The Istanbul Derby | Spencer Hall | SBNation | 28th April 2014

Gorgeously sprawling epic about a football match in Istanbul — a city “so old it has Viking graffiti in a Muslim mosque which was once a Catholic church built for an emperor”. The city has “so many spare parts from so many civilizations” that stone from one era of antiquity shores up buildings from another. A Greek statue marking victory over the Persians sits in the Hippodrome “because it might as well be there, in a place filled with fragments from four different empires”