Wednesday, November 24, 2004
Sports
AEK at Eighty: It’s Not Just a Game
By Alexander Kitroeff
AEK had quite an eightieth birthday bash in September, and the party continues. Its soccer team, at the top of the Greek professional league, is considered a major contender for this season’s 2004-2005 championship. Aside from winning on the field, however, AEK’s chances of winning the championship will depend on its ability to overcome its enormous financial problems. Thanks to well over a decade of mismanagement, the club owes more than ?100 million, both in taxes and to other soccer clubs in fees for players it bought.
When a recent ruling by the government to the effect that soccer franchises are bound by bankruptcy laws—an overdue gesture toward cleaning up Greek soccer’s troubled finances—threatened to push AEK over the brink, a couple of thousand demonstrating AEK fans held up traffic in downtown Athens to protest the government’s insensitivity toward a Greek club steeped in history. The question is, will that history earn AEK more time?
The new president, Demês Nikolaidês, one of AEK’s international stars who retired last summer, seems to think so. The darkening financial clouds over AEK’s head notwithstanding, Nikolaidês decided to go all out in marking the club’s eightieth anniversary. The club organized a visit to the city from which its original players came: Istanbul. The acronym AEK—Athlêtikê Enôsis Kônstantinoupoleôs—stands for Athletic Union of Constantinople.
AEK was formed in Athens in 1924 by a group of Greek refugees from Istanbul. They were part of the influx of one and a half million refugees who arrived in Greece in the wake of the 1919-1922 Greek-Turkish war and the official population exchange between the two countries in 1923. The Asia Minor Disaster, as those events are collectively known in Greece, meant the transplantation of several Greek sports clubs from the Ottoman lands across the Aegean to Greece. AEK’s founders were athletes who had belonged to Pera Club, a cosmopolitan (mostly Greek) soccer club in Istanbul that remained in the city after 1923. Its uprooted athletes decided to form a new sports club in Athens.
The Pera, or Old Pera (renamed Beyoglu), neighborhood they left behind was one the wealthiest districts of Ottoman Istanbul. A favorite address of the city’s foreign residents since the eighteenth century, it overlooks the Golden Horn and affords spectacular views of old Istanbul, Aghia Sophia, and Topkapi Palace. It was there that the Pera Palas Hotel was built in 1891 to accommodate the passengers arriving from Europe on the legendary Orient Express. The hotel’s Orient Bar—decayed but still atmospheric—was a favorite haunt of foreign diplomats as well as Constantinopolitan Armenians, Greeks, and Jews in the late nineteenth century.