Fat Men Don't Sweat: Health, Heft, and Heat in Early Republican Turkey

Samuel Dolbee, New York University

In August of 1929 it was so hot in Istanbul that it seemed like “fire” was “raining from the sky,” leaving everyone to walk up and down the city’s hills with a “handkerchief in one hand” and “hat and jacket in the other hand.”  (hatless/jacketless/handkerchiefless others are obviously left out of this discussion)  The sizzling solar rays also had an effect on Cumhuriyet, prompting the newspaper to boil over in a fury of journalistic élan with the natural follow up question to a heat wave: how are the fat guys doing?

To figure this out, the newspaper spoke to two men (both pictured in barely mustachioed glory above), one referred to as the "Şişmanlar" Group President, Akif Bey, and another overweight man Fazlı Bey. In the resulting front page story, both men contested what Cumhuriyet called common knowledge “in our country,” that the obese could bear the cold far better than the heat.  President Fazlı Bey declared, “I am now 125 kilos…but I am not as uncomfortable from the heat as you discussed….I get uncomfortable not from the heat but on the contrary from the cold.”  To make his point more clear, Vice Governor Fazlı Bey referred to his apparently sweat-stained interviewer: “Look, you are continuously sweating.  However, do you see me sweating?”  Fazlı Bey, however, quickly admitted that his own lack of perspiration may have stemmed from something other than size; he was in the midst of a diet which proscribed watery and brothy foods. 

Akif Bey did not seem to adhere to Fazlı Bey’s nutritional regimen, but he did subscribe to similar ideas about heft and heat.  “The skinny sweat more from the heat because they are less resistant, they get angry, they faint.  There are even those who go crazy internally from the heat.  For fat guys, this danger is absent.”  He qualified the meaning of fat people, though, adding a moral component to his definition: “This that I have said does not include the unnatural 100 kilogrammers who got fat from too much gluttony or alcohol.  I speak in the name of naturally fat people.”  Akif Bey, too, couldn't help but notice the glow of his interviewer.  “As a matter of fact now look, at this moment because you are skinny you are pouring out sweat in great quantities.  I say on my body there is not a single bead of sweat.”

There’s no word on whether the reporter confirmed Akif Bey’s claim (he looks very cool in the photo), or whether the combined efforts of Fazlı and Akif Beys succeeded in convincing the poor perspiring reporter that a sweatless world might be possible.  In any case, the story underscores a playful approach to body size and image that seems almost foreign today at the same time as it shows an all-too-familiar linkage between health, morality, and body size. 

Source: "130 Kiloluklar Ne Halde?  Şişmanlar sıcaktan şikayet etmiyorlar!" Cumhuriyet, 21 August, 1929, p. 1-2.  

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