It was Orhan Pamuk's birthday on Saturday, but rather than being garlanded with good wishes the 55-year-old Nobel laureate found himself embroiled in controversy. Interviewed by Der Spiegel in the run-up to Turkey's opening match against Portugal in Euro2008, Pamuk said that football provokes nationalism and xenophobia and called Fatih Terim, the national team coach, an "ultra-nationalist". Terim shot back that Pamuk is an "inadequate nationalist".
As stinging rebukes go this was no Wildean one-liner, but it underlined the antagonism towards Pamuk in his homeland. In December of last year the novelist was put on trial on a charge of "denigrating Turkishness", an accusation that was only dropped in the face of an international outcry. There is also a widespread feeling that the Nobel award was at best a backhanded compliment, a way of telling the country that it does not know how to treat its intellectuals.
Pamuk's ambivalence over the beautiful game is unsurprising. In his fine memoir Istanbul: Memories and the City football is barely mentioned, and the book has nothing at all to say about the fierce rivalry between Galatasaray and Fernabache which domınates the waking and sleeping thoughts of so many male Istanbullus.
I happened to be in Istanbul on the day of the match so thought I'd experience at first hand the xenophobia which disturbs Pamuk. In a packed bar near Taksim Square I watched the game in the company of exuberant but hardly chauvinistic Turkish supporters. They were curious about my nationality, they commiserated with me over England's dismal failure to qualify and they sympathized deeply with the vicissitudes of my home team (I'm a Newcastle fan).
Pamuk had told Der Spiegel that despite his misgivings he would get behind Turkey on the night and I decided to follow suit. But the boys took a beating, and the excitement in the bar evaporated with the swiftness of a Chrıstiano Ronaldo free kick. In his book on Istanbul Pamuk describes the phenomenon of hüzün, the melancholy provoked by living among the ruins of a vanished empire. It is not too fanciful to suggest that this feeling is shared by supporters of a football team which never seems capable of fulfilling a manifest destiny.
If he turned his penetrating mind to football, Pamuk, I'm sure, could write a fascinating account of its effect on the Turkish soul. If not Pamuk, then who? Where is this football-crazy nation's answer to Nick Hornby?
