What does ‘maidan’ have to do with cricket?

Freddie Flintoff recently called the Maidan ‘the home of cricket’. For supporters of Ukraine’s independence, the Maidan saw continual demonstrations a decade ago. The outline of the Hippodrome of Constantinople is marked out on the Maidan.

Quite a place, then. Or rather, places. Our tacking ‘the’ on to Maidan, indicates its use as ‘a square’. Indeed, foreign places that we call ‘Square’ are often called Maidan in their own country. (Cairo’s Tahrir Square is Maydan at-Tahrir.)

The Calcutta Cricket Club was founded at its own Maidan. The Young Zoroastrians still play at the Maidan in Mumbai, where Parsis founded the Oriental Cricket Club in 1848.

Like Parsis, the word maidan came from Persia. In its complicated history, both Persian and Hindustani borrowed it from Arabic, but Arabic had borrowed it from an older form of Persian. I’m inclined to believe it originated in a Proto-Indo-European word meaning ‘middle’, which also gave us Latin medius.

The Turks borrowed Arabic words wholesale, and Balkan languages once spoken under Turkish rule took in maidan too, as did Russian and Ukrainian.

In The House of the Dead, Dostoevsky used maidan ironically: Convicts ‘kept a threadbare rug a yard wide, a candle and an incredibly dirty, greasy pack of cards, and all this together was called the maidan’.

Maidan also shared in the horrors of the 20th century. In Lublin, Poland, the Majdan Tatarski area was used by the Germans as a ghetto for Jews, before they were sent to the Majdanek concentration camp.

In a sign of hope, Kyiv’s Independence Square, Maidan Nezalezhnosti, gained its new name in 1991. But the sound of leather on willow is not currently heard anywhere near Kyiv’s Maidan. Ukraine was all ready to apply for membership of the International Cricket Council, but then the war came.