2025-26 Olympiacos Piraeus
117 · 2026-05-25 · medium
Why is Europe not an Asian peninsula? A Brief History of the World in 47 Borders came out about a year and a half ago, and it quickly became one of my top books of the 2020s. If you've read it already, and/or if I Amazoned it to you two Christmases ago, then you already know that. I mean, I've already written two 400-page books divided into 40-odd bathroom-friendly chapters – with a third on the way this fall – so John Elledge is a man after my own heart. One of his chosen forty-seven is the boundary that separates two continents on a single landmass. The split runs along the Bosporus strait through Istanbul, a city where I lived for a year: four months on the Asian side, seven-plus on the European banks, and not again anytime soon. The line was originally drawn by the Ancient Greeks to tell the Persian Empire to bacdafucup, but modern Greece awoke to discover over a million Orthodox souls living in "Asian" Anatolia. So, in 1923, there was a "an act of legalized ethnic cleansing" to move 400,000 Muslims west and 1,200,000 Christians east, all in an effort to maintain a fake border based on contentious religious history and incredibly narrow waterways. And it worked! Just kidding. "There had never really been a simple divide between a Christian Europe and an Islamic Asiatic world to its east," Elledge wrote, "but the turmoil after the First World War provided an excuse to attempt to create one." Neither Turkiye nor Greece was ever going to surrender any actual territory over all of this, amirite, so sexy Aegean islands like Lesbos and Chios remain on the right-hand side of the invisible line. So, therefore, in conclusion, and I haven't been able to stop thinking about it since reading this book, approximately six percent of Greece is located in what the entire world agrees is actually Asia. Anyway, basketball. After the EuroLeague Final Four in Athens this past weekend, another international hoop year has pretty much come to a close. The thrylos of Olympiacos Piraeus – FIBA continental champions in 1997, back-to-back EL winners in 2012 and 2013 – lifted the cup for the first time in 13 years. Evan "Don’t Google” Fournier, one of those guys who suited up for multiple NBA teams over the course of a decade until everyone finally figured out he was a EuroBeast all along, was named Final Four MVP after 20 points and five rebounds in the chip game. The last EuroLeague result of 2025-26, a 92-85 win over Real Madrid, wasn't much of a surprise if you'd been following along at all. Olympiacos finished its pre-scheduled 38 rounds with a 26-12 record, the home-city Final Four site was predetermined a year ago, and Real had just six wins on the road all season. If you weren't following along, and/or if you get all your Eurohoop info from Shirtdoku, you didn't really miss much. There were lots of internet debates and money line swings over referees getting repeated league-office assignments to certain games where they'd had a history of nose-to-nose arguments with certain head coaches, and shit like that makes basketball a lot less fun. With all this organizational chaos, maybe it's time for the NBA to swoop in and establish order in Europe! Or... maybe not. For the third straight year, no team had its full roster for any given game, a direct consequence of a major international tournament the prior offseason (FIBA World Cup in 2023, 2024 Paris Olympics, Eurobasket 2025). This is the first summer since Covid with a real actual offseason, so get ready for nonstop greatness in 2027, where the Final Four is still as-of-this-writing scheduled for Abu Dhabi. That brings to mind another one of Elledge's borders: the EBU rectangle that includes Israel, that same invisible box that would allow Qatar and Saudi Arabia and Jordan to enter Eurovision if they were ever so inclined. Europe, as always, is a state of mind.
