The Pehlivan

What pehlivan means

The word came into Turkish from Persian, where it meant a hero or champion of any kind. Old dictionaries list a cluster of meanings: brave, stout-hearted, a man of great build, a man you could trust with a governorship. Seljuk chroniclers used it for archers, mace-fighters and warriors as readily as for wrestlers.

Sometime in the sixteenth century the word narrowed to sportsmen, and in practice to wrestlers. That usage held through the Ottoman centuries and survived the move of the tournament to Edirne. Today a Turk who says pehlivan means an oil wrestler, and usually means one who has earned the title on grass.

Earning it is the point. A wrestling license makes you a competitor; the crowd at Sarayiçi decides when you are a pehlivan. The title carries obligations, and the glossary of the field is full of words that describe how a pehlivan is expected to behave.

Nobody is born a pehlivan. Somebody's master makes him one.

Master and apprentice

Oil wrestling has no academies. A boy attaches himself to an usta, a master, who is usually a retired or active wrestler in his village or town, and becomes his çırak, his apprentice. The relationship is closer to a trade guild than to a sports club.

The master teaches grips, the peşrev warm-up, and how to lose. He also teaches how to tie a kispet so that no hand slips inside it.

He decides when the boy is ready to enter a category and which one, because the categories are set by skill and build rather than by a scale. A master who sends a boy up too early is judged for it.

The same chain runs through the announcers. The cazgır who introduces the wrestlers learned his verses from an older cazgır, and the best of them can recite a wrestler's lineage of masters back three generations. When a başpehlivan retires he takes apprentices, and the line continues.

The clubs of the Aegean and Thrace

Most pehlivan come from a belt of towns where village wrestling never stopped: Antalya's Korkuteli and Elmalı, the villages around Balıkesir and Manisa, and the Thracian countryside around Edirne itself. Antalya has produced most of the head wrestlers of the last thirty years.

Local tournaments run from spring to autumn, sometimes two in a weekend. A working pehlivan wrestles thirty or forty times a year, and Kırkpınar is the one that counts. See also: the week day by day, how the draw works.

A year of training

The season builds toward late June. Winter is for strength: farm work in the old days, weights and running now, with wrestling practice in a covered hall. Spring brings the first outdoor bouts and the first oil of the year.

Oil changes everything. A grip that works dry slides off a wet shoulder, so pehlivan train in oil from April onward, and the oiling routine becomes part of the warm-up. The kispet, wet and heavy, adds ten to thirteen kilos that the wrestler learns to carry through a forty-minute bout.

Most training happens in pairs, master and apprentice or two club-mates of similar size. A pehlivan spends more time defending than attacking, because the ways a bout can be lost are mostly errors of position. Clubs also drill the paça grip, a hand inside the opponent's kispet leg, which decides more matches than any throw.

The week before Kırkpınar

Wrestlers arrive in Edirne early to rest and to acclimatize to Thracian heat. On the opening Friday they visit the graves of the old pehlivan in the city and attend a Mevlit at Selimiye Mosque before walking out to the field. It is the one day of the year when the whole trade gathers in one place.

How a pehlivan eats

The diet of an oil wrestler is Anatolian village food scaled up, and honey sits at the center of it. Breakfast in a wrestling household is yogurt, bread, eggs and honey, taken with black tea. In Antalya and Muğla the honey is pine honey, dark and slow; in the Black Sea clubs it is chestnut honey; the old wrestlers prize karakovan, honey cut from a wild-style hive with the comb.

Honey is the pre-bout food too. A spoonful with a piece of bread an hour before the draw is the closest thing the tradition has to sports nutrition. Pekmez, grape molasses, stirred with tahini serves the same purpose in winter, when the honey has run out.

Meat comes in the evening: lamb or beef, grilled or stewed, with bulgur or rice, and more yogurt on the side. Ayran, salted yogurt diluted with water, is what wrestlers drink on the field, and the stand vendors at Sarayiçi sell it by the liter along with tea and sweets. Dried figs and apricots travel in the zembil beside the kispet.

Turkish coffee belongs to the evening after training, not to the morning. A pehlivan drinks it in the club or the village coffeehouse where the older wrestlers hold court, and where the next generation of apprentices is quietly picked out.

Tea, by contrast, is all day: at breakfast, between bouts, and in the stands. See also: what to eat in Edirne, what to bring home.

The başpehlivan

Baş means head. The baş category is the top of the thirteen categories. Its winner on the final Sunday becomes başpehlivan, the head wrestler of Turkey, for one year.

Reaching the baş class takes most wrestlers a decade. A pehlivan moves up only by winning at the level below, and the jump from başaltı, "below the head," to baş is the hardest step in the sport. The baş field at Kırkpınar is usually forty to sixty men, and the draw pairs them from the first morning.

The final is the only bout most Turks watch all year, and it is broadcast live from Sarayiçi. It runs forty minutes plus a golden-point period under the 2014 regulation. It ends with the ağa and the mayor of Edirne walking onto the grass to fasten the belt.

The belt is the prize. The title is what the crowd shouts.

The golden belt

The golden belt is the oldest award in Turkish sport and the most valuable one, made each time by the Edirne municipality from gold and leather. The başpehlivan holds it for a year and returns it at the next tournament unless he wins again.

Three wins in a row and the belt is his to keep. The municipality then commissions a new belt, and the old one goes home to the wrestler's village, where it is usually displayed in the family house or the local club. A belt kept for good is rare enough that each one is a date in the history of the tournament.

The belt comes with prize money from the ağa and, since the 1990s, with a season of appearance fees at village tournaments. It also comes with an expectation: a başpehlivan is supposed to take apprentices, to wrestle at charity events, and to be present at Kırkpınar for the rest of his life, in the stands if not on the grass. See also: the ağa who pays for it, how it ends.

Head wrestlers since 1990

The list below follows the Edirne municipality's roll as recorded on Wikipedia, checked against press reports. Ahmet Taşçı's eight titles between 1990 and 1999 are the most in the modern era; his two kept belts, in 1992 and 1997, are the only ones anyone has kept since 1990.

Three things stand out. Antalya's clubs have owned the top class for three decades, no one has kept the belt for good since 1997, and the count of the tournament skips 2020, which is why the ledger on the home page is so short. Corrections are welcome through the about page.

The boys' classes

Every başpehlivan started as a minik. The two minik classes, for boys of roughly eleven to thirteen, open the tournament on the first morning, before the crowds arrive and while the grass is still cool.

Boys wear scaled-down kispets, wrestle shorter bouts under the same referees, and are matched by the cazgır with the same verses. A boy who wins minik moves to teşvik, then tozkoparan, and so on up the ladder, and the fouls and permitted holds are identical at every level. The masters watch these early bouts more closely than the finals, because this is where they choose their next apprentices.

Parents and villages travel with the boys, and the first morning has the feel of a school sports day held inside a six-hundred-year-old ritual. If you want to see the tradition renew itself, come early on Friday, sit in the cheap stand, and watch the minik draw. See also: planning your visit, getting to Edirne, how we check facts.

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