Sultan Kösen: The Tallest Person Alive
Peter Macdiarmid/Getty ImagesSultan Kösen, one of the tallest people ever, meeting the shortest man in the world, Chandra Bahadur Dangi, in London.
Robert Wadlow is the tallest man who ever lived, but he died back in 1940. Today, Turkish man Sultan Kösen is considered to be the tallest person alive.
Though Kösen is now 8 feet, 3 inches tall, his growth spurt started later than Wadlow’s. Kösen was born on December 10, 1982 in Mardin, Türkiye, and spent the first 10 years of his life at an average height. But then, things changed. Because of a condition called “pituitary gigantism” — the overproduction of growth hormones in his pituitary gland — Kösen suddenly shot up. He eventually grew to be over 8 feet tall.
Kösen’s height had its advantages (he could help his mother change lightbulbs) and its disadvantages (he was too tall to play basketball and had trouble finding clothes that fit). But Kösen’s main concern was that he would never be able to find love. It was difficult to find a girlfriend, Kösen told Guinness World Records, because women were “usually scared of me.”
“I want what everyone else wants,” he said. “A wife, a family, a nice home.”
Fortunately, doctors were able to stop Kösen’s growth by performing Gamma Knife radiosurgery in 2010, which removed a tumor on his pituitary gland (an option not available to Wadlow.) By 2012, this treatment stopped Kösen’s growth at 8 feet, 3 inches, making him the tallest person in the world now.
Guinness World RecordsSultan Kösen in New York City. The world’s tallest living man also holds the record for “largest hands on a living person.”
And in 2013, Kösen got married to Merve Dibo (who stands 5 feet, 9 inches tall). They had met through a mutual friend and it was love at first sight, but the pair struggled to communicate since Kösen speaks Turkish and Dibo speaks Arabic. They sadly later divorced in 2021 due to the language barrier.
