`Gala-Saray?' the man in the local paint shop inquired incredulously, showing considerably more interest in the name on my replica shirt than in the half-litre of Midnight Blue gloss I was queueing up to pay for. "Gala-ta-saray?" And, now, here's the first thing that has to be said. It's not Gala-ta-saray. It's Galata-saray: although it can be, and frequently is, contracted to the much neater "Gal-sray" (rhymes, sort of, with "Tolstoy") or, better yet, "Jeem-bom".
What the man in the paint shop wanted to know, of course, was not how to pronounce this outlandish-looking Turkish word, but what it was doing on my shirt in the first place. Irish soccer fans are an easy-going lot. In the main, the discovery that one of their compatriots supports a Turkish soccer team elicits no more than a sage nod and a companionable inquiry about the situation at the top of the league table.
In Turkey it's a little different. Sang-froid is not a Turkish strong point. Which is how, last week, I ended up in an immaculate office at the headquarters of Galatasaray SK in a smart street in central Istanbul, trying to look an awful lot calmer than I felt as arrangements were being put in place for me to do the sort of things most soccer fans only dream about: tour the training grounds, shake hands with the chairman, rub shoulders with the players. But that's the end of a story which began in an apartment in Bucharest almost a decade ago, when a Romanian friend began to brag about this brilliant footballer whom nobody in Europe had yet heard of. They called him, he said, the Maradona of the Carpathians. Yeah, right, I said. And then I saw him play. The exquisite little flicks, the powerful, swerving free-kicks, the miraculous vision which transforms a long pass into a thing of beauty, the drop-dead control; oh, yes, from the moment I set eyes on him dancing down the pitch, the ball laughing on his left foot, I was hooked on Gheorghe Hagi. Keeping up with him, however, was no easy matter. Real Madrid, Brescia, Barcelona; despite success after success with the international team, he seemed doomed to jet around Europe's most glamorous clubs, increasingly under-used and hopelessly underrated.
But in the autumn of 1996, just as Hagi seemed on the point of disappearing off the edge of the known football world, Galatasaray Istanbul came to the rescue. Rumours began to trickle back to Dublin, mostly via the Internet, of dazzling performances, spectacular crowd scenes, and goals - lots and lots of goals.
I decided the time had come to ignore the dire warnings of friends and family that attendance at a live soccer match in Turkey would result in grievous bodily harm, if not irreversible psychological damage, and set out for Istanbul. Remember the huge fuss when Eric Cantona and company went off to play Galatasaray in a Champions' League qualifier in 1993-94? The hacks took one look at the home crowd at Ali Sami Yen - the flags, the chanting, the flares, the routine filling of the terraces five or six hours before kick-off - and panicked. "Ohmigod," shrieked the headlines. "Hell on earth."
The following year, when the teams met again in a Champions' League group the Turks, half amused, half enraged by the previous year's press coverage, duly held up signs which read "Welcome to hell". Well, I've been to hell and back four times in 12 months, and all I can say is, I wish I had a season ticket. Turkish soccer crowds could never be described as easy-going - the emotions involved are far too intense for that - but even if you're a woman, a foreigner and an infidel, as long as your idea of an interesting conversation is an earnest discussion about who should be playing at right-back while Umit is recovering from a broken leg, you'll be welcomed with open arms.
Once inside, a match at Ali Sami Yen is an unforgettable experience. Enormous flags billow from the stands; drums pulsate constantly throughout the game; the whole place erupts in an explosion of goodwill when the team appears on the pitch. The phrase "total football" might have been invented to sum up Ali Sami Yen in full flow.
After the first Galatasaray match I went to, when Hagi saved the day with a winning 91st-minute penalty, I thought I'd seen football heaven. But there's always something more to see. I've seen grown men weep when free-kicks rebound off the inside of the crossbar. I've seen people queue outside the stadium on a chilly Friday afternoon in January, pale and patient, waiting for the precious match tickets to go on sale. I've been hugged by complete strangers after a goal is scored and I've been brought a cup of tea at halftime just because I expressed delight at the excitement of the little boy jumping up and down in the seat next to mine. Not to mention the football - a well-drilled, fast-moving passing game - and the results - 3-2, 40, 2-1, 5-1. Football heaven, in any case, is a house of many mansions. During my most recent trip I was invited to present myself at the Galatasaray administration building for what I fully expected, given that matters had come to a head at the top of the league table, with the club two points ahead of Fenerbahce and two difficult games to go, to be a somewhat hasty handshake. Instead I found myself seated in the office of the general secretary drinking tea and watching, boggle-eyed, as the magnificent expanse of Galatasaray Spor Kulub u's plans for the future unfurled before me at a leisurely pace. At the club's private island in the Bosphorus, a social centre and floating marina just waiting for planning permission. A riding school due to open shortly, a Eurodisney-style theme park in the offing, a new water sports centre and - did you see the architect's model in the hall downstairs? - that's for the new rowing centre, the first of its kind in Turkey. To crown it all, a new space-age 70,000-seater stadium to be begun, if all goes well, in the spring of 1999.
Juggling all these tasks, not to mention braving the wrath of the Ali Sami Yen faithful while the building work is in progress and the team is forced to relocate temporarily elsewhere would seem to be the stuff of nightmare. But the man at the centre of it all, Sinan Kalpakcioglu - a successful accountant with fluent English who was headhunted to the club 18 months ago, on the grounds that his grandfather was one of the club's founding members - merely smiles his calm smile. "It's only one and a half seasons, anyway; people will put up with it." Half an hour away, in the crisp, clean air of a seaside suburb, the sun was shining on another 80,000 square metres of Galatasaray property - the training ground at Florya, with its emerald pitches, indoor basketball arena, all-year-round soccer school and a mini-hotel where the professional footballers can hang out, unmolested, between matches.
Several of them were hanging out as we were being shown around, including the Romanian international Gica Popescu and the 17-year-old Turkish sensation of the season, and dude du jour, Emre; and if they were dismayed by the presence of a boggle-eyed foreign journalist, they certainly didn't show it. Nor did the coach, Fatih Terim, whose terrifying rages on the sidelines were replaced by sweetness and light as he happily autographed a shirt and asked after Jack Charlton. I should have seen the warning signs - but the trouble is, by the time your brain has begun to glaze over, it's too late. Lunch in the players' canteen and pre-match tea in the VIP lounge with the Istanbul glitterati was overwhelming enough, but I think it was standing on the hallowed turf at Ali Sami Yen - well, within inches of it, anyway - that really did for me.
I'm pretty sure I remember a relatively lucid interval during which the club chairman, Faruk Suren, insisted on getting in the drinks after an awards ceremony hosted by a somewhat right-wing, and extremely dry, Islamic newspaper at which Galatasaray lifted three awards: team of the year, manager of the year and, for Hagi, foreign player of the year.
An animated and amusing man with fingers in numerous business pies ranging, it would appear, from autoparts to zither-making, Suren revealed himself to be - first and foremost - a football fan.
"Fourteen goals in our last four matches, and still they're talking about biased referees! Of course referees aren't neutral. You don't get the president of the canary-fanciers' association refereeing a football match. People go into refereeing because they're interested in football, and if they're interested in football they're bound to be interested in one team more than another."
And so it was, and I can offer no other excuse, that when a softly-spoken dark-haired person with enormous brown eyes and a neat beard stepped over to exchange a civil word with his general secretary, I was, literally, dumbfounded. I had always vaguely cherished the notion that if I ever got to meet Hagi in person, I'd be excited and animated and would be hard put to it to keep myself from blurting out all sorts of stuff from fond reminiscences about the greatest goal of all time (against Colombia in the World Cup in 1994) to that fantastic right-footed scorcher at Cannakkale Dardanelspor last week.
Instead, as I heard - from somewhere very, very far away - the words "I hardly need to introduce you to this gentleman", the best I could manage was a limp, damp handshake. And Hagi was gone, shaking his head, no doubt, at the ineptitude of this woman who clearly hadn't a clue who he was. And you think it's easy being a hero?
Galatasaray SK have just won this year's Turkish First Division championship for the second year in succession, having lost only two games at Ali Sami Yen all season - the Turkish cup final on penalties to Besiktas last month, and a Champions' League match against Borussia Dortmund in September. The club's top scorer, Hakan Sukur, is also the third highest scorer in Europe with 30 goals this season. Hagi's contract with Galatasaray is due to run for another year.
