Lighthouselittlegarden F.C.

A quick blog to preserve an interesting conversation I had on Twitter. It started with Jonathan Healey appreciating Turkish toponyms:

Gelibolu, Gallipoli, has a particular excellent name, originally Kallipolis, “Beautiful City”. There are lots of other surviving -polis names, for example Antibes in France (Antipolis, City-Opposite-[Nice/Nikaia]), Nablus on the West Bank (Neapolis, New City); and an example of a modern name imitating an ancient, (and implying a cultural connection to Ancient Greece), Sebastopol (Empress City), founded by Catherine the Great when she annexed the Crimea in 1783.

But what Jonathan’s tweet made me think of, and even do some google research about, was Fenerbahçe, a football club (and a neighbourhood of Istanbul) with a very interesting name. The -bahçe bit I knew was Persian baghche (باغچه), (little) garden, a diminutive form of the standard Persian word for garden, bagh, probably most familiar from classic Islamic gardens like the Shalimar Bagh in Srinagar, Kashmir, laid out by the Mughul Emperor Jahangir. As for Fener-, this means “lighthouse” in Turkish, so “Fenerbahçe” is “Lighthouse Garden”, after a lighthouse that stands there at the approach to the Golden Horn.

But it’s a bit more complicated than that:

The Turkish word fener in turn comes from Greek phanarion (φανάριον), a diminutive of phanos (φανός), torch, which came to mean “beacon” or “lighthouse”. So Fenerbahçe, a suburb of the city where East famously meets West, fittingly bears a name that’s half-Greek and half-Persian.

But what made the conversation much more interesting was Jamal Jafri pointing out that fanar, فنار, was a (rare) word for lighthouse in Persian and the standard term in Arabic, originally deriving from this same Greek word phanarion, φανάριον:*

The suburb of Fener on the European side of Istanbul derives its name directly from Greek φανάρι(ον), but I guess the Fener- of Fenerbahçe may have travelled from Greek to Turkish more indirectly, via Arabic or Persian.

Incidentally, the more usual Persian term for lighthouse, fanous-e daryayi (فانوس دریایی), is from another Greek word (φανός, “torch”) via Arabic: also from Greek via Arabic, while I’m at it, is “fanusi”, which is a Swahili word for “lantern” (meanwhile another Greek word for lighthouse, φάρος, from the Pharos of Alexandria, explains the French word for “headlight”):

Finally, and most fascinatingly of all, this from @Giovanni_Lido: the Persian word baghche also found its way, through Turkish, into Greek, an alternative (now obsolete or poetic) to the standard Greek word for garden, kepos (κήπος):

“I entered into your garden…”, sings Giorgos Totis, and the word for garden is the Persian baghche, μπαξές, baxes.

I overuse this word, but that is rather cool: a Persian word for “garden” found from India to Greek folk music, and a selection of Greek words for “lighthouse” used across the Arabic and Persian-speaking world and as far as central Africa and Western Europe. East, West, South and North (фонарь, fonar, is apparently a Russian word for “lantern”) thoroughly interchangeable, and surely the most interesting name of any football club in the world. However, I’m not a philologist, my Persian is ropey, my modern Greek worse, and my Arabic, Turkish and Russian non-existent, so I’m fully prepared to be corrected.

* The first “a” of Greek φανάριον, phanarion, is long (phaanarion), while the first of فنار, fanar, is short and the second long (fanaar): what explains the shift, I suppose, is the accentual change in the Greek accent, from pitch to stress, that was established by the sixth century AD, the accent over the second syllable of phanarion being realised in Arabic by the long second “a” of fanaar.

(Also thanks to Averil Cameron and Eli Mitropoulos for answering my questions on this topic.)