The Istanbul Derby - SBNation. Keep following this way, and into the claustrophobic Euro- sized elevator to the roof of this insane Agatha Christie movie set of a hotel. This elevator is slow, so it will take a minute, so more details while we wait for the view you're going to get up here. The first time the two teams played in 1. Ottoman Empire, and none of the Turkish players had their own surnames. The first real brawl between fans happened in 1. World Wars, dictatorships, revolutions, and every other hiccup of history. Fans have been brawling in this series since 1. Now walk out, and look around. Over the years pink paisley wallpaper found its way to the walls of this place, and the Turkish national addiction to chandeliers crept in and started festooning hallways with squid- like white ceramic lighting fixtures. The carpet is all dimmed curlicues of some pattern the English language gave up on making an adjective for, and there is a peacock figurine peering down at you when you reach the hallway leading to the rooftop bar. Someone has been killed conspiratorially here, and it was fabulously done. Someone has been killed conspiratorially here, and it was fabulously done. You're supposed to stay awake to kill jet lag and acclimate as soon as possible, so have a beer and stare out from this rooftop bar. You could care about how tired you might be after flying fifteen hours to get here, but you're too busy watching the sun burn down through air pollution, and ozone, and a layer of dust blown off the land. It's thick enough to let your eye sit on the sun directly, letting it sit on your eyeball for a second like it sits on the water of the Golden Horn, frying the whole thing into coppery ripples rolling toward the sea. The word for a dentist, one of the most boring things in the world? They are wedged in between new, horrid glass- paneled office buildings from the 1. After three hours, police stormed the club where the. State Dept Says Rense.com #1. Declared Communist Goals In US - Familiar? The Eve Of Destruction. Images Of Heroic American Activists. Parisian- looking apartments from the 1. A few wooden Ottoman era houses stick out like dark holes in the honeycombed landscape. It could be fatigue, sure. But you could be pardoned for thinking it looked like the end of the world, like the sun was having a stroke and firing out its last, longest rays in one short protest before turning the entire world into a dark, unlit tunnel of doomed history. Even if it were the end, the two biggest soccer teams in soccer- mad Istanbul, Galatasaray and Fenerbah. You'll have to take it in for just a few minutes from this weird Istanbul hotel rooftop. Then, you'll have to accept that at the end of all that history the net result of all that civilization and progress will be the same: the citizens of the city screaming for blood at a game involving two nets, a ball, and bad, evil people from somewhere else. THE PLACE WHERE THIS IS BEING PLAYED, I. E. THE CITY OLDER THAN TIME WITH SPARE PARTS FROM THE BYZANTINE EMPIREIf you set out to play Sim.
City on hard, you would get something that looks like Istanbul. Your splines would be reticulated with great cruelty, a series of hills so steep the city built a funicular railway from the shore of Karak. If you want to find the sex workers of Istanbul, draw a beeline from the waiting ships to shore, and follow lonely sailors. If you want to find the Ukraine, hang a left at the docks of Dolmabah. Most are utterly uninsurable. The odd currents of the strait push large ships and small into them with impressive frequency. If it's a small boat, the damage is recouped. If a Russian oil tanker plows into your house, no insurance company in the world will understand your pain. And that tanker may very well be Russian, since thanks to their gentle insistence they can sail whatever they like through the strait since the waters are international. To get to Galatasaray's stadium from the bars of Beyo. A trip over to Asia, however, involves traveling through international waters, and polite dodging and skipping around whatever behemoth is barreling down the birth canal of the old world and out to sea. Try to tunnel under all of it, and hit the layer cake of humanity's back pages the whole city is built on, over, around, and under. The most recent tunnel project hit pre- Byzantine ruins, postponing construction while the Ministry of Culture figured out what the hell to do with another chunk of the city's history that construction had knocked loose. The city has so many spare parts from so many civilizations that even its restoration efforts use the scraps. The heads of Medusa in the Basilica Cistern . The statue celebrating the Greeks' victory over the Persians is just sitting in the middle of the Hippodrome, because well, sure. It might as well be there, in an old place filled with fragments from no fewer than four different empires. Istanbul suffers from its own unkillable, unplanned, and unpredictable success. If it weren't hard enough . Despite being located on a fault line big enough to cough up earthquakes that have ended societies, the building continues. Construction cranes pivot grandiosely over the road from Ataturk Airport, building 2. Workers weld without goggles in the street. And there is more: plagues, war, and the trampling of millions (literally millions, hundreds of millions at this point) of the dead and living across one of the world's only natural universal joints. There is evidence that people have been living in the area for eight thousand years, older than Paris, older than Rome, older than even Beijing. For most of those eight thousand years, those people have lived under someone's very heavy thumb: the Persians, the Greeks, the Byzantine Emperors, the Ottoman Sultans. Plague, fire, plaguefire, war, more war, World Wars, revolution, floods, storms, urbacidal earthquakes, riots, ethnic rioting, genocide, the Crusades, depressions, famine, poverty, AIDS, typhus, religious schisms, millennia of corruption, impossible geographies, and the overturn of entire ways of life by others have not killed Istanbul, because Istanbul is unkillable. It is a daywalking vampire of a city sipping tea with a stake in its heart and a necklace of garlic knotted around its neck. It could not die if it wanted to, and will be thrown clear of the earth's wreckage when the sun dies intact and most likely sitting down to some tea, and maybe a game of backgammon before watching the game. THE ACCOUNTING OF THE POSITIONS OF TEAMS IN A SECTION WHOSE RELEVANCE TO SOCCER IN THE TURKISH COSMOS IS MINIMAL GIVEN THE AMOUNT OF EMOTION SPENT ON SINGLE GAME SERIES FRAUGHT WITH VIOLENCE AND LOVEThese are the positions of the teams, if those can even be considered important here. Galatasaray's only real hope in making up the gap between themselves is to visit utter ruination on the rest of their schedule, beat Fenerbahce at their home stadium, and then hope for a total collapse by Fenerbahce, the team who can still win the Turkish S. There will be no rioting by Fenerbahce fans, and none to sit in the fortified opposition section in T. The match will be 5. Fenerbah. At the point just before their second match against Galatasaray, Fenerbahce most likely has the 2. Turkish S. They can't win, at least in the sense of Fenerbahce getting a coveted spot in the Champions' League because of a match- fixing scandal. When the team's President returned to the country after addressing the charges with FIFA, he was met at the airport by hundreds of cheering Fenerbahce fans. They believe the scandal is a conspiracy because .. What they will get is the Istanbul title, and new stars on the uniform, and scandal be damned, another title over Galatasaray. At this point in the season, that seems like all but a given. Then, in celebration, they'll probably throw things into the pressbox. The exchange of that kind of loyalty in exchange for emotional expression is fandom anywhere, really. Yet in Turkish soccer it can buy more than say, the average affection for an NFL team will get you in the United States. The currency of loyalty can be exchanged in any number of directions for Turkish soccer fans. It can buy seats thrown into the pressbox, as it did for Fenerbah. That currency can buy protection, as it did during the xenophobic riots of 1. Fenerbahce fans and players protected the team's Greek star Lefter K. It can buy political muscle at the street level, as it did when Besikitas fans, and in particular their fan club . It can buy improv engineering, as in the 2. Galatasaray fans were caught attempting to tunnel into a match against Schalke in their home stadium in Germany. The simplest exchange of all: emotion given in the name of violence. A 2. 01. 3 match between Galatasaray and Besiktas collapsed into total chaos after Galatasaray midfielder Felipe Melo was red carded . The 2. 01. 2 derby between Galatasaray and Fenerbahce ended with police protecting Galatasaray players with riot shield, and with a Galatasaray supporter stabbed in the street. There will be security. There are so many reasons to have that security, and not all of them have to do with soccer. A CHASTE SAMPLE OF VERSE FROM THE BOOK OF GALATASARAY CHANTSGo wild in the stadiums,You'll get the cups,You'll be the champion. People who don't like you deserve to die! Die! You never see anyone buy one, much less a bag of them. People do scarf down simit, the pretzel- ish bread somewhere between a sesame stick and pretzel, all sold by the same red carts advertising the low, low price of one Turkish Lira. The men are on the street all day and the simit business is run by the government, so it's assumed they work for the government. They might not, or they might, because it is really hard to get away from the idea that the government wants their authority to be known. The white military tower overlooking Taksim Square in the distance has a guard peering out on each corner. He will wave you off if you take a picture of the building, if you somehow managed to ignore the scary- ass red signs reading . They crackle to life when their unmarked lights go off, and people clear the way for them without a single honk.
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