Turks In Grease

There is something primal about wrestling, whether it involves the naked Beowulf grappling with the bestial Grendel in a misty swamp or former New York Giant linebacker Lawrence Taylor straining against pro wrestling bad boy Bam Bam Bigelow for pay-per-view millions. While pro wrestling in the U.S. amounts to little more than choreography with muscles, in other parts of the world wrestling retains its archaic form—and prestige.

Less renowned than the struggles of the gargantuan sumos of Japan are those of the practitioners of Turkey's yahli guresh, or greased wrestling. Once a year for the last 634 years, wrestlers have gathered for Kirkpinar, a three-day tournament that caps a weeklong festival in June and is essentially the Super Bowl of greased wrestling. Since the 1800s the festival has been held in the city of Edirne.

"There are 300 oil-wrestling tournaments that take place all over Turkey," says Ahmet Yeniji, a referee and former wrestler, "but none draws so much attention as Kirkpinar."

Edirne, once the capital of the Ottoman Empire, boasts five centuries of architectural history. The city is in northwestern Turkey, in Thrace, and the jewel of its skyline is the Selimiye Mosque, whose minarets rise toward the heavens like great horns. In honor of Kirkpinar, a net that is nearly invisible by day is strung between two of the minarets during, the tournament. After dark the net glows with little lights, the words Er Meydani (Field of Men) floating over the city.

This year more than 700 wrestlers gathered to grapple on the field. Barefoot and bare-chested, gleaming with oil and wearing only leather calf-length trousers called kispets, the wrestlers, or pehlivans, entered the field 50 at a time. The field was about 100 yards square, the grass uncut. A band whose members played drums called davuls and clarinets, known as zurnas, set the tempo as the wrestlers advanced in a wave, lifting their legs high, slapping their thighs and throwing their arms forward in a seemingly lighthearted dance called peshrev.

Wrestlers then began to pair off with their opponents, who had been determined by lottery. Stalking each other like panthers, they assessed one another's strength in three stylized passes. On one pass, each man reached down to touch the other's calves; on another they embraced and rubbed each other's backs; on yet another they stopped to swing each other's arms to gauge the opponent's strength.

And then the various pairs came together and the matches began, often developing into grueling contests that lasted more than an hour. "Ten years ago began the limiting of time," lamented Kemal Temizoglu, a fan who said he had been watching Kirkpinar for 39 years. "Before this, some matches lasted two days."

The horde of wrestlers who paraded on the field the first day—from five-year-old boys to men in their late 30's—was winnowed so that on the morning of day three only eight were left in each of the eight divisions, which were determined not by weight but by age and by success in competition. By evening, the finals began.

According to legend, Kirkpinar derives from a marathon match that took place in the 14th century. Returning from a successful military campaign in the Empire's northwestern region, Suleyman Pasha and a vanguard of 40 of his best warriors camped in the town of Samona. To entertain themselves the warriors held a wrestling tournament. Two of the grapplers struggled for hours, but no victor emerged. A return match was held some months later, on May 6, Spring Festival Day. The two wrestled from morning until midnight on Ahur Koy meadow, again with no winner. Utterly exhausted, both men died that night, and in the morning their comrades buried them under a fig tree. When the warriors returned a year later, some springs had risen between the two graves, so the place became known as Kirkpinar (Forty Springs).

Unlike in "mat wrestling," as the greased combatants call the five-minute Olympic-style sport, no points are awarded during the first hour of a yahli guresh match. The contest ends when 1) "a wrestler's belly sees the stars," as Temizoglu puts it; 2) a wrestler is lifted above the shoulders of another and carried for three steps; or 3) a wrestler pins his opponent or forces him into a position in which his back is to the ground and he is on both elbows. If there is no winner after an hour, a 10-minute tiebreaker follows, in which a point system much like the one used in international mat competition is applied.