The Christian sports star who put women’s volleyball on the map in Turkey

ISTANBUL, Turkey — In the newly built Eczacibasi sports complex in Istanbul’s industrial neighbourhood of Ayazaga, Violet Kostanda Duca is standing, surrounded by trophies and pictures of her beloved team Eczacibasi’s past victories. While reflecting on the glorious past, she also talks about her disappointment with the professionalisation of Turkish sports and the growing influence money is having on sport. 

As she speaks about volleyball, the sport which has shaped her life since she was 14 years old, the newest generation of Eczacibasi players smack balls back and forth in the hall behind. 

At the time of the interview, in May, the team was about to head to Japan to participate in the 2017 FIVB Volleyball Women’s Club World Championship. It’s one of the biggest competitions in international women’s volleyball, and Violet is one of the players who paved the way for future Turkish teams to qualify. 

It’s a familiar scene for Violet, who was one of the main forces behind her team’s success during the European Club Championship in 1980, when Eczacibasi was a runner-up. It was the first time a Turkish women’s team made the finals. 

During that championship, she played with a sprained ankle. She had badly sprained it three weeks earlier, but refused to have surgery, as she had been medically advised. Instead, she played the entire championship with her ankle anaesthetised and bandaged. 

These days, the team is much better resourced, but Violet doesn’t necessarily consider this to be a positive development. 

“They have everything. They have their own medics and their own sports hall. They have so many different jerseys,” the volleyball veteran told TRT World. 

“We didn’t have those things [in our time]. But we really put our heart and soul into how we played.”

“Things have now changed, not only in volleyball, but in other branches of sports as well,” she says. 

Violet, who is a Christian of Macedonian descent, played for the Turkish national team some 120 times before she retired three decades ago. 

Commentators view Violet as one of the main reasons the Eczacibasi team won 14 national championships during her shining career there. Her skill and prowess helped make women’s volleyball popular with millions of Turks. Thirty years after Violet’s retirement in 1986, women’s volleyball has become clearly established as one of the most popular sports in Turkey, overcoming initially conservative views about women playing sports. 

Turkey is a Muslim majority country, although the country had larger non-Muslim populations in the past. But Violet does not view her career through the lens of religion or ethnicity, and says her religion was no barrier to her becoming a legendary player.

“I didn’t feel different [from Muslim teammates]. I could be a Christian. It didn’t matter at all. All of us share the same God. I was born and raised in Turkey. My grandmother was also born in Turkey. I feel sad [when I am asked about my family’s origin]. I never want to leave [Turkey],” she says. 

A career born out of tragedy

Violet’s career began in 1972 with tragedy. Her elder sister, Lidya, had been the first promising volleyball player in the family to join Eczacibasi. Yet scarcely had Lidya’s short career begun when it came to a sudden end. She died of cancer when she was just 21. 

“Her lymph nodes became swollen around her throat. ‘It is not serious. We will take it out,’ [the doctors] said. But [the cancer cells] were all around her neck,” Violet said in a grief-stricken voice. “In a short time, only six months, she passed away.”

After Lidya’s death, her teammates wanted Violet to join their team, to replace her sister, as both a player and a friend. She lacked her sister’s height — Lidya was 1.82 metres tall, while Violet is 1.72 metres — but at the time she was considered tall enough for volleyball. 

The Eczacibasi team is owned by the Eczacibasi family, which owns one of the biggest pharmaceutical factories in Turkey. The team’s original sports complex was in the Levent neighbourhood in Istanbul, behind the pharmaceutical factory. In those days, it was a luxury for a team to have a sports hall. During the summer of 1972, Violet trained intensively in that hall, smiling as she recalled those early days. 

In 1973, her hard work paid off and she became part of the Eczacibasi team. Soon after joining Eczacibasi, she was also recruited to join the Turkish national team. In 1980, Eczacibasi came in second during the European Club Championships, marking a turning point for women's volleyball in Turkey. And Violet continued to serve on the national team every season until 1986. 

Now, Turkish women's volleyball teams — both the clubs and the national teams — confidently compete at the highest levels of the game. 

“Our teams have reached such a level of skill where they can easily compete for world and European championships. Typically at least two of our club teams qualify for the semifinals. This is a huge success for Turkey,” she says with pride. 

On Sunday, for instance, Turkey’s national women’s team defeated Slovenia in five straight sets, winning the 2017 Women’s U23 World Championship. In 2012, the team reached a milestone in its history by taking the bronze medal in the World Grand Prix. 

Turkish clubs have also reached the zenith of the game. The Turkish club VakifBank Istanbul won its third gold in the CEV Champions League this year, the biggest event in European club volleyball. Violet’s former team, Eczacibasi, came third in the same competition, meaning two teams out of the three top teams in Europe are Turkish. 

Both Turkish teams also qualified to compete in the 2017 FIVB Club World Championships which took place in May in Japan. When TRT World interviewed Violet, Eczacibasi was preparing for the championships. 

Following in her father’s footsteps

After her sister’s death, Violet was to lose more family members. Her father, a football player, had left his own mark on Turkish sports. Hristo Kostanda is considered one of the most legendary figures of the Besiktas club’s early years. 

His skills on defense are praised for helping Besiktas take five consecutive championships in the 1940s. He also played for the national team. But Hristo was grief-stricken after losing his young daughter. Six years after his daughter’s unexpected death, in 1978, he had a heart attack. He died just before his younger daughter’s impressive career was really about to take off. 

“His friends used to describe him as ‘a big guy’ who wouldn’t ever let the ball get past him,” Violet says, recalling her father’s career playing defense for Besiktas. 

During those times — much celebrated by the club’s fans — Besiktas scored nearly 600 goals in 144 matches. Its opponents rarely managed to break through the team’s defences, scoring just 81 goals in the same period. Hristo, renowned also for his long passes to the team’s strikers, has been credited  by sports experts and fans as the player who achieved those statistics.

“I don’t know [what the factors were that led my sister and me to play sports]. I guess the worldview of a sportsman is quite different from other people’s. Our father raised us to be free girls,” Violet says.

“When I say ‘free,’ I mean that my sister and I didn’t have restrictions on us simply because of being girls. Instead, we were both encouraged to feel capable of everything. Our father was very supportive of our interest in sports; he wanted us to play sports,” she explains. 

“In those days, it was very difficult for girls to become athletes. Many people frowned on this. It was something unfamiliar for Turkey.” 

After losing her father, Violet threw herself even further into volleyball, playing intensively. She also took over her father’s financial and family responsibilities. Hristo had been running a cheese business in tandem with his football career, like many other Turks of Christian Macedonian descent. He was even known as ‘Hristo the Milkman’ by friends. Violet inherited her father’s business after his death, shuttling between volleyball games and their cheese shop. 

“God gave me patience and strength [to overcome all this grief]. Humans always find a new goal to work towards. After I lost my father, I lived for my mother. Following my mother’s death, I lived for my husband,” Violet says, in a tired yet determined voice. 

She lost her husband Pavlo Duca, a Turkish man of Greek descent, to cancer in 1996, when he was only 47. 

“Since my husband’s death, I live for my daughter,” she said. Her daughter, Christiana, who is now 30, was born and lives in Athens, working for a Turkish company there. 

Yet throughout all the pain she endured, Violet always had volleyball. If it weren’t for the world of sports, she says, she would have found it much harder to cope. 

Missing ‘old sportsmanship’

Violet has won a reputation for her strong advocacy of ethics in the sports world. Her humble attitude helped her to inspire her teammates in the 1980s, and to encourage a formidable team spirit. 

“Everybody describes me as a good volleyball player. But I didn’t play volleyball alone. We were six friends [playing together]. Without the other five team members, I couldn’t do anything. That’s what a team sport is about,” she says.

“As long as we play as a team with discipline, honesty, and integrity. There is nothing we can’t achieve,” she says confidently, her sharp eyes unblinking. 

About the current state of volleyball clubs in Turkey, meanwhile, she’s very critical. The club presidents intervene in everything, from how the game is played to player selection.  

This is bad for the team spirit, in her view, as well as for the game itself. 

She also argues that club presidents place too much emphasis on money and believe that money can solve anything. Yet, most of the time, money isn’t enough for long-term success if a team manager fails to foster a team spirit, she says, and does not set concrete goals for the team. 

“You can't be an athlete simply by watching three matches. That’s not enough to give you the mind of a true sportsman,” she says. 

Since retiring as a player, Violet has gone on to lead several Turkish volleyball teams as a successful manager. She was a manager for the Besiktas women’s volleyball club from 2005 to 2008. She then moved to Fenerbahce and led that team for five seasons, until 2012. 

She is against blind fanaticism in sports too.  

“I could be a fan of Fenerbahce. But my father [one of the most legendary Besiktas players] wouldn’t argue with me on this. I can support both Besiktas and Fenerbahce at the same time,” she says. She is disappointed that some Turkish sports fans would happily see a Turkish team lose in an international competition if it isn’t the team that they support.  

“I put everything else aside when it comes to [a Turkish team playing in the international arena] because it will gain points [no matter which team is competing]. It will also help our national team. We knew this and grew [with this mentality]. Now this kind of mentality is gone,” she lamented. 

Yet she acknowledges that division among supporters is a global trend, shaking not only sports, but also politics. She compares what is happening among sports fans to the recent rise of nationalistic movements around the world. 

Disenchanted with politics

Likewise, in international politics, she is uncomfortable about the extent to which people’s identities are increasingly being exploited by populist politicians. She dislikes politics. When people ask her about politics, she recalls how she was called by some of her classmates as gavur (Turkish for infidel) when she was in school. 

“When they yelled ‘gavur’ at me, I wouldn’t take it seriously. The meaning of gavur is infidel. Because I wasn’t an infidel, I didn’t take it personally. [They] viewed me as a foreigner [because my name, Violet, isn’t Turkish]. I don’t care. There was no reason for discrimination,” she said, the expression on her face showing her dismay over identity politics. 

At the same time, she stresses adamantly that she never faced any kind of discrimination over her religion or ethnicity during her captaincy for the Turkish national team. And she remembers fondly how the public commemorated other Turkish sports heroes like the football stars Kostas Kasapoglu and Lefter Kucukandonyadis, both Christians of Greek descent, following their respective deaths in recent years. 

A large crowd turned out in memory of Kasapoglu, the former captain of the Istanbulspor club, when he died last year.  And Kucukandonyadis, who passed away in 2012, was considered one of the greatest Turkish football players who ever played the game. He captained the Turkish national team on nine occasions. The crowd on the streets of Istanbul during his funeral left many speechless at the time.

“The crowd at Lefter’s funeral was phenomenal,” she says, noting that some foreign commentators were surprised to see Christian players mourned so intensely in an overwhelmingly Turkish country. 

Foreigners don’t always understand Turkey’s diverse social fabric, she believes. She notes that her ancestors fled Macedonia in the late-1800s to find refuge in the Ottoman capital, and that people often forget that Christians as well as Muslims came here from less stable regions seeking safety. Turkey is, after all, the successor state to the Ottoman Empire, which was multi-lingual, multi-cultural, and multi-religious. 

“Lefter wore the Turkish national jersey, as my father did. This is natural for Turkey.”

“I feel very Turkish,” the volleyball veteran says. “Our roots are here.”