Kicking it NURESA AKA scored her tenth goal of the season on a sunny afternoon last week in Diyarbakir, the unofficial capital of Turkey’s mainly Kurdish south-east. Ms Aka’s strike helped to clinch a 4-1 victory for the Diyarbakir Women’s Football Club over a rival team, Kahramanmaris. “They call me Ronaldo,” boasts the lanky 17-year-old forward, referring to the Portuguese football star Cristiano Ronaldo. “People tell me I play like him.”
Ms Aka is one of the reasons why Diyarbakir is at the top of Turkish women’s professional football’s third division. She began dribbling as a child in the alleyways of the shantytown where she and her six siblings live. “Most of my girls are from poor, religiously conservative families,” explains the team’s coach, Melek Akgol Karakoc. “It’s a miracle that they are here at all.”
Women’s football is, in itself, nothing new in Turkey. The officially secular country prides itself on treating women better than its Muslim peers. Turkish women gained the right to vote earlier than French women, and females are common in all professions, including sports. But patriarchal…
