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.