At the end of March 2022 we took a trip to our favourite holiday destination, Cyprus. Don't judge me, we visited the Turkish Republic of North Cyprus where our good friends Cihan and Annette are from. In the past I've found it really hard to find football shirts in this territory, with a meagre handful collected over the past 20 odd years. But that all changed this time, on a previous trip I had made a contact, Hakan of Sportstation Spor Mağazası, as well as meeting a couple of players from teams in the AKSA Super Lig, the top flight of football in North Cyprus.
We were due to watch Göçmenköy play Mağusa Türk Gücü at the Ataturk Stadi in Nicosia on 20-03-22, and our taxi driver from the airport piped up and told us that his mate would be playing in that game. A quick phone call and he'd secured me a match shirt which I collected from the player, Bekir Yıldız, after the game. This is a 2021-2022 away shirt of Göçmenköy.
Did I mention, the taxi driver also played for one of the Super Lig sides, Türk Ocağı Limasol, and he promised me one of his shirts too, as it happened, I ended up with two!
This is the 2021-2023 home shirt of Türk Ocağı Limasol, as worn by our taxi driver.
And this is an away shirt matchworn in a previous season.
So it's always worth chatting with your taxi driver when you arrive in foreign lands, you never know what, or who, they might know.
I mentioned before that I had made a contact at the official Kappa distributor in TRNC, Hakan, who runs Sportstation Spor Mağazası, I met him a few years ago while on holiday. We called into his shop where he'd promised me he'd have a few shirts available, he was true to his word.
This is the 2021-2022 away shirt of Mormenekse GBSK.
And this is the 2021-2022 home shirt of Maras Genclik Spor.
And then Haken took us an office above his shop, which turned out to the be club offices of Dumlupınar TSK, and he'd made sure they'd have a home and away shirt available for me!
Here are the 2021-2022 home and away shirts of Dumlupınar, the Famagusta based side.
And Hakan wasn't finished yet, he then called up one of his friends who works at Mağusa Türk Gücü S.K., and persuaded him to open the club shop especially for us, well I wasn't going to say no, was I?!?
These are the 2021-2022 Home and Away shirts.
This is the 21-22 Third shirt. And this is the 19-20 league champions commemorative shirt
Mağusa Türk Gücü play in the city of Gazimağusa (also known as Famagusta) which is an ancient walled city, the walls were built in the 16th century, and are truly stunning to see. The Canbulat Stadi, where Mağusa Türk Gücü play their home games, is quite remarkable in that part of the city wall makes up the backdrop along the east stand and even dominates behind the north stand goal, here's a photo I took.
All in all it was a great football shirt collecting holiday, and I made a few new friends too.
That's it for now, but there are quite a few more shirts collected this year to show you, plenty from the USA, some cracking non league shirts, and maybe some BHAFC shirts too.
To see many more football shirts from my collection please take a look at my other blog posts here and to see even more shirts from all over the world please take a look at my website www.oldfootballshirt.com.