This report first was published on the net byTurkish Daily News on 18 July 99

*The matches among the big heavyweights are the crowning contests, for the person who emerges as the winner it means glory, fame, money and a golden belt. If you win this contest three years in a row, you get to keep the belt

*The moves during the match and the ways in which a wrestler can win also have their ritual aspects, to a great degree determined by the difficulty of catching and throwing an opponent who has been sluiced down with olive oil.

*The first portion of the fight was mostly a push and shove match as the wrestlers tried their best to get out of the punishing sunshine as much as possible

Officials are swearing that next year the 639th Greased Wrestling Matches at Kirkpinar will be held in June instead of the traditional July. Wrestlers and spectators alike melted in the 40 degree-95 percent humidity weather that has been plaguing Turkey for the past couple of weeks. The present open-air stadium now has overhanging roofs to shelter the visitors but this hardly helps the wrestlers on the field who tried their best to move their individual matches into whatever shade they could find. The referees frequently had to step in and move them back out onto the grassy field.

Today's greased wrestling matches are a far cry from the legends related to their founding. In fact it isn't known exactly how they started although it seems they began when a number of Turkish warriors took a break while fighting their Byzantine counterparts. This was about 650 years ago as the Ottoman Turks embarked on their road to empire. A river runs through what was then a heavily forested area outside of today's Edirne. There were springs as well as the river and an island had formed where the river split into two. In fact the name Kirkpinar means Forty Springs in English. The Turkish warriors began wrestling among themselves to make the time pass as they rested. They fought until dark fell and then picked up again in the morning. From then on, it became a tradition to meet in the same place and wrestle until nightfall and resume the next day until one warrior emerged victorious. (That this year's matches were the 638th is a consequence of having had to cancel the contest during the Balkan Wars at the end of the 19th century when enemy armies had overrun the area.) Edirne at one point in the Ottoman Turks' expansion was the capital of the growing empire and still served as the summer capital after the conquest of Constantinople (Istanbul). A whole palace complex was built along the river at Kirkpinar and even today some remains can still be seen just outside the wrestling grounds. This was for centuries a favorite hunting grounds for the Ottoman sultans and it was natural for the tradition of greased wrestling to continue under their patronage.

And on to ritual and stylization

The wrestlers who now know with whom they are going to fight move apart with their opponent and begin a long-striding, hip-slapping, challenging march down the course of the field which includes an announcer reading traditional lines of poetry. They dip, bend, touch the grass, turn and engage in the traditional moves of respect and challenge with their opponent and then the match is on. The moves during the match and the ways in which a wrestler can win also have their ritual aspects to a great degree determined by the difficulty of catching and throwing an opponent who has been sluiced down with olive oil. In fact one of the ways to win is by catching one's opponent off balance. One wrestler by the time the heavyweights are fighting may have a much longer reach which compensates for being lighter in weight. To get a hold on the opponent's leather pants and either lift him totally off the ground or pin him down is how one wins. One heavyweight a number of years ago was so annoyed at the little gnat who had managed to reach the final round that he picked him up, held him in the air for a time and then just dropped him. End of match. Today there are attempts to make the main match last longer; after all, the president himself has taken to attending. So the tradition of fighting until nightfall and starting again the next day has gone by the wayside. The big match lasts 35 minutes and then if the two wrestlers are equal in number of points, the match goes on another five minutes and another five minutes until one wrestler garners more points than the other and is declared the winner. That's what happened this past Sunday.

Ahmet Tasci from Karamursel is a "heavy" heavyweight -- a beefy guy with the craggy face of someone who's been in the business of fighting for years, after all he started when he was 25 and he's 39 now. He's won eight times at Kirkpinar -- a record for the Turkish republican period -- and has taken the golden belt home permanently twice. He hopes to win a third such gold belt and is already planning how to do so. In fact he would like to become a 10-time winner. This year's match was not with Cengiz Elbeye with whom he fought last year and had to withdraw because of a blow to his eye. This had been expected but in fact the two met earlier in the elimination rounds and Elbeye had to quit the matches with a badly dislocated shoulder. Tasci's opponent was Vedat Ergin from Ankara, the first time that Turkey's capital has supported a wrestler. The first portion of the fight was mostly a push and shove match as the wrestlers tried their best to get out of the punishing sunshine as much as possible. Several times the sports reporters and photographers sitting on the edges of the field had to get up and move out of their way. When the match went into overtime, Tasci quickly put an end to it. In fact he garnered points so rapidly that one might suspect him of merely playing in order to put on a show so that people got their money's and time's worth out of it. It certainly didn't matter though to the citizens of his home town. He got a hero's welcome anyway, complete with civic parade down the main street. And he'll be back next year.