Murat C. Yildiz, "The Ottoman World of Sports: Refashioning Bodies, Men, and Communities in Late Imperial Istanbul" (U Texas Press, 2026)

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

of Texas Press, 2026), Murat Cihan Yıldız 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