Murat Yıldız
Associate professor of history at Skidmore College and author of The Ottoman World of Sports, researching modern sports culture, physical training, and communal identities in late imperial Istanbul.
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Feb 17, 2026 • 42min
Murat Yıldız on the Ottoman world of sports, modernisation and minorities
Murat Yıldız, associate professor of history at Skidmore College and author on Ottoman sports history. He traces Istanbul’s modern sports culture through multilingual archives and club records. He discusses how physical training tied to modernization and anxieties, how clubs mixed communities yet reinforced boundaries, and why football outshone traditional wrestling and emerged as a mass spectacle.
