Fenerbahçe Chobani Stadium

Before it became home to one of Turkey’s fiercest football clubs, this patch of ground was known as Papazın Çayırı, the priest’s meadow. In 1908, it transformed into Turkey’s first organized football pitch, leased from Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II for 30 gold pounds annually. The field was shared by bitter rivals Fenerbahçe, Galatasaray, and Beşiktaş until 1933, when Fenerbahçe purchased it for either ₺1 or ₺9,000, making them Turkey’s first club to own their stadium. Now it bears the name of a yogurt company founded by a Kurdish American entrepreneur.

The meadow’s path to football pitch ran through a fundraising speech for war veterans, of all things, which is how a British guest and an Ottoman court physician ended up agreeing that this particular stretch of treasury land was the right place for Istanbul’s young men to start kicking a ball around seriously. The arrangement outlasted the empire that granted it, surviving the fall of the sultanate and a change of national government before Fenerbahçe finally took full ownership under a president who later became Turkey’s prime minister. The stadium now carries his name alongside whichever corporate sponsor has most recently paid for the privilege, a lineage that has moved from Ottoman gold pounds to a cookie company to strained yogurt without ever quite letting go of the ground’s original talent for being fought over.