The Selcuk Camel Wrestling Festival goes all the way back to over 2,400 years and originated from the nomadic Turkic Tribes.
Today, this camel wrestling league hold over 30 events across the country from November to March.
Two large camels stand face to face, sizing each other up, before throwing themselves head-first at one another.
Each animal struggles to bite its adversary’s feet to topple them, their long necks interlocking as the crowd cheers.
More than 2,000 people, many settled around little tables for picnics, spur on their favorite to win.
There are boos too, for those owners down in the arena who intervene too much in the matches.
The contests take place in the western Turkish town of Selcuk, at a site just a few minutes from the Aegean coast.
In the fighting arena that day, 124 camels wrestled each other in short duels part of a centuries-old Turkish tradition.
Camel culture in Turkey dates back to the Yoruks, a nomadic people whose ancestors were the ancient warrior Selcuks, who arrived in Anatolia during the 11th century.
The first camel fight was formally organized in the region around the 1830s, says Devrim Erturk, an academic at Dokuz Eylul University in Izmir.
As the nomads settled, the camels were used for the transport of goods, mainly towards the western ports of Turkey.
“And the cameleers started to make their camels fight” in the places they stopped at in the region, a camel owner said.
He himself owns several camels, including a two-year-old male that he wants to see wrestle in the arena.
Nearly 90 such events have been organized to take place in the region from Canakkale in the northwest to Antalya in the southwest between December and March.
This is the reproductive season for camels — when the males who fight are naturally more aggressive — and a quieter period for residents, as agricultural activity slows in the winter.
