“For an outsider, an understanding of Turkish sport undoubtedly throws a great deal of light on other aspects of Turkish social life, and there is no sport wich carries as much symbolic “weight” in Turkey as wrestling. The sentiments evoked by wrestling are far from static or consensual. Interpretations of the symbols and imagery of wrestling can, of course, be used in different ways and appropriated as tools in hegemonic processes or their opposing counterparts. Indeed, wrestling is systematically used in the construction of myths of national strength and in a moral education in almost chivalric notions of contest and display … But wrestling can also be seen as a repository of subversive knowledge, as a recognition that all is not what it seems, that strength is not moral purity, that deceit and guile are necessary part of social life, that one frequently has to cope with losing face, that compromise is sometimes better than contest“.
(Martin Stokes, “”Strong as a Turk”: power, performance and representation in Turkish wrestling”, in MacClancy, Jeremy (ed.) Sport, Identity and Ethnicity. London: Berg, 1996, p. 22]
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