The Ottoman World of Sports

Refashioning Bodies, Men, and Communities in Late Imperial Istanbul

A revision of the history of modern sports in late Ottoman Istanbul, showing how Muslims, Christians, and Jews created a shared sports culture that was simultaneously global, imperial, and local.

The history of sports in Turkey is deeply contested. Over the decades, journalists, pundits, non-professional historians, and everyday people have offered competing narratives about the origins of modern sports in the late Ottoman Empire.

The Ottoman World of Sports tells the story of how Istanbul’s Muslims, Christians, and Jews-gymnastics teachers, football coaches, weightlifters, journalists, athletes, and fans-created a gendered and class-stratified civic project that promoted athletics as a source of fun, beauty, and moral education. Influenced by the emerging global vogue for organized sports, all boys from the expanding middle class of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century imperial capital were expected to exercise and compete on the playing field in order to develop into moral men. Yet even as the embrace of modern athletics transcended ethno-religious divisions, it did not erase them. Drawing on a wide range of archival research in multiple languages, historian Murat Yıldız shows that sportsmen created new communal boundaries in team affiliations, fandom, and sports media. Adeptly reconstructing Istanbul’s imperial culture as it was experienced more than a century ago, The Ottoman World of Sports recovers a lived imperial culture whose defining features were shaped by its multiethnic, multireligious, and multilingual sportsmen.

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