Backstory: Wrestling on a mountain in Turkey

Before each confrontation, the fighters performed a ceremonial warm-up dance meant to imitate an eagle's flapping wings (this was undertaken with fervent enthusiasm by the kids, reluctance by the teenagers, and a muscular grace by the men). Under the eye of a referee, the wrestlers then feinted and tangled, accompanied by a booming drum and the nasal, melancholy tones of the zurna, a Turkish flute. The winners sometimes celebrated with handsprings, and the opponents usually made up with a hug or a traditional kiss on the cheek.

Such festivals are common in rural Turkey. Many, like this one, take place in yaylas, the high-altitude summer villages where farmers pasture their stock. Urban Turks often maintain their family connections to these remote places, and return to the mountains for holidays and festivals.

Here, city life recedes: Cellphones are silent, and electronic entertainment is replaced by curving lines of men performing the halay, a traditional Anatolian dance.

In the afternoon, as the intensity of the matches increased, so did the questioning from our new acquaintances. One young soldier wanted to talk about Jim Carrey and Bob Dylan. A young woman in a snug headscarf, a student of English literature in the nearby city of Erzurum, stopped to chat about Jane Austen and Shakespeare. But most wanted to talk about politics.

"Iraq is our neighbor, Iran is our neighbor, Syria is our neighbor," said a high school geography teacher. "We feel as though we have to choose between America and our neighbors."

Since the founding of the Turkish Republic in 1923, Turkey has had a secular government – a point of pride for many Turks – and it has long had a friendly relationship with the US. But this is also an overwhelmingly Muslim country, with a sense of loyalty to the rest of the Islamic world. With conflicts in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East intensifying, many Turks' frustration with the US government is palpable.

Like its Muslim neighbors, Turkey is also seeing an upsurge in public expressions of belief; at the wrestling festival, the speeches by local politicians were heavily salted with religious references.

The last match of the day was hard-fought, and Adem Shakar, a broad-shouldered 28-year-old physical education teacher from Erzurum, lost in a contested decision. But he's got nothing to worry about. He participates in both grass wrestling and traditional Turkish oil wrestling – in which combatants slather themselves with olive oil – and he sometimes fights four matches in a single weekend. So he'll soon have another chance at the winner's purse of about $700 – and he may even confront the same opponent, as the world of Turkish wrestling is close-knit indeed.

"Inside the ring, we're competitors," he said, "but outside, we're friends."

At the end of the day, as the announcer's final exhortations echoed off the mountainside, we walked down the road to the village and its cathedral, where our bicycles awaited. The festival audience trickled past us in cars and trucks and minibuses, honking cheerfully and gesturing offers of rides. For the moment, at least, hospitality remained undimmed by politics.

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