Is the Ottoman body “abnormal, amorphous and accustomed to slacking?” In 1913, an Ottoman author argued that the Ottomans lost the first Balkan war because of the lack of swiftness and physical infirmity of the Ottoman soldiers. "Because," he claimed, “we have forgotten our duty to strengthen our bodies; we have fallen into laziness so much that even our blood circulates languidly in our veins.” Was this a single articulation, or was it a part of a new discourse on body that had been developing throughout the nineteenth century and was becoming hegemonic in late Ottoman society? What were the effects of wars in general, and the Balkan War in particular, on the emergent discourses? Did the practices that are related to a new conceptualization of the body change after the Balkan defeat? A preliminary research indicates that there was a proliferation of the aforementioned articulations on the theme of body in relation to the nation in the post-Balkan war period. This paper will address the questions above and will trace the transformation of discourses on the body, using various literary genres as sources, such as ethics books, and periodicals, along with published memoirs on the Balkan wars. This is a part of a larger project on how the contents of laziness, productivity, and work ethic changed by becoming social, ‘national’ and political issues in the last century of the empire(1839-1920). The relationship between body and work was reconfigured when modern binaries, such as industriousness vs. laziness, were becoming hegemonic. This paper will look at the Balkan War ‘not as an event, but as a social process’ that allows us to see how war-making and nation-building were interdependent processes, and how the war made the critiques that pitted an ideal Ottoman against the ‘real’ “feeble and lazy” Ottomans increasingly salient. The reformers talked not only about the individual bodies, as in the tradition of the medico-ethics books, but also targeted the entire body politic. As the building block of a nation, the human body became a topos where both physical and mental infirmities ought to be defeated to establish a “productive nation.' The shift that occurred with the Balkan defeat was not only built on a century-long practice that made the productive body part of the nationalist discourse, but also made an emergent narrative visible on the national level in an undisputed way, and hence indicating a new stage.