Smoking inside the stadium is illegal, and almost everyone will smoke. For the entire match. It is an all-seater venue, and no-one will sit. Instead they will stand. For the entire match.
Telford Vice / Cape Town
MARBLED skies pregnant with pearly wetness birthed warm drops the size of cats’ paws onto dozens of us huddled under the meagre concrete curve of the roof. Faces stayed dry, backs were soon soaked. Somewhere behind smoked glass Dr Zhivago surely was watching through dead grey eyes.
A man in uniform appeared and spoke several words welded into one. He motioned for us to fold the concertina barrier slung between us and the turnstiles, so as to free more space under the roof. Strangers shuffled forward to stand snug with each other in that odd intimacy produced by the oil and water combination of public transport and inconvenient weather.
Behind us was Beşiktaş, ahead of us the Bosphorus. We awaited the next ferry to Kadıköy, where we would disembark and walk to the Şükrü Saracoğlu Stadium to watch Fenerbahçe play Istanbul Başakşehir.
Once aboard, a sturdy older man with swept back black hair and eyes that shimmered darkly, making him look not a little like Mustafa Kemal Atatürk himself, played the violin with urgent passion. He knew his market, doling out songs celebrating Fenerbahçe to the faithful in their navy blue and yellow jerseys and scarves, who sang along with apposite urgent passion and duly filled the violin’s case with banknotes.
One of the songs was Bir Tek Sana Gönül Verdik, or “We Only Fall in Love With You.” The lyrics translate as: “We didn’t love the world, we only loved you. We fell in love, we took heart, we loved you to death. Don’t let your longing continue, Fenerbahçe, these hearts can’t stand it anymore. If you are going to let us live, let us live; victories full of trophies.”
It was composed by Genç Fenerbahçeliler, the club’s youth section, released in 2020, and belted out many times during the match we would see that night. You can find it in the many Fenerbahçe playlists online. Yes, proper football clubs come not only with youth sections but, these days, with playlists curated by their supporters.
One such online version of Bir Tek Sana Gönül Verdik is sung without accompaniment by two men. They are hoarse, perhaps after a night of drinking and smoking and obsessing over the events of a match. In their rough whispers the song becomes a lullaby. You can almost hear the tender beating of their hearts rise up their throats and emerge from their, probably, bearded mouths.
It is a sound that casts Turkish football in a light rarely seen; softer, reflective, imbued with the kind of masculinity that raises hopes, not razes dreams. Or the opposite of the way Manchester United were welcomed to Istanbul in November 1993 to play Galatasaray.
“No way out!” the crowd chanted repeatedly, in English, in the arrivals hall. “Wellcome [sic] to the Hell!” read a hand-scrawled sign held up for the players’ perusal as they sat on a bus waiting to leave the airport. “This is your last 48 hours,” read another.
Photographs of the moment show two police officers facing the same way as the sign-holders, all looking through the bus windows at the freshly landed players. The fans are appropriately dishevelled and sneering, the cops are immaculately dressed and groomed and, inappropriately, smiling banally.
In April 2000, Leeds United supporters Christopher Loftus and Kevin Speight travelled to Istanbul to watch their team play Galatasaray. They were stabbed to death during a fight between rival groups of fans in Taksim Square the night before the match — which went ahead regardless. As Leeds’ bus pulled into the Ali Sami Yen Stadium’s parking lot on match day, Galatasaray fans banged on its sides and aimed throat-slitting gestures at the players.
The murders were written up in the Turkish press as violent yobs getting their comeuppance. “Once more English hooligans, once more, blood,” was Hürriyet’s headline. Loftus, 37, was a fibre optics engineer. Speight, 40, owned a pub. Hooligans? Unlikely.
The British papers used the horror to fuel the longstanding and often racist Western narrative about the perils of visiting uncivilised, savage-strewn places like Turkey. “Most Turks will go to extraordinary lengths to avoid a fight, because they know that when you fight in this country, people often get killed,” the Independent reported in a piece that began, “They came to watch a football match and they died in agony, stabbed in a foreign city.”
At more or less the same time Loftus and Speight were attacked, a large group of Leeds fans were being royally entertained in Fenerbahçe by supporters of that team — who are Galatasaray’s sworn rivals. Alas, complexity doesn’t hit the headlines as hard as murder, and “Welcome to hell” is still a trusty trope trotted out for any team, and their fans, unfortunate enough to have to visit Turkey.
People like us, going to the Şükrü Saracoğlu. We had wimped out of the authentic experience by employing a guide, a good decision for several reasons. To buy a ticket to watch top level football in Turkey you need a Passolig credit card. It’s also a way to store information on spectators, which might deter them should they feel like visiting violence on those shouting for the other side, or even on those not shouting loudly enough for their own side.
Our guide, a pleasant, paunchy man in his 30s with sharp eyes and dark curls that cascade into a bristling beard, and a lifelong Fenerbahçe member, had arranged our Passolig cards. But it took more than that to be allowed into the stadium.
We needed to show our passports to someone behind what looked like bulletproof glass to get the cards, and pass through at least a half-dozen security checks staffed by police. It was what boarding a plane going from Moscow to Kyiv might be like, should such a flight exist. Boarding that flight, mind, with the rest of a sellout crowd of 47,834. At 6pm on a random Thursday.
The stadium befits the era of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Opened in 1908 and rendered an unlovely oblong monolith by six rounds of renovations, it doesn’t belong in the same city as ancient jewels like the Blue Mosque, Hagia Sophia and Topkapi Palace. After climbing at least 20 flights of stairs we reach our tribune; what grandstands are called in Turkey.
We arrive equipped with necessary knowledge of the cultural norms. Smoking inside the stadium is illegal, and almost everyone will smoke. For the entire match. It is an all-seater venue, and no-one will sit. Instead they will stand, a foot on each of two adjoining seats. For the entire match. Spectators in one tribune will sing and gesture at those in another, who will sing and gesture back. For the entire match.
We have a rudimentary grip on the songs’ lyrics and signals. Because we do not want to stick out. We especially do not want to stick out by wearing anything red. Fenerbahçe’s colours are yellow and navy. Başakşehir are in head-to-toe orange. What’s with red? It’s the main colour associated with the hated — in these parts — Galatasaray, and being mistaken for their supporters could get messy. Non-Galatasaray fans take this seriously enough to not put tomato sauce on their chips when they are in club company.
So we are startled when we see someone in a bright red hoodie. Isn’t he going to be in trouble? “If Fener do badly, yes,” our guide says. “He will be told to explain why, and he will need answers. Or be able to run fast.”
You could cut the febrility with a döner kebap. Fortunately for little red riding hoodie, Fenerbahçe score in the fifth minute and are 3-0 up after 20. From there the match loses tension and focus, and Fenerbahçe win 4-0. All rise to go home happy, bar a tiny section of Başakşehir supporters barricaded from the rest of us.
We exhale, exhausted but exhilarated. And relieved that the punch in the face we expected for not singing or gesturing enthusiastically enough, or looking as if we would or had ever worn red or put tomato sauce on our chips, never came.
The streets are lined by police in full riot gear. They stare at us with Dr Zhivago’s dead grey eyes through their massed transparent shields. We stare straight ahead, and walk as quickly as we dare without raising suspicion.
Our guide’s last trick is to take us to a street food stall, where he buys each of us a falafel wrap. “It’s vegan,” he says as he hands them out. “Are you vegan,” we ask him. “No,” he says with eyes polished by victory. “I’m Turkish.”
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