Wearing the red and yellow scarf of his beloved Galatasaray football club, Arda stands with two unlikely companions: a fan of Fenerbahce and one of Besiktas, his team’s fierce Istanbul derby rivals.
On an ordinary day they might be fighting each other. But in the face of a violent crackdown on political protests in their neighbourhood, they’ve joined forces in an unholy alliance.
“Normally we mouth off to each other. But right now it’s they who are the enemy,” says Arda, 18, pointing at the nearby police who stand watching for trouble after Turkey’s week of political riots.
On sloping lawns overlooking their Inonu stadium, the Besiktas fans — the Eagles — sport the black and white stripes of their team, which finished third in the league this season.
They rub shoulders with the protagonists of the fiercest derby of all in the three-way rivalry: the Canaries of “nouveau riche” club Fenerbahce in blue and yellow and the Lions of league winners Galatasaray, traditionally associated with the republican elite.
At the sidewalk cafes of Istanbul, word has it that the rivalry is as old as the Turkish republic — founded in 1923 by the secular hero Kemal Ataturk.
Things changed on May 31, when riot police firing tear and pepper gas stormed a protest to keep the bulldozers away from Gezi Park, a short walk from the Inonu stadium.
Amid the nationwide protests that followed — the biggest challenge to Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his AKP party in his decade in office — fans of traditionally working-class Besiktas held their own march on June 4.
In solidarity the elite old guard of Galatasaray and the “new money” from Fenerbahce, second in the league, flocked to join them, walking with their arms around one another.
On Saturday Fenerbahce mounted their own demo, marching across the bridge from the eastern, “Asian”, side of the city to Taksim Square, epicentre of the protests.
Star players such as Galatasaray’s top scorer Burak Yilmaz and its foreign stars Didier Drogba and Wesley Sneijder have posted messages of support for the protesters on Twitter.
With his mop of red hair, Arda struts around waiting for the cops to make a move. He’s not afraid, he says. “I’ve picked up a tear gas canister and thrown it back” at the cops.
“All Turks have to get together,” he says. “For ten years now the AKP and Erdogan have been telling us what to do, what to think and what to say. We’ve had enough.”
Nearby, his mate Muhammet, a Besiktas supporter, says he has stayed away from home for four days to avoid the disapproving gaze of his family.
“I told them I was going to a concert, otherwise they’d have disowned me on the spot. My parents, my brothers and my sisters all support Erdogan. Fascists!” he laughs.
One fan of Fenerbahce, who would not give his name, sees Turkey as “a cooking pot that Erdogan wants to put a lid on”.
“We want to breathe, to study, to work with foreigners, go to Europe. Erdogan wants to take us backwards, to subject us to religion,” he says. “He has had his time. He should quit.”
The oldest football club in Turkey, founded in 1903, Besiktas also has one of its most revered firms of radical supporters: the hard-left “carsi”, marked out by the circular anarchist symbol on their T-shirts.
“The cops fired tear gas on our territory. They’ve got to leave,” says one member, Ozkan, a 21-year-old with a thick black beard.
His friends bought him a brand new gas mask as a trophy after a spectacular brawl in which he says he wrestled a young woman away from the clutches of the riot police.
“We’re used to fighting,” he says.
An expert in the sociology of Turkish football, French academic Jean-Francois Polo of Galatasaray University, explains the roots of fans’ fierce affiliations through the country’s recent history.
A coup in 1980 was followed by a crackdown on political groups and universities as the military leaders tried to “depoliticise” society.
“The only place where people could express their identity and their membership of a group was in the football stadium,” said Polo. “They do so to this day.”
In Turkey three groups in particular have taken to clashing over the years with police in public affirmations of their identity, he says: the Kurds, the far-left — and the football fans.
They are leading proponents of the edgy sense of humour fanned by the protests.
Ozkan takes his phone from his pocket, puts it on speakerphone and dials the police emergency number. His friends wait in silence as it rings and someone answers.
“Hello, police? It’s Besiktas. We’ve got some food but there’s no pepper. Send us some pepper. Some pepper gas!”
Turkish football rivals forge unholy alliance
