Sports

Wednesday, November 24, 2004

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.

AEK’s founders were evidently not very nostalgic for Istanbul’s late Ottoman cosmopolitanism, which soured badly as the empire collapsed after the First World War. When they decided on the colors and the symbol of the new Constantinopolitan club they were forming in Athens, they reached much further back into history, adopting the Byzantine empire’s double-headed eagle as AEK’s symbol, as well as the gold and black colors also associated with the Byzantines.

The crowned double-headed eagle was the emblem of the Palaiologoi, the last dynasty to rule Byzantine Constantinople. It symbolized the empire’s domains in both Asia and Europe, and was kept despite the fact that virtually all of the Asian possessions were taken over by the advancing Ottomans, who eventually conquered Constantinople in 1453. In the two centuries of Palaiologan rule prior to Byzantium’s fall, the double-headed eagle became identified not only with the empire but, more generally, with Byzantine institutions, culture, and, above all, Orthodoxy. The ecumenical patriarchate’s flag yet depicts a black, crowned double-headed eagle against a gold background.

Associating the Constantinopolitan refugee club with the Byzantine empire might not have been solely due to nostalgia for Byzantium, but a defensive reaction to the hostile environment encountered in Greece by the refugees. Regarded as a dangerous drain on scarce resources, the newly arrived refugees were not welcomed by many indigenous Greeks, whose lives had been disrupted by a decade of political upheaval and war. Indeed, Tourkosporoi (of Turkish seed) or yaourtovaftismenoi (“baptized in yogurt,” referring to a major ingredient of Asia Minor cuisine) were some of the insults native Greeks hurled at the refugees.

AEK managed to thrive in the 1920s, despite—or in spite of—nativist hostility, and it quickly became the strongest and most popular of all the refugee sports clubs established in Athens. This was because of its founders’ political connections to Eleutherios Venizelos’s Liberal party, which benefited from refugee voter support. The club’s first president, Kônstantinos Spanoudês (1871-1941), was a journalist and close associate of Venizelos who became a parliamentary deputy and, later, government minister. In 1926, the government’s central committee for housing refugees agreed to put aside land in Athens’s Nea Filadelfia section to be used as a sports training-ground for refugees. It became AEK’s de facto training-ground. In 1929, Venizelos made it official by approving the construction of a stadium on that site, which became AEK’s property. AEK inaugurated its stadium in November 1930 with a 2-2 draw in a “friendly” (exhibition) game against Olympiakos.

AEK not only outflanked the other refugee clubs in terms of popularity, it also challenged the two major soccer clubs in the Athens-Piraeus area, Panathênaikos and Olympiakos. AEK’s competitiveness was due not only to its political connections but also to the deep pockets of entrepreneurs such as Alexandros Strongylos, who served as the club’s president in the 1920s. A sign of AEK’s growing importance was its inclusion in an informal alliance, formed in 1927, of Greece’s top soccer clubs (the so-called POK, an acronym for the Panathênaikos, Olympiakos, and Constantinopolitan Athletic Union). In 1932, AEK won the Greek Cup, one of the two major tournaments in the country. Most of its lineup was then made up of Constantinopolitan Greeks; within a few years, however, AEK would acquire as many Greek-born players in a bid to remain competitive.

AEK retained its status among Greek soccer’s “big three” in the post-Second World War era that witnessed the establishment of a national semi-professional soccer league in 1959-1960. AEK won the first national championship in 1963, led by its star player, the legendary Mimês Papaioannou, the team’s all-time top scorer. AEK would go on to win several more championships in the late 1970s and early 1990s. Meanwhile, the club branched out into other sports, including basketball, but the soccer team remained AEK’s core.

Over time, the economic and political incorporation of refugees into Greek society, and the gradual passing away of the refugee generation, meant that “refugee identity” was expressed through a set of symbolic attachments. The Greek-born children of the refugees honored their heritage by keeping alive the memories of their parents and their customs, ranging from cuisine to music—and, naturally, they rooted for AEK.

All major soccer teams in Greece have social roots—ostensibly, at least. Olympiakos is “the people’s team,” and Panathênaikos is (supposedly) the bourgeoisie’s team, although, in both cases, these labels reflect conventional wisdom rather than any sociological reality. In contrast, AEK remains the “refugees’” team, as does PAOK, the team formed by refugees in Thessalonikê in the 1920s (see greekworks.com, “Thessaloniki’s Hidden Passion: PAOKomania,” Alexander Kitroeff, October 15, 2001). The core of AEK’s fan base is made up of persons whose forebears lived in the Ottoman empire, although the team’s popularity has spread, thanks to the number of championships and Greek Cup tournaments the club has won, as well as its respectable performance in European tournaments.

More important, the team is associated with both refugee values and the history and culture that “Constantinople” represents for all Greeks, and it engenders a fierce loyalty. Thus, when AEK periodically falls short of Olympiakos’s domestic dominance or Panathênaikos’s traditionally successful performance in Europe, the fans fall back on the notion of the uprooted refugee, marginalized but struggling against the odds. Because of its symbolic association with Byzantium, AEK is something more than just a team for its fans. It is “an idea” or “a religion”—and, sometimes more explicitly, a “Great Idea” (a reference to the now long-discredited vision of incorporating Istanbul and Anatolia into Greece’s borders). For some, AEK is simply “Orthodoxy.” The team’s “Orthodox” identity came to the fore during Greece’s nationalistic 1990s: in April 1999, when NATO was bombing Yugoslavia during the Kosovo crisis, AEK went on a symbolic peace mission to Belgrade and played a friendly game against Partizan-Belgrade. A large banner in the stadium read, “Ellas-Servia-Orthodoxia” (Greece-Serbia-Orthodoxy).

Supporters of Panathênaikos and Olympiakos prefer to ignore the heroic dimension of AEK’s “refugeeness,” or the respectability that its Orthodox connections imply, and choose, strategically, to focus on its Ottoman origins. The 1970s, which witnessed the emergence of a hooligan fan culture in Greece’s soccer stadiums, also produced echoes of the old native-versus-refugee tension that had antedated the refugees’ social integration. Opposing fans greeted AEK’s starting lineup with jeers of Chanoumises! (the Hellenization of hanüm, the Turkish word for “wife”) and rhythmic shouts of Tourkoi! Tourkoi! Ton pairnete tsimbouki! (Turks, Turks, you take it in the mouth!).

But this year, AEK president Nikolaidês cleverly turned the club’s Ottoman ties to the financially ailing club’s advantage. The eightieth-anniversary trip to Istanbul included—aside from visits to the Greek Orthodox patriarchate and Aghia Sophia—a friendly match with Istanbul’s Galatasaray, itself one of Turkey’s “big three” soccer teams. The move itself was appropriate, given the recent rapprochement in Greek-Turkish relations; moreover, Galatasaray—formed by members of the Ottoman elite who were students at the city’s Galatasaray lycée, a pioneer in physical education in the Ottoman empire—shares AEK’s roots in cosmopolitan Istanbul.

By acknowledging its Ottoman roots on its eightieth anniversary, AEK has embraced a broad but not necessarily incompatible set of identities: “refugeeness,” Byzantium, Orthodoxy, and Ottoman cosmopolitanism. With such a rich symbolic arsenal at its disposal, it must surely be confident that the Greek government will help it emerge from its current financial crisis. After all, what Greek government could turn against a club that has been welcomed by the ecumenical patriarch and underscored the closeness of Greek-Turkish relations by marking its anniversary with a soccer match in Istanbul?

If it can manage to resolve its financial problems, who knows what might come next for AEK? On the strength of its team’s form, this history-laden club may well be in a position to claim the 2004-2005 championship. The only problem might be that the season ends on May 29—the date on which Constantinople fell to the Turks in 1453.

Postscript: Last week, after this article was written, the Court of Appeals in Athens ruled that AEK could have 95 percent of its debt written off under Article 44 of the so-called companies law. That would leave the club with outstanding debt of roughly €16 million. AEK’s success in getting the courts to help shed its debt load follows similar success by the Thessalonikê club, Arês, a week earlier.
A. K.