Ikranur Sarigul is only one of many girls in the eastern Anatolian region whose life was transformed by joining a girl’s school team set up to keep them in education and out of an early marriage. Continue reading How football is saving the lives of Turkish girls in Malatya
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan was once an athlete. Now, he uses sport for his own purposes—even as fans use it to express dissent. Continue reading Understanding authoritarianism through soccer
Firas al-Ali, a former player for Al Shorta and the Syrian national team, has lost friends, family members and his home in the violence that has engulfed Syria. Continue reading The Syrian football star caught up in revolution and forced into refuge
The Olympiakos owner’s influence in football, business and politics has soared in recent years. But now he is at odds with the government and his rivals scent blood. Continue reading Greek game in crisis and Nottingham Forest’s Marinakis is at the heart of it
Greece’s economic crises have created opportunities for an evolving breed of oligarchs to tighten the relationship between football, business and politics. The beautiful game is a vehicle to realise ambitions that reach far beyond the sport. Continue reading The new Greek oligarchs’ path to power: Soccer
Field recordists are battling to preserve Turkey’s unique sonic heritage amid rampant gentrification and noise pollution. Continue reading A fight is on to save the sounds of Turkey
At a church in Stuttgart, Germany, Gökçen Kaynatan was preparing to perform “Cehennem Yolu” (“Road to Hell”). It was suggested that anyone with a heart condition should leave. Continue reading The 78-year-old rising star of Turkish music
There is often also a poetic intensity to the love expressed in Turkish football songs. Many are suffused with longing and infatuation. Continue reading Love songs of Turkish football
Photographs of Fuat Husnu Kayacan show him dressed impeccably in an Ottoman tunic and fez, sporting a sharply waxed moustache, looking every bit a young man of the establishment. He attended a military school and his father was an admiral in the Ottoman navy. But Fuat Husnu was also a subversive, a criminal: an illicit footballer. Click here to read the rest of this article published … Continue reading Illicit football: The Black Stockings
REYHANLI, TURKEY – Grasping the bed sheets, Abu Staif braced against the pain as he lifted and lowered his weight-strapped right leg. The knee is swollen and there’s a large chunk missing from his lower leg but painfully, painstakingly, he is getting better – thanks to a new mobile physiotherapy unit in the Turkish town of Reyhanli. Just over a year ago Abu Staif, now … Continue reading How a mobile physio unit is helping wounded Syrian refugees to walk again
The last time Mohannad Sabry, an Egyptian journalist who has reported extensively from the Sinai Peninsula, reported from North Sinai in June 2015, he received a phone call from a source telling him that every military checkpoint east of el-Arish was stopping vehicles, with instructions to arrest him. “Does that make me, as a journalist, a terrorist in their eyes? Or as dangerous as a terrorist?” Sabry … Continue reading Sinai: Reporting Egypt’s ‘War on Terror’
Writing by Patrick Keddie 