Kırkpınar Wrestling Arena
A diploma project that lifts Kırkpınar oil wrestling — practised since the 14th century and inscribed on UNESCO's Intangible Cultural Heritage list — out of its single festival day and into a year-round, urban-scale sport and culture campus at Sarayiçi, gathering arena, athletes' and boutique hotels, an education building and a museum along a terraced public spine.
The diploma project opens with a deceptively simple question. Kırkpınar oil wrestling — practised since the 14th century, staged for the 665th time in 2025 and inscribed on UNESCO's list of Intangible Cultural Heritage — stirs to life at Sarayiçi for only a handful of days each year, leaving the grounds dormant the rest of the time. How can a centuries-old but seasonal ritual be given a permanent, year-round public home without freezing the spirit it carries into a monument? The tension is plain: on one side the festival's brief, ceremonial time; on the other, the sensitive historic fabric of a former Ottoman capital. Rather than setting these two scales against each other, the design looks for a way to hold them in conversation.
The answer is not one building but an urban-scale composition that settles into the sloping site. At its heart, the wrestling arena wraps tribunes, boxes and press galleries around the square er meydanı (the central wrestling ground) that gives the tradition its centre of gravity; around it, an athletes' hotel, a boutique hotel, an education building, a museum and a restoration component touching an existing historic structure are threaded along a terraced public spine that follows the topography. The slope becomes an asset, breaking the masses into horizontal tiers so that none competes with the surrounding historic fabric and the scale eases down toward the old town to the south. Through its hotels, its teaching programme and its museum, the campus sustains a cultural life that holds up on the days between events.
Architecturally, the project carries the movement of the tradition into a contemporary tectonic. A kinetic façade of folding panels opens and closes with the rhythm of the day and of events, tuning daylight and privacy and giving the building a shifting, living face; a folded, gridshell-like canopy settles into the landscape and gathers the arena and its in-between spaces beneath a single gesture, binding ground and roof. In the dusk renders, warm interior light spilling from the vaulted glass entrance meets the grain of stone and folded surfaces, offering a soft but assured contemporary presence — a proposal to carry Kırkpınar beyond the ceremony of a single day and make it a living, year-round part of Sarayiçi.
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