Amid Struggles, Turkey Finds Heroes in Its Women’s Volleyball Team

As the volleyball sport neared its finish, 1000’s of followers watching on big screens in an Istanbul park rose to their toes and fell silent. The ball soared, a Turkish participant set it up close to the web, and her teammate spiked it. Her Italian opponents blocked the shot however knocked the ball out of bounds, handing victory to the Turks and inflicting the gang to erupt into chants of “Turkey! Turkey! Turkey!”

The nail-biter victory on Friday by Turkey’s nationwide ladies’s volleyball staff within the Women’s European Volleyball Championship was the latest conquest by the nation’s most profitable main sports activities staff, a file that has turned it right into a uncommon supply of nationwide satisfaction that holds attraction throughout the nation’s social divides.

While some ultraconservatives have attacked the ladies as an affront to Islamic values, their followers laud them as paragons of feminine empowerment in a rustic the place many ladies really feel they’ve but to attain social equality. And the staff’s successes are a welcome shiny spot for Turks fighting sky-high inflation, political polarization and a sluggish restoration from devastating earthquakes in February that killed greater than 50,000 individuals.

Affectionately known as “the Sultans of the Net,” the staff received the Volleyball Nations League championship in July in Arlington, Texas, and have become the world’s high rated ladies’s nationwide staff, in accordance with FIVB, the game’s worldwide governing physique. On Sunday, they face Serbia within the last match of the European championship in Brussels.

At dwelling, the staff’s video games are aired dwell by the state broadcaster and its gamers exude star energy. Legions of followers on social media rejoice their accomplishments, monitor their frequent hair-color adjustments and speculate about their romantic entanglements.

Corporate sponsorships and state help have flowed in. In 2021, when Turkey granted citizenship to the Cuban-born participant Melissa Vargas, she obtained her new Turkish ID card from none aside from President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

“They are fighters,” mentioned Ceren Duyan, a biologist at a biotech firm who watched Friday’s sport within the park. “When we see women do good things in sports or anywhere else, we see that we too can be powerful.”

The volleyballers’ rise comes amid a global reckoning with how feminine athletes are handled in contrast with their male counterparts. Last month, the pinnacle of the Spanish soccer federation was suspended after giving a feminine participant an undesirable kiss on the lips. In July, the BBC apologized after one in all its reporters requested the captain of the Moroccan nationwide ladies’s soccer staff if any of its gamers have been homosexual.

Turkey’s staff has largely averted such controversies, though the gamers’ private types have linked them to a few of Turkey’s deepest divisions.

While its individuals are predominantly Muslim, Turkey was based in 1923 by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, its first president, as a secular state. Much of Turkish politics revolves round struggles between those that treasure the nation’s secular legacy and people urgent to broaden Islam’s position in public life. The latter camp consists of Mr. Erdogan, Turkey’s predominant politician for 20 years.

The gamers are clearly within the former camp.

They don’t cowl their hair or put on clothes that conceals their our bodies, as most religious Muslim ladies do. Instead, they seem in the usual uniform of shorts and tank tops, and a few sport tattoos. Ms. Vargas, the staff’s high scorer, has just lately appeared on court docket together with her hair dyed electrical blue or bleached blond, with a blue lightning bolt over her ear.

After a victory on Wednesday in opposition to Poland, one participant, Zehra Gunes, advised Turkish reporters that the staff was advancing Ataturk’s imaginative and prescient for Turkey.

“As Turkish women, we try to be role models for future generations by holding a light on the path that Ataturk showed,” she mentioned.

Another star participant, Ebrar Karakurt, obtained floods of hateful and homophobic messages after posting pictures of herself on social media in affectionate poses with different ladies, and an Islamist newspaper referred to as her “a national shame.”

In 2021, when the staff was competing within the Summer Olympics in Tokyo, a distinguished preacher sharply criticized the staff for not adhering to his conception of how a Muslim girl ought to behave.

“Girl of Islam! You are not the sultan of the courts; you are the sultan of faith, virtue, chastity and decency,” the preacher, Ihsan Senocak, wrote on X, the social media platform previously generally known as Twitter.

A spokesman for Turkey’s volleyball federation finally responded to the hubbub, praising Ms. Karakurt for having the “the spirit of a fighter to represent her country.”

“Everyone’s private life concerns them only,” the spokesman mentioned. “All the rest is hokum.”

Ms. Karakurt has just lately struck again at her critics in her personal approach.

Last week, an X person named Abdulhamid responded to one in all her posts, saying, “As the Muslim Turkish nation, we continue to put up with you.”

After Friday’s victory, Ms. Karakurt posted {a photograph} of herself holding an indication that learn, “Cut the crap, Abdulhamid.”

The staff’s successes resonate as a result of Turkey has lengthy seen sports activities as a strategy to assert itself globally.

“It was always the motive of Turkish sports to be successful in international encounters to prove that we are legitimate — as powerful, as successful, equals to our Western peers,” mentioned Daghan Irak, a senior lecturer in media communication on the University of Huddersfield in Britain. “It is a very important part of our society’s psyche in terms of sports.”

Mr. Erdogan and his authorities could not recognize every part concerning the staff’s public profile, Mr. Irak mentioned, however the president probably appreciates their inspirational worth.

“Obviously, Erdogan is more interested in the national pride this team generates than the lifestyle questions,” Mr. Irak mentioned.

Mr. Erdogan, an avid soccer participant in his youthful years, has not attended any of the staff’s video games. But he did name Eda Erdem, the staff’s captain, after its first sport within the Tokyo Olympics to say he had been watching.

“You made us sentimental, you made us teary,” Mr. Erdogan mentioned, passing his greetings “to all the girls.”

After the staff received a event this summer time, an opposition lawmaker, Gulcan Kis, filed an inquiry to the Parliament asking why Mr. Erdogan’s sports activities minister had not attended any video games and urged it was to keep away from angering conservatives.

“Is the targeting of the national women’s volleyball team by religious scholars the reason for your absence from the final game?” Ms. Kis requested.

But the squabbles haven’t harm the recognition of ladies’s volleyball, or the huge infrastructure supporting it. The nationwide ladies’s league is massively aggressive and wealthy in sponsorships. And the Education Ministry runs a “Sultans of Tomorrow” program to introduce the sport to women in provincial cities.

The success of the nationwide staff has attracted a brand new technology of ladies to the sport, mentioned Neslihan Demir, who retired from the staff in 2017.

“All the little girls in Turkey want to play volleyball now since they are watching their big sisters as role models,” she mentioned.

The gamers’ broad social acceptance has inspired mother and father to let their daughters play, too, she mentioned.

Ms. Demir recalled assembly a household who requested her whether or not their 9-year-old daughter may change into a Sultan of the Net.

“Start at once,” she advised them.

Safak Timur contributed reporting.