Turkey's Galatasaray said Saturday it would rename its stadium after Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's call for the removal of the word 'arena' from sports stadia, state-run news agency Anadolu reported.
The Turkish football team's venue will be called Türk Telekom Stadium instead of Türk Telekom 'Arena' from Monday. "The board of directors took the decision to change the stadium's name after the president made the call on this issue," club chairman Dursun Özbek said. Türk Telekom chief executive Paul Doany welcomed Galatasaray's move, saying he supported Erdoğan's order for the 'arena' names changes.
The Turkish Football Federation (TFF) announced that the word “arena” had been removed from the names of all stadiums in the country.
Erdoğan on Friday ordered the removal of the word 'arena' from sports stadia in Turkey because of its historical meaning, claiming it was a term foreign to the Turkish-Islamic civilisation. "I am against 'arena'. Of course, you know what they used to do in arenas in the past? They would let people be shred to pieces," Erdoğan said during a speech in Istanbul.
Erdoğan refers to ancient Roman games in which gladiators and wild animals entertained spectators including in the Colosseum in Rome, ruling out their other functions in social and political life.
Earlier this week Erdoğan referred to historic "European arenas" as he said past events in arenas meant using the term was "neither polite nor elegant". "We are going to remove the word 'arena' from stadiums," the president said, adding he had given instructions for the removal to Sports Minister Akif Cagatay Kılıç.
"What does arena mean? We don't have such a thing in our language," he said. The sports ministry issued a warning to provincial governors to remove the word 'arena' from stadia across Turkey.
ERDOĞAN'S 'NEW TURKEY' IN LANGUAGE
Erdoğan's "criticism" and order about language, such as to remove "arena" from sports stadia is strictly linked to AKP government's neo-Ottomanist ideology.
He had changed his controversial presidential palace's name, which was built illegally, costing a fortune, to a name connoting with Ottoman institutions. The huge palace is renamed as the "presidential külliye" instead of "palace." A külliye is an Ottoman architectural concept that designates a complex with a central mosque and a series of ancillary buildings - such as a hospital, library and public fountain - surrounding it.
In October 2015, he declared his presidential palace as the "new symbol" of the Republic of Turkey, which marks its 92nd anniversary on October 29.
Erdoğan opened his hugely controversial new presidential palace on the outskirts of Ankara in 2014. It has 1,150 rooms and was built at a cost of around 490 million euros ($615 million).
In 2015, a ceremony for the opening of a new campus at a private university in Ankara offered a stage for Erdoğan to state that his aspiration to change the jargon of politics also extends to a redesign of the lexicon of academic life. He also ordered to say "külliye" instead of "campus".
In December 2015, President Erdoğan waded into the heated debate over the possible inclusion of Ottoman language classes in the high school curriculum, vowing that the classes will be introduced “no matter what they say.”
In 1928, the new Republic of Turkey switched its alphabet from Arabic to Latin.
In 2014, Erdoğan ordered that Ottoman, an old form of Turkish using a version of Arabic script, must be taught in schools to prevent younger generations losing touch with their cultural heritage.
Pro-government, Islamist daily Yeni Akit initiated a campaign to teach the Ottoman language, while one of its columnists, Mehmet Ali Tekin, referred to the alphabet used in the Ottoman language as the “Islam-Arabic alphabet,” a term that would encourage devout Muslims to learn it.
Tekin said, “Overnight in 1928 [referring to the alphabet reform], our 900-year history was disconnected from future generations. The caliphate was abolished. We were asked to wear hats. Our alphabet was changed.”
