A black and white still featuring a shirtless muscular man appeared in an Ottoman magazine in 1910. The man, who is well chiseled, is demonstrating his own physical excellence that was achieved through a regime of exercise and gymnasiums. However, Selim Sirri is not merely showing off the fruits of his efforts, he is part of a reformist movement that sees physical education, disciplining the human body and exercise as being at the heart of a modernising empire. Newspapers and magazines were using Sirri to underscore the idea that physical education, ‘carried a symbolic meaning-the Ottoman Empire had joined a global community of physical education.’ Elsewhere, a letter dated to 1906, complaining about the referee in Galatasaray’s football match as […]
