Soccer, Memory and Politics: How Galatasaray Omits Former Star in UEFA Trophy Celebrations

Twenty years after Galatasaray won the UEFA Cup, celebrations marked the moment of Turkey’s biggest achievement in Europe at the club level. One name was missing: Hakan Sukur — the King.

Bulent Korkmaz (L), Galatasaray’s first captain, and the second captain Hakan Sukur (R) lift the UEFA trophy after a penalty shootout that followed a 120-minute final against Arsenal on May 17, in 2000. (Photo credit: UEFA)

When Joseph Stalin declared his arch-nemesis Leon Trotsky as the public enemy of the Soviet people, he did not only launch an insane purge against the perceived sympathizers of Trotsky. But Stalin, in thrall to the grip of the paranoia in an unimaginable level, even moved to expunge Trotsky’s pictures from photographs and books in a sustained effort to eradicate the living memory of the revolutionary who was among the top leading names of the Bolshevik Revolution along with Lenin and Stalin. Any hint of association with the regime’s enemy simply meant death for many people during the sham Moscow trials (1936–38).

Stalin’s shrewd reorganizing of the public memory provided a useful source of inspiration for George Orwell who, in his 1984 novel, sought to portray a totalitarian regime’s endless machinations to control people’s minds, their access to the archive and historical record by installing an all-encompassing control over all layers of public knowledge…