The Upper Lip

Yesterday Alaska hosted the 2009 World Moustache and Beard Championships. These days the moustache is an ironic joke in the West, but it wasn’t that long ago many soldiers, philosophers and evil railroad barons sported them. Never really disappearing from Western lips, its prominence (or lack thereof) coincided with the sleaziness of the decade.

Yet the moustache is a very prominent part of the Turkish stereotype, and rightfully so; for a long time it was revered both as a symbol of virility and as the preferred means of getting bits of food stuck to your upper lip.

To understand the importance of the moustache, one need only hear the tale of İstanbul Mayor Ömer Faiz Efendi on a trip to Britain in 1867. The mayor was asked by a lady why Turkish men kept facial hair to which he boomed, “So that our words are obeyed.”

Some Turks eventually began associating presence not with facial hair but with the content of one’s character, and after World War I (and the consequent secular Republic) began shaving as a sign of modernity, progressiveness and decency.

But this was only some of the men, and many throughout Anatolia still clung to their lip hair. There was even a study covered heavily in the 1985 press showing 67 percent of men over fifteen wore moustaches and that 60 percent of the women preferred it. In 1997, a scandal erupted when a statue of a historic efe in Aydın was erected sans moustache and subsequently had to be replaced with a more respectful one. Even as recently as 2000, a mayor threatened his citizens with a shave if they were caught with prostitutes.

And the moustache is more than just an accessory: back in the 60s and 70s (and to a lesser extent, today), a man’s political allegiance was expressed on his upper lip. Below are examples of left-wing, right-wing nationalist, and religious conservative moustaches respectively:

The leftist moustache resembled the one worn by Stalin, the nationalist’s Fu Manchu combined with the eyebrows to recreate a “triple crescent” (their symbol) and the religious just kept it trimmed right beneath the nostrils, because nothing says “devout Muslim” like the flaring nostril-hair look.

But the moustache has been under attack for several decades. As a new generation of Turks begin closely following global trends, the moustache is becoming an outdated symbol of an awkward backwardness. To still sport one suggests a lack of hipness usually reserved for statues, conservatives (like our leaders to the left), ironic hipsters and angry women (who donned them in protest of under-representation a couple years ago).