Out in front: A visit with the soccer ultras accused of plotting a coup against Turkey’s Erdoğan

In June 2013, at the height of the Gezi Park protests, Cem Yakişkan, a 48-year-old bar owner, father of two, and founder of Turkey’s most celebrated group of soccer fanatics, or ultras, tried to bring down Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s government with a cell phone.

Or so the prosecution alleges.

In a trial that opened last week, Yakişkan and thirty-four other “ultras,” or super-fans, of Istanbul’s Beşiktaş soccer club, known as the Çarşı, heard charges of attempting a coup d’état, participating in and organizing illegal meetings and demonstrations, and founding a terrorist group, as well as a range of lesser offenses. If convicted, they face life in prison.

The coup charges, Yakişkan told me when we met, were a sad joke. “If we had the power to topple the government,” he said, laughing, “we would have made Beşiktaş champion.”

When the Gezi Park protests engulfed his hometown, Istanbul, in the summer of 2013, he and other Çarşı had little choice but to leap into the fray, he said. “When we saw police beating kids in the streets, we felt we were needed,” he told me. “It would have been unthinkable not to take part.”

Yakişkan had sat me down at his bar, Esperi, on an evening in late November, sporting a pair of reading glasses and a head of graying, disheveled hair. He was flanked by half a dozen Çarşı, a motley group that included an architect, an engineer, a chef and a lawyer, all in their 30s and 40s. Except for the lawyer, whose beard looked as if it had just knocked out another beard in the men’s room, none quite fit the mold of a soccer hooligan.

If the upcoming trial seemed to be the last thing on Yakişkan’s mind, the top right corner of a TV screen mounted behind him spelled out why. 2:0, it read. Beşiktaş had just beaten Kasımpaşa, a crosstown rival — or as one of the bar’s patrons called it, “Erdoğan’s team.” The crowd was in good spirits.

Just as Beşiktaş takes its name from the neighborhood where Yakişkan lives, Kasımpaşa takes its from the part of town where Erdoğan was born, grew up, learned to play soccer, and got his first whiff of politics. The Turkish leader moved out long ago, first to the Istanbul mayor’s office, then to the prime ministry, and most recently to a 1150-room presidential palace, but his presence looms large over Kasımpaşa. His posters line the walls of local teahouses. Everyone older than thirty, including several barbers who all insist that the Turkish leader was once their regular customer, claims to have known him. In the mid 2000s, the neighborhood and the eponymous team got a new arena — the Recep Tayyip Erdoğan Stadium. Beşiktaş, whose own arena was demolished last spring to make way for a new, bigger one, played some of its home games here in 2013. This season, it has been banished to the outskirts of town, to a hulking, soulless wind tunnel known as Ataturk Olympic Stadium, several miles west of nowhere. A number of Beşiktaş fans, including the Çarşı, have decided to boycott the games because of a new ticketing system that requires them to purchase a special pass from a company run until recently by Erdoğan’s son-in-law. Attendance at Beşiktaş games has plummeted.

Yakişkan went to his first Beşiktaş game in 1977, as an eleven-year-old. Five years later, amid bloody clashes with fans of the other big Istanbul clubs, he and a few friends founded Çarşı, bringing together the team’s most devoted, fanatical, and violent supporters — the ultras. The name Çarşı is styled with the anarchist symbol instead of the A.

To someone who completed his crash course in soccer culture in Poland, ultras are a byword for drunk, bare-chested thugs who spend their weekends raining smoke bombs, flares, and plastic seats from stadium stands, destroying train stations, brawling with the cops and each other, and belting out chants about as sophisticated as prison wall etchings. And breaking beer bottles over an aspiring reporter’s young head — a whole different story.

There is, of course, a fair share of that, meaning hooliganism, in Çarşı. Knives and guns have been known to feature regularly in clashes with Fenerbahçe and Galatasaray ultras, claiming the lives of several Çarşı veterans in the 80s and 90s. A mid-1990s truce between the main Istanbul clubs called has held, claims Yakişkan, with the exception of a few stabbings, the work of what he calls “youngbloods”.

Yet there is also much more to Çarşı. The group routinely takes part in blood drives organized by the Turkish Red Cross. When an earthquake leveled parts of Van, a city in Turkey’s restive southeast, in the fall of 2011, members donated blankets and clothes for survivors. Halfway through a derby match against Galatasaray, they and other Beşiktaş fans took off their jerseys and unfurled a banner featuring a smiling sun and the words, “Don’t let Van go cold.” Earlier this year, they organized a fundraiser for an Istanbul shelter for stray dogs.

After the 2007 murder of Armenian journalist Hrant Dink at the hands of a teenage nationalist, Çarşı supporters protested with signs reading, “We are all Armenians.” One of the group’s leaders, Alen Markaryan, has campaigned to improve relations — poisoned by the legacy of the mass killing of up to 1.5 million Armenians in 1915 — between Turkey and its eastern neighbor. “Inonu stadium,” Yakişkan boasted, referring to Beşiktaş’ former grounds, “is where the Armenian issue was resolved for the first time.”

At Gezi, which began as a sit-in against the demolition of a small park and quickly swelled into a wave of mass protests, sweeping up layers of grievances against Erdogan’s government and uniting leftists, nationalists, liberals, secularists, and feminists in the process, Çarşı felt right at home — particularly when police intervened. Three of its members became icons when they hot-wired a bulldozer and tried to use it against riot vehicles. Another was stabbed when he tried to persuade peddlers near Taksim to stop selling alcohol to the protesters. “Sık Bakalım,” a Çarşı chant, turned into a Gezi anthem. “Take off your helmet, drop your baton,” it went. “Let’s see who’s the real man now.”

On at least one occasion, the Çarşı and other protesters clashed with police in front of Erdoğan’s offices in Istanbul. That — and that alone — appears to be the basis for the coup charges against Yakişkan and the others. The fighting, the prosecution alleges, was a prelude to an attempt by the Çarşı to take over the building and topple the government. As evidence, it offers a few weapons and gas masks found in certain ultras’ houses, as well as intercepted conversations and text messages, most of which consist of the Çarşı egging each other on. There’s also the usual footage of rock-throwing protesters. The case against Yakişkan, identified as the ringleader, relies on phone calls and Twitter posts in which he urges friends to join Gezi, plus allegations that he accepted the equivalent of $12,000 to organize Çarşı’s march on Taksim, which he denies. Somehow, the evidence includes a bill for pizza and meatballs.

Citing an interview that one of the suspects gave to a foreign news outlet, the indictment also concludes that the ultras sought “to provide the international press with an image similar to the Arab Spring,” so as to legitimize their attempt to overthrow Erdoğan’s government.

Rıza Türmen, an opposition lawmaker and former judge at the European Court of Human Rights, views the Çarşı trial as only the latest installment of Erdoğan’s crackdown against domestic opponents. Of the eight people killed in the Gezi protests most were killed by police, but it was the protesters who faced the heaviest sentences, he told me in a phone interview. “Çarşı are charged with preventing public officials from doing their duty, but it’s the police who prevented people from exercising their right to protest,” he said.

Çarşı’s lawyer, Derviş Yıldız, said he had “no doubt” that the case was political. “At first they charged us with being a criminal organization,” he told me, sitting alongside Yakişkan. “After a few months later the charge changed to terrorist organization. How? Why? What happened? The evidence is the same, the investigation papers are the same, and the testimonies are the same. But the charge has been upgraded. In the indictment, it says one of us had a gun, for his personal use. They say that with this gun, with just one gun, we’d take out the government. This is mental.”

“They needed a scapegoat, so they chose us,” Yakişkan said. “Everybody came out [to the protests], but then everybody pulled back, and Çarşı was left out front. We accept that.”

With only the faintest hint of sarcasm, he added that he owes Erdoğan a debt of gratitude. “Gezi was amazing. People became brothers there. People wearing Beşiktaş, Galatasaray, Fenerbahçe jerseys, people who’d have been at each other’s throats in normal conditions, there they were, side by side. For that we have to thank the government, for making us able to experience all that,” he said.

“It was the most beautiful fifteen days of my life.”