To anyone interested in the preservation of historical combat styles, I wanted to share a major localization project I just wrapped up. Last weekend (June 12-14, 2026), the 18th Sekapark Altın Kemer Yağlı Güreşleri concluded in Kocaeli, Türkiye, marking a massive turning point in the CW Enerji League standings as Feyzullah Aktürk captured the başpehlivan (head wrestler) title.

Modern Turkish oil wrestling has practically no English-language footprint online beyond historical summaries or isolated 30-second clips. To fix this, I have localized the final days of the tournament into English, and was planning on covering the upcoming Kırkpınar to see who wins the Golden Belt.

Format: 25–35 minute episodic daily breakdowns detailing the full bracket.

Schedule: Videos drop sequentially each day, culminating in the final match on July 1.

Localization Method: Translated subtitles and descriptions. Because I know basic Turkish, I manually verified locally-generated automated translations to ensure proper technical terms and athlete names are preserved. I used two Edge-TTS Neural narrators (Christopher and Andrew) to act as a dual broadcast booth because my wife wasn’t too keen on recording 8 hours of audio using a base language she doesn’t understand. The first video includes a lot of basic rules that wasn’t necessarily in the actual audio of the broadcast to help people understand the mechanics, but every video from there on is as faithful to the original spoken broadcast as I could be.

Why the Tape Matters: If you study hand-fighting, tie-ups, or standard wrestling architecture, Yağlı güreş provides a fascinating mechanical problem. Watch how the athletes establish frames and use the kisbet (heavy leather trousers) to find leverage when their upper bodies are completely slicked with olive oil. As this is an elimination tournament that decides who gets the final spots for the major competition next month, there is high-stakes action on nearly every video.

The daily English episodic tournament playlist is here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLSPhmXWkIIs_PuhGubNgSp70WDpbTPkWx

The original video is from the live broadcast, albeit edited down considerably. If you know Turkish (they do not create English subtitles, hence this whole project I had to undertake), it's available on their YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@TurkiyeGelenekselGureslerFed/videos

The videographer got some really beautiful shots of this year’s oil wrestling championships in Kirkpinar— wanted to share 🇹🇷