Remember thirty years of hurt? I looked up when that song came out. It turns out there are now grown adults who had not been born at the time—and the thirty years have quietly become sixty.
But that is not today’s subject. I am in favour of sport. Or rather, of supporters.
A national condition
Türkiye has football fever, and it is not a mild case. The club shops probably clothe more of the population than every prêt-à-porter chain put together. Let the beloved team win—and for most people that means one of Istanbul’s Big Three, Beşiktaş, Galatasaray, or Fenerbahçe—and within the hour there are flags three storeys tall down the fronts of apartment blocks, cars sounding their horns until midnight, and firecrackers going off like a small artillery engagement. Boys and girls play football absolutely everywhere: in courtyards, in side streets, outside mosques.
They all know where I come from, incidentally. Not because of the Hermitage or the white nights, but because Fatih Tekke—a Trabzon man, and a local hero—spent four seasons at Zenit St Petersburg. That is quite sufficient credentials.
Bordo-mavi
Trabzon, naturally, has a pride of its own: Trabzonspor. Super Lig, champions more than once, winners of the Super Cup, and as far as the last sixteen in Europe. The colours are claret & blue—bordo-mavi—and the combination is everywhere. There is a chain of fishmongers here trading under the splendid name of Bordo Mavi Balık, the Claret&Blue Fish.
Half the city walks about in the club shirt. Some are still in the old one with the Vestel logo; others have moved on to the new one with the gold Papara.
And here is the picture
The cover picture comes from Akçaabat, just west of Trabzon—the ancestral town of a certain rebellious mayor of Istanbul—and it is the quintessence of popular devotion to the game.
Nothing sets off the domes of an old mosque, you will agree, quite like a pair of brightly coloured footballs.
