Some details about Turkey's only female professional wrestler in the 1920s and 1930s.
On several occasions in the 1930s the American press wrote about a supposed female wrestler in Turkey who was dominating her male opponents. The name they identified her by was Emine Hanim. Let's take a look at what they were saying.
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| Newspaper illustration from 1931 |
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| Newspaper article about Emine from 1931 |
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| Newspaper article about Emine from 1932 |
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| Newspaper article about Emine from 1933 |
At first glance these articles may sound like made-up stories, but they were not. Emine Hanim was very much a real person.
In Turkey she was known as Emine pehlivan (Emine the wrestler), Kütahyalı Emine pehlivan (Emine the wrestler from Kütahya) and Emine Bacı (Sister Emine). "Hanım" means woman in Turkish so that explains how she got that name in the foreign press.
There's not a whole lot about her in the Turkish press, but there are some stories and even a couple of interviews. Her name first appears in 1927 and we can still find her wrestling in 1938. Her career was probably a bit longer than that though. In those years she was billed as Turkey's first and only female pro wrestler. I can't say for sure if she really was the first, but she was certainly the best well-known one and the only one I've heard of wrestling in Turkey.
Emine was a professional wrestler and strongwoman who toured Turkey wrestling men and performing feats of strength. It seems she mostly wrestled in the Greco-Roman style, but it's possible she may have also some some traditional Turkish oil wrestling bouts too. The freestyle/catch style didn't become prominent in Turkey until the mid 1930s, and she was still active then, so there's also a possibility she may have wrestled in that style too.
Emine was known as being from Kütahya, but according to a 1931 interview with her she was actually from Anamur so it may have been a case where she lived in Kütahya and that's why she was associated with that city. In that same 1931 interview she said she was 30 years old and had been wrestling for 8 or 10 years. Her father (Yörük Mehmet) and brother (Kara Ali, but not the famous 1930s Turkish wrestler by the same name) were said to be have been wrestlers as well. The claim about the father was that he had toured Europe and the brother was said to have wrestled in the United States, but those seem like false claims to me. In a 1933 interview Emine said she was trained by her father and someone called Peter. As of 1931 Emine was claiming to have never been defeated in a wrestling match. According to a 1937 article her weight was 99 kg (218 lbs).
It's hard to pin down exact matches or opponents, because there isn't a lot of coverage of her in the Turkish press that I was able to find. Most of the matches that I found some coverage of were of her defeating lesser-known Bulgarian wrestlers. For example, on January 13, 1928, in Istanbul she defeated someone called Nikola in 8 minutes. In a later interview she also claimed to have defeated the Syrian wrestler Youssef Barza, who I know was a popular name in Lebanon and Syria later on, in Istanbul in 1926-27.
In 1931 she issued a challenge to another Turkish wrestler called Karabet, who was claiming to be the heavyweight champion of Turkey, but I don't know if anything came from that challenge.
In terms of her strength demonstrations she was known for bending steel with her hands and, supposedly, lifting 250 to 300 kg (551 to 661 lbs) in weight.
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| Emine on the cover of a Turkish illustrated magazine in 1927 (her
opponent being a Bulgarian wrestler by the name of Dimitrov) |
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| Emine in 1931 |
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| Emine and her Bulgarian opponent Dancho/Danjo in 1931 |
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| Emine in 1933 |
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It should also be noted that in 2024 a Turkish book about her was published. However, the book is a biographical novel. As such it does have some real-life facts, but it also has a ton of fiction.
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| The book "Emine the Wrestler - The Strongest Woman in the World" |
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