Fort comme un Turc

Literally: As strong as a Turk

Example: “Le déménageur a soulevé le piano seul : il est fort comme un Turc.” — The mover lifted the piano on his own: he's strong as an ox.

English equivalent: Strong as an ox

Origin: The phrase is a fossil of European fear, and the Turk in it is not a modern Turkish person but the Ottoman soldier of the 15th century. It appears in the middle of that century, shortly after the troops of Sultan Mehmed II took Constantinople in 1453, at a point when an empire built by conquest across Europe, Africa and Asia had made its army the standard European measure of force. What was being noted was strength and courage, and, in the same breath, brutality: the 17th and 18th centuries used the Turk as shorthand for the unbeliever and the merciless enemy, called a hard and pitiless man un vrai Turc, and meant by treating someone à la turque treating them roughly. The compliment left in the modern phrase is what survived after four centuries wore the rest away — which is why nothing in it works as a claim about Turkish people, then or now.