Ottoman History Podcast - The Ottoman World of Sports

Episode Date: August 2, 2026

with Murat Yıldız hosted by Sam Dolbee | In the late Ottoman capital, imperial politics became a field of collaboration and competition between Muslim, Christian, and Jewish communities, especially in the years following the 1908 constitutional revolution. And as our guest Murat Yıldız argues in a new book, the world of sports also emerged as an arena of political contestation, as gymnasts, footballers, weightlifters, boxers, coaches, teachers, journalists, and fans pursued a civic project that blended athletics, aesthetics, morality, and community. Sport did not erase the communal boundaries that existed off the field, but it often transcended them, as middle and upper class men participated in a shared culture that equated the physical development of the body with the moral development of the person. In this conversation, we explore the Ottoman world of sports at the end of empire, as the growth of a multiethnic civil society facilitated to the proliferation of sports club and writing about athletics, gender, and the body in the Ottoman public press.          « Click for More »

It's the Ottoman History podcast. I'm Sam Dolby. In the late 1990s at Belarmeen Jefferson High in Burbank, California, there was a star basketball player. He averaged 27 points and 8 assists per game. He was a committed New York Knicks fan. He had a tattoo on one arm that read only Allah can judge me. He was called The Amazing Turk and the next Michael Jordan. His name, Murat Yildes. Murat is an associate professor at Skidmore. college and he has a new book out called the Ottoman world of sports with the University of Texas Press. I should add here that Marat is also far too modest to disclose any of these athletic

achievements himself. I had to find them through some archival digging of my own. And when I asked him about these details, here's how he responded. How does that all sound to you today? It sounds like you've done incredible research on that piece. But he was willing to talk about some of the surprising similarities between Los Angeles High School basketball and the Ottoman world of sports. Playing basketball very seriously. In Southern California, as a half-Turkish-American, Southern California, large Armenian communities, large Jewish communities, going to a Catholic high school. For me, thinking about how sports facilitated kind of shared bonds that transcended kind of ethno-religious background, I mean, it wasn't something that I just thought about it in an academic sense.

Like, I know what it was like to hoop with Armin or hoop with Sharon. These are two individuals that I can think about from high school. I remember beefing with the individuals when I first started high school who recognized my Turkish name and we're talking shit on the court. But I also remember the ways in which sports actually brought people together and at the same time facilitated the preservation. of difference, right? So did you play for an Armenian club? Did you play in the Makabi games, right? Were you hooping at the Mormon church? I didn't have the

language to describe this as a as a 16-year-old who's just trying to find a space to hoop across the city of LA, but I could understand how racial, ethnic, religious differences remained and they were transcended through these activities. That's something that I understood. In today's episode, we'll take you through the Ottoman world of sports, young men, Istanbul at the end of empire, and even some bad referees. Stay with us. So the book catalogs the multi-ethnic and multilingual Ottoman world of sports, which has deeper roots, but really emerges post-1908, with numerous sports clubs forming across Istanbul for young men to get ripped, to be modern, to spend time with each other.

What were the broader political and social currents in the world and in the Ottoman Empire that made this era so foundational? If we look at Istanbul's most prominent sports clubs, today like Besiktash, Fenerbache, Galatasaray, they were founded in this period, not to mention so many others that we don't remember, which you mentioned. It's an incredibly transformative moment on a global scale and an imperial scale, and I think at a local scale. If we pan out and think about that global scale, what we're seeing is the development of physical culture and modern sport as a set of discourses, a set of institutions that are connected. to new understandings of the body, new understandings of the individual, new understandings of

gender, right? And this is taking place at a context of industrialization, of, you know, increased flight to urban centers. You get the development at the late 19th century of the modern Olympic Games, and you get the spread of obviously global, the making a split of global capital. all of that is, I think, an important context in which we see the creation of an imperial world of sports. Now, the imperial level, the empire is reconfiguring itself. It's recognizing the fact that its boundaries are shrinking, that European powers are increasingly encroaching on its territories, that internally they, that there are individuals that are asking for a new relationship between the central authority and local ones.

And this is resulting in the empire and imperial administrators asking how do we reconfigure ourselves, how to reform ourselves, right? And it's in that kind of broader moment of reform, right, which countless historians have written about whose writings I'm deeply indebted to, that I see the Ottoman world of sports emerging, whereby you have individuals from a variety of different backgrounds. And this to me is really important because there's a way in which this could easily just be a story of Ottoman state administrators who are saying, we need to teach gymnastics, we need to create clubs because the empire's boundaries are shrinking in order to be a good imperial project in

order to reform ourselves, then we need to do these activities. And that takes place. But what I'm seeing is that it's not just taking place and not just unfolding at that administrative level. You see it at a variety of different local levels whereby you have people who are Muslim, you have people who are Jewish, you have people who are Christian that are working out a number of different concerns, bodily concerns, communal concerns that really come together, gender concerns, where they're looking to these internationally legitimized activities, right, the Olympic Games, these internationally established rules and regulations and saying, these are the activities, these are the spaces, the new conceptions of the body that we are going to use

and to institutionalize in order to better ourselves. It was important for me to kind of think about these different realms, that the global, the imperial, and the local, and not seeing them as, and I'm attempting to make the argument that they're not fundamentally distinct, that they're unfolding together, that they're overlapping. and the people in, you know, late Ottoman Istanbul who are experimenting with ideas and objects and practices and thinking and understandings of selfhood, that they're doing it in a moment where they can pick up a magazine or they can hear somebody in a coffee shop or see somebody

kicking a ball around the street. And there's somewhat of a novelty to these ideas, these practices and objects, and they're working them out. I think we'll touch more on this idea of working out in the multi-ethnic context. of that in a few minutes, but maybe one way we could get into some of these stories is through a lot of the compelling figures that you have in this book who are involved in this process of working out. One who keeps appearing is Selim Sire. Could you tell us about him and the role he played in helping bring about this Ottoman world of sports? Selyim Sireh is, he's an

individual that I think many Turkish citizens would recognize. Nominally they would recognize. This is an individual that my father opened the book would be like, oh, yeah, Salim Surah, and he'd add Tarjan at the end. This is an individual that's looked at to be the founder of modern sport in the empire. He's an individual that's born in the late 19th century, comes from a city that's now in modern Greece. His father is killed in a war. The family moves to Istanbul, and the mother is basically scraping together, money. to send her son to a school in which he can better himself. He ends up at the Mectabi Sultani, the Imperial College,

like many other individuals in the empire from all different corners of the empire are studying in. He grows enamored by exercise. He grows enamored by gymnastics. He's an individual whose life I tried to trace in order to understand the making of an Ottoman gymnastics educator, a physical culture enthusiast, and somebody who is trying to carve out a niche for himself in the Ottoman educational project. So he's an individual that teaches gymnastics at schools after graduating, is living in Izmir, he's penning articles, he makes

his way back to the imperial capital. You get the sense that he's a mover and a shaker. And as somebody who is quite entrepreneurial. Like, so if he's, I imagine him today, like on Instagram, you know, really doing a great job of like sharing what he's working on and trying to carve out a name for himself. But he's, he's doing regular private lessons with kind of well-to-do Ottoman families who want their sons to work out. And am I remembering this correctly that at one of these demonstrations, he takes his shirt off and shows off his body. as an example of how this is supposed to be done? Yes. So again, a point in favor of him being a very effective influencer.

Yes. And in that sense, he's both an expert and a practitioner. And I see him navigating this expanding world of the press in a really interesting way. You see him curating the images that he wants to project of himself as something. as somebody who's in the military, so he, you know, poses in military garb. He poses with his shirt off because he has ripped six-pack. He poses doing gymnastics to show that he's skilled, he's a skilled gymnast. So putting on or showing the various different hats that he wears,

he very effectively does that in spaces and in the press. Right. So at that event that you reference, he's an individual who is, is delivering what he describes or what the article described as an eloquent speech about the necessity of physical training. And he's also taking off his shirt and showing just how defined a physique he has. And he's cultivated. And this is somebody who's, you know, later on after 1908, he goes and he studies in Sweden and makes his way back to Istanbul with these kind of credentials, right? So his CV is expanding. People recognize that. And he becomes the first

general inspector of physical training in the empire. And he is someone who very much is shaping the vision of the Ottoman physical training educational project. So on the one hand, we have physical training coming from the schools in part in relation to Salim's work. We also have the media playing a key role, and we'll talk about that in a second. I also wanted to bring up another striking figure, Vahram Papazian, one of the first official Ottoman representatives at the Olympics in 1912 in Stockholm. Can you tell his story? Papazian is an individual who is from Istanbul.

If I'm not mistaken, the father is from Kaizzi. Studies at Robert College, grows enamored with exercise. You get the sense that the family isn't necessarily of means, but the father really believes it's important for him to better his lot in society and to kind of climb social ladder by studying. So he goes to school. He establishes himself as a very effective fast runner, joins a sports club,

and represents the Ottoman Empire at the Olympic Games in 1912. And, you know, I mean, this is maybe a point we can talk about later on, right? It's a question of who was he representing, right? That international scale changes the stakes of what it means to represent, right? So he's clearly, he's representing the Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman-Armenian press raises the question of, is he also representing Armenians and Armenian-ness? But this is an individual that is known in sporting circles,

in Armenian circles, but also this kind of broader world whereby I could imagine him turning up at a at a track meet and you know people are like oh that's papazian like that guy's that guy's fast yeah he's armenian just like you have somebody else named you know shukrube from galatasarai who's also like incredibly fast and you know people would know him uh and he makes you know these these individuals make their names um in in istanbul's sporting circles and you know for papazian's sake he he makes his name known at a global scale by competing in in in stockham he he lived in the city during the First World War, he eventually makes his way to, if I'm not mistaken, Greece, then Lebanon, and then he ends up passing away in Rhode Island.

But there's also a famous story from his memoir about his experience in 1912 with the absence of the Ottoman flag and really gets to this question of whether he was representing the empire or Armenians within it and how he felt about that, at least in his memoir. Yes. Yes, and I'm glad you bring it. The memoirs are a wonderful source that he pens when he's actually living in Beirut. They're published in Beirut. He talks about his experience, and it's a very kind of vivid, colorful description of how he felt in Stockholm.

Because he's not alone. Migridic, Migriyan, is the other participant, also an Armenian from Istanbul. but he talks about his experience and he's at pains to show that he's proud to be there to represent the empire and also is making a point of saying that he feels that he didn't receive proper treatment by Selim Sirra. So here you're seeing like their paths crossing and Selim Sirah according to Papazian not being showed the proper deference respect as an official representative of the of the empire. You know, he describes there not being Ottoman flags.

He describes there the Olympic Committee doesn't have the, you know, Ottoman flags. Doesn't the uniforms of the athletes don't properly have the crescent and the star. There's a very colorful description of him visiting the embassy in Stockholm and having an impassioned conversation. with the ambassador and the ambassador's wife, and that it's that conversation that moves the ambassador and moves his wife, and immediately after the streets are adorned with Ottoman flags and the uniforms of the two athletes now then feature the crescent and star. So it's a really, it's a fascinating description of his of his experiences, concerns that he has, moral concerns about being in Stockholm and mixed bathhouses, in addition to him talking about what it is for him as a citizen

of the empire and as an Armenian denizen of Istanbul and as an athlete that's competing at this global stage. So part of what we see in this book is about the athletes themselves and what playing means to them, what working out means to them. But this is also about the emergence of a spectator event of people watching athletes. So how much does media help produce this Ottoman world of sports? I see media playing an instrumental role. Something that I really wanted to do when working with these sources was to not just mind them and to treat them as a source that'll enable me to objectively describe what's going on in these spaces.

What I wanted to show was that this expanding media, newspapers, magazines are playing a key role in shaping a distinct set of understandings of modern sports, of spectatorship. and, you know, I wanted to think of them as mediums of change, that have ideas, that have concerns, right, that have clear perspectives that they're seeking to impose and expose readers to. They had very clear visions of what it meant to be a proper athlete, what the role of the club was, right? what competition meant. There's this one individual, Burhanateen, who's writing in newspapers and he's writing in magazines. He's an Ottoman Muslim from Istanbul.

And he's up in arms about competition. He's up in arms about competition. He's also concerned about mixing of teams on the football pitch. And he says, you know, you can't consider Galatasarra and you can't consider Fenerbacha as proper Turkish teams because there are non-Muslim players. I wanted to expose readers to that, that there is an individual who maintained those concerns and had to maintain that perspective. And at the same time, show that there are some athletes that were like, no, we're cool.

You know, we're okay with this. We want the best goalie. Right. We want the best striker. Oh, that forward is incredible. Or that center midfielder is incredible with the ball. It doesn't matter what their ethno-religious background is. You know, to come back to the question,

I see these publications as being incredibly important and shaping distinct visions of what it means to be an athlete and what it means to be a proper sports enthusiast. One of the most remarkable things about the work that you've done is the linguistic range. You're working with materials in Ottoman. Turkish, Armenian, Greek, Ladino, French. I'm probably forgetting some other languages. Can you talk about your approach in this regard and how it relates to scholarship? You know, I was fortunate to go to graduate school at UCLA at a place that, you know, has an

incredibly diverse set of faculty teaching languages that are connected to the empire and to the broader region at a very high level. it was very important for me to work with and to bring these languages together and to and to try to to work with these sources in these various different languages that are connected to the city you know and this is a broader point about the city right like Istanbul is a remarkable historical city that has posed distinct challenges to historians right like how do you how do you study masculinity in Istanbul in a way that attempts to bring together Muslims, Christians, and Jews. And historically, you know, we as historians have struggled to do that because of the diversity of linguistic sources. So, you know, the languages were of immense importance to me to study, to work at, to continue to work at.

And, you know, one approach has been to say, okay, let's. use a kind of microanalysis to look at Jews of the Empire or the Jews of late Ottoman Istanbul or Armenians of Ottoman Istanbul and Greeks of Ottoman Istanbul and to write a history in which they bring together, you know, these different sources to study these individual communities. And I was completely, and I am completely indebted to the scholarship, I asked this question of, is there a way in which we bring these individuals, communities, and languages together through a single frame. And this is what I attempted to do.

Maybe we might linger on that term frame for a second because another thing that's really impressive about this book are the photos. It's very clear that across languages, across communities, there's a shared visual language about masculinity, about exercise, about sports,

about male bodies. And you can actually see it across different publications. Publications are in different languages, but the photos are basically the same. We see the same kinds of poses. And I wonder, among all those photos, do you have a favorite? That is a really good question if I have a favorite photo. There's a couple of photos that I absolutely love.

One is a photo of photographers at one of these larger stories. sporting events. But these are these are photographers of of the Edmond magazine. And they're posing with their cameras around their necks and somebody snapping a photo of them. And then that photo gets picked up in a magazine, but it's also featured in a Galatasarai club album. And I love it because we see the photographer, photographers, right? Individuals that rarely get featured. And I wanted to demonstrate that they thought of themselves also as they're making up a profession, they're photojournalists. And I love that. And I really wanted to show that these, that photos don't just appear, but they are taken by individuals who are contracted,

right, who are there that are snapping shots. You're seeing how mobile these, these cameras are. They're two individual that I, that I want to call attention to. One is, I can't remember if this is Jorgos or Nicholas Alibranthis. These Alibranthis brothers from the Hercules Gymnastics Club, and they are super chiseled athletes. These are Greek Istanbulites or Ottoman Greeks. You know, super defined bodies that have, you know, their names inscribed at the

the bottom of the pictures, which was interesting to me because what I realized was that these these are photographs that were circulated. And to come back to the fact that, you know, you raise this point that there's a kind of shared visuality. There's a shared aesthetic that, you know, this individual, Alibrantis could very well have been Mustafa, or he could have been a Kevork, or he could have been a Moshe, but he was Jorgos. And that that's inscribed

on the picture that's now housed in the Kortzolush Sports Club. The mere fact that it was, that's continued to be preserved there is important to me, that it's housed in this photograph album. As a last image that I'll

highlight is it's from the post script. And this is a this is an image of the Besiktash gymnastics club. It's an image that I'd seen in various different settings. I should know this, but it may even be featured on like coffee mugs that are sold in the

Besitosh Sports Club. I've definitely seen it on like small posters, but it's a group of members of the club. And they're posing for the crameras in a group shot. And they have somebody's in the back of the frame. They're holding a large poster. And that poster has a massive size bicep on it. And then on that poster, there is a verse from the Quran that speaks to the importance of making ready. Or the literal verse from Sura al-enfal is, and prepare for them what you can of strength.

Right. And so this is a remarkable image that is very staged and is showing to me these are individuals that are thinking about the importance of strength in the context of war. This is taking place during the First World War. We'll come back to World War one in a minute. Yeah. On the one hand, your archival approach shows us how people were being separate together. We have people joining sports clubs in line with their religious or ethnic community. But as you mentioned earlier, there were also people who were always saying, we want the best striker, we want the best goalie. We don't care what language they speak, where they're from, where they worship. So how should we understand this tension between separation and cooperation in this period right before World War I? I think it's a reflection of how Ottoman citizens and not Ottoman citizens who were residents,

of the late imperial capital experienced the late empire and organized cultural activities and just lived in the city they largely did so in communal spaces that were organized around

largely homogenous ethnic religious and linguistic boundaries organized around these boundaries. I see this as part of that late imperial moment where, as the empire is reconfiguring itself and experimenting with new ideas of what it means to be an Ottoman citizen, right, that they're reworking and experimenting and thinking about what does it mean to be an Ottoman? what does it mean to be, for example, to be Jewish?

What does it mean to be Greek? What does it mean to be Muslim? There's not a singular answer. And anybody who has worked in Istanbul's multilingual press knows that you hear a variety of different voices and different perspectives on what it means to be an Ottoman, right? What I'm seeing in the late Ottoman world of sports is that it's not merely a reflection of that. this is a methodological point that I've constantly thought about. The more that I taught about sports more specifically, the question is, to what extent does sports reflect broader political developments,

and to what extent does it actually serve as an activity in a space through which processes are shaped? Sports is unfolding in this late imperial moment, where people are, you know, reworking what it means to be, an Ottoman Jew, an Ottoman Muslim, an Ottoman-Roman-Greek. It's not that I was surprised by the fact that they were doing so in these spaces and saying, if you want to work out together, we want to create a club, then we should probably do it along these ethno-religious boundaries.

I don't want to give off the impression, and I didn't get the impression from the sources, that there's something kind of like time immemorial about it. There's a kind of unchanging Ottoman-Armenianness or Greekness or Jewishness or Muslimness. Because at the same time, you know, they're saying, look, in order to be an Armenian athlete, then you need to join the Dork Club or the Artavas Club. You know, so at the same time that they're saying, look, in order to be a member of this club, you need to be Armenian. They're also kind of, so they're expanding what it means to be an Armenian by saying, and they're also shrinking it by saying, you know, you need to be a man. You need to basically come from a certain background where you're literate that you have letters of recommendation that can speak to

these, to speak to your moral qualifications. And they're also expanding what it means by saying you can be Armenian, apostolic, Catholic, Protestant. I see that there is an interesting relationship in the Ottoman world of sports where what I refer to as a kind of shared civic and ethno-religious or an exclusive ethno-religious bonds and ties are not contradictory, but are actually mutually constitutive, whereby this kind of shared civic, which is not exclusively Ottoman in the sense of they're saying, the Ottoman-ness is what is bringing us together. There's something about a kind of shared civicness that is unfolding in this imperial context and doesn't necessarily speak explicitly to Ottomanist, but I see as being

inextricably connected to that. And this idea that these ethno-religious bonds in these organizations, in these periodicals and in these spaces are incredibly important. And what I see happening is this is a deeply Ottoman late Istanbulite set of processes that's connected to how novel these activities are. I mean, this is something that I try to show that people are concerned about the fact that people are spending so, that young men are spending so much time working out and posing in new kind of attire and showing different parts of the body to a camera in ways that they wouldn't have done before. And one of the ways in which you legitimize them and say, you know, in order to be a good Armenian or to be a good Jew or to be a good Turk, you know,

need to actually be working out. So there's a way in which the communal bonds actually legitimize these activities. And there's a way in which these activities are also legitimizing these spaces. In order to be a good Istanbulite, in order to be a good young man, you need to be working out. And that's something that we all in the city kind of agree is important because we hear concerns about cleanliness. We hear concerns about hygiene. We hear concerns about time management. and these are spaces where you're working those ideas out, and you're working them out in largely ethnically and religiously, homogenous ones.

As we've touched on a few times, this is a book that's very much rooted in Istanbul. And there are such wonderful details about moving in the city. I'm thinking of, please to move a match time back so that a team could get their members from Perra to Caducroi, something like that. Yeah.

As you worked on this, did you always know it was about the city? Or did that change over time? I knew I wanted to write a history of the city. I did. I knew that I wanted to write a history of modern sport in Istanbul. I could have written a kind of macro history of Ottoman sport in which I show how diffuse these activities were across the empire and urban centers. And I do mention this in the intro that, you know, I'm not writing a history entitled

the Ottoman world of sports and just looking at Istanbul and saying that that is the empire writ large. I'm saying that this is a very imperial center-based project. And I wanted to study Istanbul in a way in which captures its, what I refer to as an imperial mode of living. When I heard letters saying, let's push the match back, or let's, you know, let's take the ferry across the Bosphorus, or I'm seeing sport enthusiasts or gymnastics, instructors are teaching classes across the city, right, from Vefa at one time and then later at the Imperial College in Beulhu, the city is one that people are traversing, that are navigating through

these, you know, and it's made possible by these new technological transformations, and it's, it's made possible by this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, the, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, I knew that I wanted to write a, uh, a history of, of, of, of Istanbul. And that was very important to me. At the same time, it was important to me to write a history of Istanbul in which I brought together individuals from various different ethnic religious and linguistic backgrounds, because I think the city of Istanbul looks different through these sources when they're brought together in a single study. So I wanted to take us to the beginning of chapter five where you touch on two physical culture journals, one in Armenian, one in Ottoman Turkish, and they're responding to

basically the same question and responding in the same way. They're both responding to this dilemma where people are saying, we know we should exercise, but we aren't. We can't find the time. And they're saying, no, you actually just need to organize your time better. There's always time to exercise. And this is a dynamic that I encountered a number of times in this book where I felt like I was reading something that could have been written today, some version of it. And I wondered if you could talk about either in response to this particular response or other sources where you felt like maybe you could recognize yourself or something of the present in an unexpected way in early 20th century Istanbul.

As historians of the late empire, I often think about it as, you know, the making of the modern and the end of empire. And these two is being inextricably connected. When I started the project, I don't know if I was surprised by how recognizable some of these concerns were, anxieties, frustrations. but I do know that that, uh, that, um, that they were ones that that, that struck me as relatable. And, you know, I, I think that's a, it's a testament to just how transformative that moment was and how, how, how that moment continues to, to, to, to, to serve as a legacy for

the region. Can I actually interject here to give you another example of one that was really striking in this regard? Part of your work was done in the archives of Galatasaray, and you found something in the archive, which I don't think I've ever noticed someone writing about, which is a complaint letter about a referee in which the referee is called an eshek-a-lo. Yeah. Yeah, it's a great letter. Tell us more about this letter and how you felt when you found it. I spent a number of months working through these letters and other sources connected to the club. And there are different sources connected to these institutions, right?

And on the one hand, you get, I mean, I sifted through club minutes where you see the function of an administration of a sports club. very kind of banal concerns, you know, how much equipment do we have, what are we doing as an organization to make sure that the team has this many individuals. And then I start sifting through other sources like these letters, which show a very, not necessarily completely different, but a very textured and very human depiction of what sporting look like. In the magazine, Edmond or in football or in Marmnarz, I didn't hear these very serious educators saying, oh, this referee is an ass, right?

He's a prick. there's a certain level of awareness that that type of language shouldn't be in the magazine. But, you know, in internal correspondence, I heard, you know, these individuals taking aim at referees in a very, very humane way. To me, this was a glimpse into just how people lived the Ottoman world of sports. And to me, that was really important. People are talking shit. It meant a lot to me to hear concerns, anxieties, frustrations, passions,

passions, love, anger that are all connected to this world, as opposed to just hearing an idealist representation of what the sportsman looks like. In concluding, you talk about the paths of some of these figures during World War I and the Armenian genocide. Yeah. How did the Ottoman world of sports come to an end? There's a profound amount of violence, militarization, hardship, and state violence that we see in the First World War, writ large, and more specifically at Armenian communities.

And I wanted to show in that postscript that on the one hand, some of these constitutive threads of the Ottoman world of sports continue to live on, right? people continue to play football matches. There's less able-bodied men. Many young men are fighting. Many young men are dying. But football matches are being held. Gymnastic performances continue to be organized.

Magazines, some of them shut down, but some continue. And at the same time, what we're seeing is that people have different experiences in this war. Right? And more specifically, they have different experiences in 1915. So one of the individuals whose name hasn't come up yet, Shavars Khrisian, who founds and edits this Armenian magazine Marmna Mars, who knew Salim Sira well, who exchanged letters with him, refers to him as a colleague and as a patriot in his Armenian magazine,

is arrested, disappeared, and murdered in 1915. That's shocking, that's jarring. I thought it was incredibly important to not just cut at the First World War, but to show that these are some of the different lived experiences. You also have figure like Faharan Papazian, who actually isn't killed in the Armenian genocide and specifically mentions this in his memoir that says, I didn't die.

and he attributes it actually to him serving as a representative of the Ottoman Empire in the Olympic Games and says basically he thinks it's that letter from the ambassador that saves him. You have Albert Ziffer, who's one of the main actors in Chapter 3, he's a Jewish Istanbulite who is friends with Silim Sira, who receives a letter from Sili Msehira attesting to and basically certifying his ability to teach gymnastics in schools across the empire during the First World War. You have other members of Ottoman Turkish clubs that are serving during their war and they're dying. So there's a host of different experiences of the Ottoman world of sport that take place during the World War that I wanted to kind of end the project on and to basically also invite, I think, more research. I mean, this is something that I want to go back to and think about.

It's like, how do people experience this world of sport during moments of war? We're recording this at a moment where I know I am completely exhausted. Potentially you are as well from watching this incredible run of the New York Knicks and watching the madness surrounding the World Cup unfold, but also the magic on the pitch. And you know, what does it mean to think about the late empire in this Ottoman sporting world in the context of the now? The book comes out in February, 26. And the past couple of years, the amount of bloodshed, carnage, violence that we've witnessed in the region, more broadly and more specifically, the Palestinian people, the people of Lebanon, now the people of Iran. I think about what possibilities, what opportunities are completely foreclosed and how does life continue?

I wanted to briefly sketch out how life continues during moments of war, during moments of mass violence, during moments of incredible amount of dehumanization, and also to say that, you know, there's ways that life does continue. I end the book, you know, thinking about the stakes of this type of project. And for me, it's a project that is not just about setting the historical record straight and saying, you know, this took place. And these individuals shaped modern sporting in Istanbul. And that it's a so much, it's very much a collective effort, not in a kind of romanticized way, but, you know, we cannot deny the fact that Istanbul's modern sports culture. was indebtably shaped by Muslims, Christians, and Jews, I think it offers us a way to reinvision the world, to re-envision our current moment,

and that it's a way to think about how we want to build a future. That's Marat Yildes. His book, The Ottoman World of Sports, is out now with the University of Texas Press. Of course, as always, you can find more information on our website, including a bibliography and images, and maybe even a link to a certain 19-19. 99 Huryat article about the next Michael Jordan. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Ottoman History podcast.

Until next time, take care.