The Ottoman World of Sports: Refashioning Bodies, Men, and Communities in Late Imperial Istanbul

Murat C. Yildiz

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University of Texas Press

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The Ottoman World of Sports

Refashioning Bodies, Men, and Communities in Late Imperial Istanbul

Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlicht/Copyright: 2025

Über dieses Buch

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, sports scholars, 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 ethnoreligious divisions, it did not erase them. Drawing on a wide range of archival research in multiple languages, historian Murat Cihan 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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Murat Yıldız provides a fascinating description and analysis of the emergence of sports as a shared imperial project, which simultaneously served as a site for ethnic mobilization for Ottoman Turkish, Armenian, Jewish, and Greek sports aficionados and athletes. The material from diverse sources echoes the multivocality of the empire and at the same time it indicates the emergence of a shared bodily culture. Furthermore, the book contextualizes this emerging imperial culture in other modern projects in late Ottoman Istanbul.

— Tamir Sorek, author of The Optimist: A Social Biography of Tawfiq Zayyad

The Ottoman World of Sports stands as both the definitive study of the development of modern sports in the final decades of the Ottoman Empire and a vivid portrayal of late Ottoman cosmopolitanism as manifested in its capital, Istanbul. Yıldız brings to life the Ottomans’ complex visions of community and intercommunality through the prism of sporting culture. Meticulously researched across a multiplicity of archives (many previously untapped), written with elegance, and dazzlingly illustrated, the book has an appeal that goes beyond students of social history and popular culture to general readers with an interest in the history of sport in the non-Western world.

— Hasan Kayali, author of Imperial Resilence: The Great War’s End, Ottoman Longevity, and Incidental Nations

Weaving together the stories of an extraordinary array of individuals and clubs from late Ottoman Istanbul, The Ottoman World of Sports opens a window into a shared culture of physical exertion and competition that traversed the divides of religion, language, social class, and neighborhood. Its vivid descriptions of the endeavors of Muslim, Christian, and Jewish sports enthusiasts, reporters, and players alike is the result of painstaking research in a staggering, multilingual collection of archives, many of which Yıldız exposes to readers for the first time.

— Julia Phillips Cohen, author of Becoming Ottomans: Sephardi Jews and Imperial Citizenship in the Modern Era

Fachgebiete

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Frontmatter
i

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Contents
vii

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List of Illustrations
ix

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Note on Transliteration and Translation
xiii

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Abbreviations
xv

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Pregame. “You Can Write the History of Sports in Turkey Right Here . . .”
xvii

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Introduction. “Sport in Our City”
1

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chapter 1. “Gymnastics Is Not a Game”
25

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chapter 2. “Long Live Our Gymnastics Club”
52

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chapter 3. “Sport Nut”
81

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chapter 4. “My Dear, You’re Going to Be Both an Inspector and a Founder”
107

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chapter 5. “Praise Be to God, Sport Enthusiasm Has Awakened in Our Country
123

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chapter 6. “Oh My, Th ere Is a Spectacle”
152

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chapter 7. “These Brave Young Men with Solid Biceps Are the Hope of the Future Generation”
178

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chapter 8. “Th e Name of the Ottomans Will Be Held High”
200

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Overtime. “Th e Unconventional State of Affairs”
229

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Acknowledgments
245

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Notes
251

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Bibliography
309

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Index
331

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Informationen zur Veröffentlichung

Seiten und Bilder/Illustrationen im Buch

eBook veröffentlicht am:

17. Februar 2026

eBook ISBN:

9781477332870

Seiten und Bilder/Illustrationen im Buch

https://doi.org/10.7560/332863

eBook ISBN: 9781477332870

Zielgruppe(n) für dieses Buch

For an expert adult audience, including professional development and academic research

University of Texas Press

The Ottoman World of Sports

Übersicht

Über dieses Buch

Rezensionen

Fachgebiete

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Frontmatter

Contents

List of Illustrations

Note on Transliteration and Translation

Abbreviations

Pregame. “You Can Write the History of Sports in Turkey Right Here . . .”

Introduction. “Sport in Our City”

chapter 1. “Gymnastics Is Not a Game”

chapter 2. “Long Live Our Gymnastics Club”

chapter 3. “Sport Nut”

chapter 4. “My Dear, You’re Going to Be Both an Inspector and a Founder”

chapter 5. “Praise Be to God, Sport Enthusiasm Has Awakened in Our Country

chapter 6. “Oh My, Th ere Is a Spectacle”

chapter 7. “These Brave Young Men with Solid Biceps Are the Hope of the Future Generation”

chapter 8. “Th e Name of the Ottomans Will Be Held High”

Overtime. “Th e Unconventional State of Affairs”

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Bibliographische Daten