It is an oppressively sunny day in Edirne, and the Turkish city, located a couple hours west of Istanbul and a few miles east of the Greek border, has stopped what it’s doing for the week to watch sports—that is, provided you consider a penned-in field full of writhing, grappling, oiled-up dudes to be sports. A tournament to determine the best oil wrestler in the country is what everyone in Edirne has taken the week off to watch for 653 years.
Some of these men are fighting, some are stretching, and many others are simply strutting around for the crowd. It calls to mind a more chaotic Puppy Bowl, but the men inside—shirtless, covered in oil, wearing leather breeches with the names of their hometowns bedazzled on the butt—are the baddest dudes in the Balkans.
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To catch you up on the legend taught in Turkish grade school: in the 1300s, the Ottomans made their first conquests in mainland Europe, starting with Edirne. A group of 40 soldiers decided to celebrate the victory by wrestling the crap out of each other. Two brothers emerged as the strongest, and they wrestled through the night, in a match lit by the moon and candles. Neither could maintain an advantage, and they died locked in a stalemate. Their comrades buried them near a spring and started an annual wrestling festival in their honor at Kirkpinar, “the spring of the forty.”
Skip forward 500 years or so to the late 1800s. Edirne is in a self-conscious and dying Ottoman Empire. Pashas and viziers, the brand managers of their day, turned the tournament into a festival of virility designed to prove that the Muslim men of the Balkans were the most virile of all. And so the tradition continued, with interruptions and changes of venue whenever war threatened the city—which, as it turned out, was often.
Zack Snyder rubs thighs with delight. — Photo by Terry George
Today, the nationalism that remains is the purest window dressing; what’s left is the virility fest. The matches take place in the long grass at the center of an approximately 5,000-person stadium. The field is called, bluntly, Er Maydani, or the Manly Square. It’s a bit of a walk from anything else, and the medieval ruins peeking out of the parking lot don’t hold anyone else’s interest amid the county fair atmosphere.
You will notice two things while walking toward Er Maydani. The first is the music; I’m walking not as much in the direction of a stadium as into the thudding thrum of some great big bass drums. They’re supported by reedy and surprisingly electric neys, and the effect is something distinctly live-wire—it’s sort of a Gangs of New York vibe, except with more women selling multi-gallon rice makers.
The beast with two backs. — Photo by Terry George
The wrestlers are all galoots. Well, maybe not all—there are a couple Kevin Love types, and a few stereotype-bucking blondes and gingers in the mix. Most everyone is under six feet. These are rectangular men at work, and despite the oil and the dizzying heat this event could be confused for a high-concept Baseball America shoot of the top 100 catching prospects. The extreme preponderance of beef is the event’s only truly consistent aspect; it was famously dominated in the early 1970s by an Afro-Turk named Mustafa Yildiz.
The coating of oil has a strategic and not just prurient use. It makes the wrestlers slick and tough to get a hold of. The practical effect of this is to make the sport much more conservative than American-style wrestling. Nobody wants to lose their balance by reaching out; instead they mostly push at each other. A key stratagem is to get your hands not just on but into the opponent’s pants, since the leather affords a grip. Most competitions are minutes of rather unexciting lockups and shouldering, blocky dudes sweating into each other until all of a sudden one dude has the drop on the other and has lifted him off his feet, pausing a moment to savor his victory before throwing his opponent onto his back. The victor’s posse then comes racing to cover their hero in water. One celebrates with backflips. Another hugs his dad, his embrace leaving an oil angel on the proud, balding giant’s shirt.
The individual competitions can take hours, but the wrestlers come in furious, greasy waves. They enter the arena and are anointed with a golden ewer, one by one, as the announcer introduces each by name, club, and hometown. The competitors all come with a posse, and the ones from Edirne garner the loudest cheers. It’s a good moment to appreciate some of the more absurd entries into Turkey’s testosterone-heavy naming culture; a personal favorite is Cengizhan Şimşek, which translates to Genghis Khan Lightning. There’s also Ismail Balaban, a chiseled blond who is one of the favorites, but whose name makes him an implausible cousin to the owlish American character actor.
The competition lasts six straight days, and although there must be some methodology, I can attest that it strikes the uninitiated as a royal rumble. By the final, where either Orhan Okulu or Osman Aynur will be crowned başpehlivan, or head wrestler, both are clearly exhausted. It gets slappy and aggressive, if still disciplined. I’m rooting for Okulu mainly because I identify with the balding goon, especially after he took down the Channing Tatum-y Balaban. Okulu eventually wins simply by exhausting his adversary, who has no interest in honoring the festival’s origin story by dying.
The (overwhelmingly male) crowd bursts into applause for Okulu. This seems a good place to acknowledge that the whole scene, in which very athletic and notably shirtless men covered in oil endeavor to get their hands under their opponents’ waistbands, could be described as homoerotic. It’s also a good place to mention that this is missing the point, at least to the extent that many sports are fundamentally just that. Men competing with other men for the adulation of still more men is something like the foundational statement of professional sports, and if there’s something homoerotic in this sport it’s less shocking than it is beautiful and elemental. Oil wrestling is a distinctly Turkish event that may be more reminiscent of Magic Mike than Remember the Titans in form and content, but it can also be viewed as an earthy ur-sport. It was here first, at least if there’s anything to that founding myth. At the very least, there are worse ways to get a history lesson on a hot day.
