There is a practical reason oil wrestling is so hard to win. Both men are covered head to foot in olive oil, so nothing holds. A grip that would end an ordinary match slides off, and the wrestler has to work from leverage and stamina instead of a quick lock. Bouts can grind on in the heat until one man is simply stronger than the other.
That is what opened in Edirne on 3 July, when the 665th Kırkpınar Oil Wrestling began on the Sarayiçi meadow. This year 817 wrestlers entered, 40 of them başpehlivans, the head wrestlers who compete for the top title. The youngest boys went first, walking onto the grass to the announcer's call, and the tournament that has run for more than six centuries started again.
How the sport works
A pehlivan wrestles in a kıspet, heavy leather breeches cut off below the knee, and nothing else but the oil. The grips that decide a match are made on the kıspet itself, or by reaching down inside it, which is legal and often decisive. Before they fight, the wrestlers perform the peşrev, a slapping, striding ritual walk that warms the body and salutes the crowd.
Winning means pinning your opponent's back to the ground, or lifting and carrying him clear. The oil makes both absurdly difficult, which is the point. A big man with no wind loses to a smaller one who can keep moving. In the top category a single bout can last far longer than anything you would see on an Olympic mat.
Why Edirne, and why so old
Kırkpınar means "forty springs," and the festival carries a founding story to match. By tradition it goes back to the middle of the 14th century and a band of Ottoman soldiers, two of whom wrestled to a standstill so grueling that both died on the spot; springs were said to rise where they fell. Whatever the truth of the legend, the tournament itself is real and continuous enough that this year's is counted as the 665th.
That continuity is why UNESCO added Kırkpınar to its Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2010. The festival survived the end of the empire that started it, and it still draws its wrestlers to the same corner of Thrace every summer.
Edirne earns the honor by geography as much as history. The Sarayiçi grounds sit on an island wrapped by the Tunca River, which keeps the air thick. The wet heat is part of the test. Wrestlers fight the humidity and their own oiled skin as much as the man across from them.
This year's meadow
The weather did its usual work. Edirne hit a high of 33 °C (91 °F) on the opening day, with temperatures holding around 31 and 32 over the weekend and humidity climbing past 70% in some hours. Scattered showers came through. On the Sarayiçi grass, under that load, the oil did the rest.
The head-wrestler bracket was seeded, not drawn by luck. The 40 başpehlivans were sorted using the standings from the CW Enerji oil-wrestling league, the top 32 split into four groups of eight with a fifth group added from this season's early leaders. The higher seeds skip the opening round; the lower ones fight their way up to join them. The seeded field included Orhan Okulu, Feyzullah Aktürk, İsmail Balaban, Ali Gürbüz and Recep Kara.
The prize the head wrestlers chase is the başpehlivan title and the standing that comes with it. A pehlivan who takes the top belt is a known man in Edirne for the rest of his life, and the wrestlers who fill the meadow's smaller categories grew up wanting exactly that.
None of the five took it. When the final was wrestled on 5 July, the başpehlivan's golden belt, the altın kemer, went to Erkan Taş, a 26-year-old from Sinop competing for his first Kırkpınar title. He beat Feyzullah Aktürk on points in a bout that ran close to an hour and stayed scoreless through regular time; in the scoring round Taş worked behind his opponent late to settle it. For Aktürk it was a second straight loss in the Kırkpınar final.
Six and a half centuries in, the format has been tidied into leagues and seedings, but the meadow has not changed, and neither has the problem the oil sets every man who steps onto it.