The Istanbul Derby | Hacker News Reader

The Istanbul Derby

sbnation.com

30 pointslermontov9 comments

* "Viking graffiti in its Muslim mosque which was once a Catholic church built for an emperor." - Catholic? It's called Hagia Sophia. The irony of this error is that a commonly cited reason for why the expected help from Europe did not arrive during the last siege of Constantinople was the attitude of "I would rather see a Turkish turban in the midst of the City than the Latin mitre" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loukas_Notaras).

* "It's [Golden Horn] really called that, by the way, because everything in Turkish sounds dramatic" - Name is from Ancient Greek. Nobody really uses that name anymore, except tourism brochures and people who do want to be dramatic, I guess. (BTW, did you know that the Golden Gate bridge is named after the Golden Horn?)

* "The statue celebrating the Greeks' victory over the Persians is just sitting in the middle of the Hippodrome" - Not a statute, really, but the Serpent Column (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serpent_Column)

etc. etc. I understand this is not an investigative piece about Istanbul's history but an On The Road-like breathless impressive essay. Still errors that can be avoided with simple Wikipedia lookup bother me. (And let's not even go into the Turkish word for dentist being "teethmaster"!)

For the curious, re: "teethmaster", it's more like "teeth-person". Turkish is practical like that. You can add "-çi" or "-çı" to any noun and come up with a profession that does something related to that noun. And if it's not a noun, you can turn it into a noun first. And it it's not a real word, people will get what you mean.

What made me laugh was the direct translations of the names of the players. I guess I never thought about what the words /actually/ meant. "Falcon" or "Lightning" would be last names that you wouldn't bat an eyelid at in Turkey, but I guess they sound pretty epic when you say them in English.

It was all Catholic before the schism. And the rest is just silly minor errors. The translations of the players' names are very wrong. So what. What's important is as a stambouliote I've felt my huge hate and my huge love for my city reading this.

In a narrow technical sense you are right, the original Hagia Sophia was built ~500 years before the East-West Schism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East%E2%80%93West_Schism) that split the Church.

However, in the usual sense that Catholic is used, calling Hagia Sophia, which was the seat of the Greek Orthodox Patriarch, a Catholic church is ridiculous.

But in the sentence being criticized, "Catholic church" is primarily being used to distinguish from "Muslim mosque". And of course, the official name of the Eastern Orthodox Church is the Eastern Orthodox Catholic Church, because both churches consider themselves catholic, as did the unified church that existed before the Schism.

Yes, lots of misunderstood or no-fact-check info here. "Simit business is run by government?" Or did I misread this?

It's very strictly controlled by the council, and I guess it also participates in the production and sales.

I'm a simple man: I see a decent read on Istanbul, I upvote. But it could do with [2014] in the title, I was a bit startled when Didier Drogba was mentioned.

With that introduction, I was surprised that no reference was made to the Nika Riots, since they happened in the same place (in 532) and make footy hooliganism look like high tea.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/blue-versus-green-roc...

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