This talk reconsiders the history of late Ottoman Istanbul and its lived urban space through a focus on modern sports. “Sports enthusiasts” from a plethora of ethno-religious backgrounds living in the Imperial capital created the Ottoman world of sports, a gendered civic project that promoted gymnastics, athletics and team sports, namely football (soccer), as educational, moral and leisure activities for young men from an expanding middle class. This talk explores how exercising in schools, working out at the sports club, competing on the pitch and narrating physical fitness in the columns of periodicals served as sites of encounter between Muslims, Christians and Jews that facilitated the cultivation of shared experiences, norms and embodied knowledge for an entire generation of Istanbulites. Mapping the ways in which educators, experts, athletes and students engaged a global physical movement created a multilingual civic vision of exercise, and treated sports as a site for ethno-religious mobilisation, the talk uncovers the intersection of different visions of self and community that undergirded the world of sports in late Ottoman Istanbul.
About the speaker:
Dr Murat C. Yıldız is Associate Professor of History at Skidmore College. His book The Ottoman World
of Sports: Refashioning Bodies, Men, and Communities in Late Imperial Istanbul (University of Texas
Press, 2026) tells the story of the role played by Muslim, Christian and Jewish sports aficionados in
the making of a shared sports culture in Istanbul during the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. He is an assistant editor of the Arab Studies Journal and an editorial board member of
the International Journal of the History of Sport.
