A gymnastics society that took up football later.

Beşiktaş began as a gymnastics club, and its legal name still says so. English Wikipedia gives the full name as Beşiktaş Jimnastik Kulübü, literally “Beşiktaş Gymnastics Club”, abbreviated BJK, and says the club is based in the Beşiktaş district of Istanbul. The three letters are a short form of the name, and they sit at the centre of the crest.

The club dates itself to 1903. Wikipedia says that, according to the club’s own archives, its origins lie in March 1903, when local athletes in Serencebey formed a gymnastics society called the Bereket Jimnastik Kulübü. Its early activities were gymnastics, wrestling, boxing, fencing and athletics rather than football.

The name changed after the political upheavals of 1908 and 1909. Wikipedia says that the fencer Fuat Balkan and the weightlifter and wrestler Mazhar Kazancı moved to Istanbul from Edirne and joined the group, encouraging more organised training, and that around this time the society took the name Beşiktaş Osmanlı Jimnastik Kulübü, “Beşiktaş Ottoman Gymnastics Club”. A founding member, Mehmet Şamil Şhaplı, was elected the first president.

Football arrived through two neighbourhood teams. Wikipedia says that by 1911 young players from the Beşiktaş district, who had formed sides called Valideçeşme and Basiret under the influence of Şeref Bey, were brought into the club. That step turned Beşiktaş into a multi-branch club with football, rowing and other sports alongside gymnastics. Wikipedia credits Şeref Bey with organising the football branch and, after the First World War, with rebuilding the squad.

Şeref Bey’s name stayed in the club’s geography. Wikipedia says that in the early 1930s Beşiktaş built and used the Şeref Stadium, in the gardens of the Çırağan Palace, and named it after him. The club used it through the 1930s and into the late 1940s, alongside the shared Taksim Stadium.

Two colours, a red crescent and an eagle.

The club’s colours are black and white. English Wikipedia describes them as the registered colours, used across the club’s visual material and kits. Traditional home strips pair white shirts with black shorts, with black or white socks, and the away and third kits rotate around the same pair of colours with occasional accents, keeping the red of the crest.

How the colours came about is told in two ways. Wikipedia says early club publications long repeated that the original colours were red and white, and that they were changed to black and white in mourning for members lost in the Balkan Wars. It adds that later research, and documentaries produced by the club itself, have questioned whether red and white was ever used in official competition, suggesting that black and white came first in practice.

The crest is a shield. Wikipedia describes it as a black-and-white shield carrying the initials BJK, the founding year 1903, and the crescent and star of the Turkish flag rendered in red. It says the shield form and its elements have been used, with minor redraws, across kits, branding and the club museum since the middle of the twentieth century. Wikipedia also says Beşiktaş is one of the few clubs to have acquired the right to bear the Turkish flag on its crest. Under federation rules, the club shows stars above the crest for national championships.

The animal came from the stands. Wikipedia says the nickname Kara Kartallar, the Black Eagles, arose among supporters, took hold by the middle of the twentieth century and was later adopted officially, and that it now appears in club communications and in the museum. The eagle has since given its name to places as well as to the team: when the club’s new ground opened in April 2016, Daily Sabah headlined its report “Black eagles Beşiktaş back in their nest”, and wrote that the stadium would house the Beşiktaş Museum and a club store called “Eagles’ Nest”.

The supporters’ group has a voice of its own. Wikipedia names the core group as Çarşı, formed in the early 1980s around the Beşiktaş marketplace and known for the slogan “Çarşı her şeye karşı”, “Çarşı is against everything”.

Design and documentation.

Many football club identities are assembled from a handful of borrowed symbols, and each one sets a different design problem. A national flag placed inside a crest brings a fixed set of colours and shapes with it, such as a star, a crescent or a cross, and the designer has to fit the club’s own colours around them without the two schemes fighting at small sizes.

Laurel wreaths come from classical imagery and frame a figure or a set of initials. They read well when embroidered on a shirt, but their fine leaves tend to fill in on a phone screen, so a simplified outline is often drawn for digital use. Animal emblems, from birds of prey to lions, give a club a nickname and a mascot as well as a mark, and the same animal may exist as a detailed drawing, a flat silhouette and a matchday costume.

Two-colour kits are durable brand assets in sport, because stripes or halves in a fixed pair of colours can be recognised from the top of a stand long before any badge is legible. Stadium names add another layer: a ground named after a person or a district carries its own lettering on gates, roofs and tickets, and that signage becomes part of how the club is pictured.

One plot by Dolmabahçe Palace, three names.

Beşiktaş has played most of its history on one site beside the Dolmabahçe Palace. English Wikipedia says the Dolmabahçe Stadium was inaugurated on 19 May 1947, and that it was later renamed Mithatpaşa and then İnönü Stadium. Beşiktaş played its first match there in November 1947 and remained until 11 May 2013, when it played the ground’s farewell league fixture before demolition. During the rebuild the club played most of its home matches at the Atatürk Olympic Stadium.

The replacement carried a sponsor’s name before it was built. StadiumDB reported in August 2013, while the old stadium was still being demolished, that the new Beşiktaş ground would be named Vodafone Arena under a naming rights agreement with the mobile network, and that Vodafone would also become the club’s shirt sponsor. The report said Vodafone would provide on-site services such as Wi-Fi and mobile apps.

The stadium opened in April 2016. Daily Sabah reported on 10 April 2016 that Beşiktaş had returned home three years after leaving İnönü, and described a pitch set below sea level, hybrid grass and a sound system by an Italian firm. Wikipedia says the first league match there, a win over Bursaspor, was played on 11 April 2016, and that the Beşiktaş JK Museum re-opened inside the new stadium in February 2017. Wikipedia refers to the venue in this period as Vodafone Park.

The name has changed since. Wikipedia says that in October 2023 Beşiktaş signed a three-year naming rights deal with the refiner Tüpraş, and that the ground is now styled Tüpraş Stadyumu for sponsorship purposes, while its neutral name is Beşiktaş Stadium.

For a design guide, Beşiktaş shows how far two colours and three letters can carry a club: a black and white shield, BJK and 1903, a red crescent and star, and an eagle supplied by its supporters. Compare it with Galatasaray and Fenerbahçe, its two Istanbul rivals, each built on a different pair of colours. For this guide we use eagle black, shirt white and crescent red with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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