“This is a serious history, yet an immensely readable one— informative, gossipy, and grand fun.” —New York Times Book Review “This beautiful book … stimulates the mind as well as the eye” —Chicago Sun-Times “An alluring invitation into the labyrinthine corridors of the Turkish harem.” —San Francisco Chronicle
About Harem: The World Behind the Veil, 25th Anniversary Edition In this fascinating illustrated history—a worldwide best seller—Alev Lytle Croutier explores life in the world’s harems, from the Middle Ages to the early twentieth century, focusing on the fabled Seraglio of Topkapi Palace as a paradigm for them all. We enter the slave markets and the lavish boudoirs of the sultanas; we witness the daily routines of the odalisques, and of the eunuchs who guarded the harem. Drawing on her own family history, Croutier also reveals the marital customs, child-rearing practices, and pastimes of “middle-class” harems, the women’s quarters of ordinary—albeit often polygamous—households. Finally, she shows us how the Eastern idea of the harem invaded the European imagination—in the form of decoration, costume, and art—and how Western ideas, in turn, finally eroded a system that had seemed eternal. This revised and updated 25th Anniversary Edition of Harem includes a new introduction by the author, revisiting her subject in light of recent events in Turkey, and the world.
About the Author Alev Lytle Croutier is the author of Taking the Waters (Abbeville) and three critically acclaimed novels, The Palace of Tears, Seven Houses, and Leyla: The Black Tulip. Born in Turkey, Croutier studied at Oberlin College and founded the publishing company Mercury House. Harem is also available in paperback. To view our complete www.abbeville.com/digital.
selection
of
e-books,
visit
Detail of Harem Scene at the Court of Shah Jahan, by an unknown artist.
To all who danced the seven veils, my mother, grandmothers, and aunts.
Contents COVER ABOUT HAREM: THE WORLD BEHIND THE VEIL FRONTISPIECE TITLE PAGE DEDICATION
HAREM REVISITED
PREFACE
The Grand Harem INTRODUCTION
meaning, origins, polygamy, slave markets, harem of the Seraglio, acquisition of slaves, training of odalisques, sultanas, eunuchs, dynasty, the Golden Cage, death, the world of extremes DAILY LIFE IN THE SULTAN’S HAREM
harem walls, gardens, games, pools, riddles and stories, poetry, prayer, secrets of flowers and birds, opium, song and dance, shadow puppets, shopping, excursions, visits and outings, festivals and special days, disenchantment COSTUME AND FINERY
passing of the veil THE BATHS FOOD
SULTANAS
marriage of sultans, harem women and politics, valide procession, princess sultanas, remarriage of sultanas, accouchement and birth, death of sultanas, Roxalena (Hürrem Sultana), Kösem Sultana, Aimée DeBucq de Rivery (Nakshedil Sultana) EUNUCHS
Süleyman Ağa, origins, types of eunuchs, eunuch trade, procedures, Chinese eunuchs, effects of castration, sexual desire and consummation, marriage of eunuchs, regeneration of genitals, the chief black eunuch (kizlar ağasi)
Harem Life in the City ORDINARY HAREMS
the go-betweens, romance, gifts, henna night, weddings, husband-wife relationships, polygamy, relationships among wives, superstition and charms, upkeep, odalisques, jewelry, living quarters, bundle women, death
West Meets East ORIENTAL DREAM
One Thousand and One Nights, wind from the East, Lady Mary Montagu, journey to the Orient, John Frederick Lewis, the Romantics, Jean-Léon Gérôme and the camera, Amadeo Count Preziosi, Empress Eugénie, Pierre Loti, emancipation of the East, the last picture SURVIVALS
twentieth-century Orientalist threads, movies and television, harems today
CHRONOLOGY
BIBLIOGRAPHY ACKNOWLEDGMENTS INDEX PICTURE CREDITS COPYRIGHT
Harem Revisited
It’s odd to realize that a quarter-century has passed since the publication of Harem: The World Behind the Veil, and it’s still alive. I was delighted when Robert Abrams, my former publisher, had the idea of reissuing the book on its twenty-fifth anniversary. Harem was the first book to explore this secret world of women from a feminine perspective. My intentions were primarily personal and cultural: to reflect on my family history and demystify the concept of the harem, which the Western imagination had turned into a dark, exotic, and erotic dream. I wanted to show the complex realities of this utterly private realm, which were far removed from the titillating depictions of odalisques by Western painters and writers. At the same time, I also considered what these fantasies said about the West itself—why it wanted to see its own women in a romantic Oriental guise. Harem originally took me ten years to research and write, tracking down volumes in the dimly lit libraries and dusty archives of strange cities, digging into family stories, or having tea with ancient ladies who had lost their logic but still could make evocative connections in the interstices of their memory, memory that was as fragmented as the idea of the harem itself. No definitive sources existed on the subject. No Google to search. No Wikipedia to consult. It was simply a low-tech, labor-intensive process of assembling tesserae that had, like most Turkish antiquities, been scattered into faraway places. I’m very pleased that other writers and scholars have since built on my research and produced remarkable new insights into harem life. Their work has claimed an important space in women’s studies and led to more understanding, more dialogue.
Since the first publication of Harem, the world has changed, and we have, in particular, seen many intense dramas concentrated on the Middle East: the Gulf War, 9/11, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Arab Spring, the relentless conflict between Israel and Palestine, and a tsunami of Islamization. Partly as a result of these events, and partly because of increased Moslem immigration to the West, the Islamic gender issue has come under more scrutiny. On the one hand, Moslem women are obtaining much better education for themselves and their children, gaining greater visibility in civil society, and becoming more entrepreneurial. On the other hand, extreme Islamization threatens to create a new regime of legalized inequality. I have watched Turkey—my birthplace, the world’s hope for a secular Moslem country—change its face in just a couple of decades. First the number of women wearing hijabs increased by leaps and bounds, and then odd, ninjalike figures—women in burkas—appeared on the streets walking behind their husbands. The insinuation of Islamic couture began with a peculiar headpiece that came from the South, changing a woman’s silhouette: the turban, a scarf worn with a cap inside that looks like a bun. Then there was the burkini, a very modest type of swimwear in the form of a hooded pantsuit that covered the whole body except the face, the hands, and the feet. At the street markets in Istanbul, a multitude of stands sell women’s underwear, and it always astounds me to see a male merchant and women in hijab pass back and forth a sexy bra or bikini underwear. “Rose,” says one of them. The other opts for jasmine. The merchant reaches below the case and pulls out some thongs embroidered with flowers around the crotch. You pull the velcroed flap, similar to those in magazines advertising perfumes, and voila. The word harem has even begun to reenter the common lexicon in Turkey. The current prime minister recently accused his opposition of invading his harem, that is, his private life, or his protected and sacrosanct space—an inexcusable act of heresy or haram. I realized that although the institution itself had been illegal for a century, the chapter on harems had not closed. The clash between civil and shariah law seemed insurmountable.
As I write this, the Turkish government has blocked Twitter and YouTube in an effort to suppress opposition. The extremists view the Internet as evil, not as a path to enlightenment and open dialogue. A cleric has referred to online chat as “a satanic relationship and not an Islamic one, leading to temptation, having dates, and holding lust for one another, finally to fornication. Therefore, we say that this door must be closed and people must be warned against the Internet. And we ask Allah’s forgiveness.” The social media’s role in the Arab Spring has been widely discussed. The Internet has created a dynamic exchange in which a Moslem woman can be a traditionalist or an iconoclast, a housewife or an entrepreneur. The neutral ground of cyberspace allows women to learn about their rights within the religion, without the usual cultural or traditional barriers—barriers that prevented Afghan women under the Taliban, for example, from getting an education and working. The term “cyber Fatima” was coined to describe a Moslem woman who chooses to cover her head and stay home with her children but, at the same time, runs a thriving Internet company like Two Muslim Girls, which sells traditional clothing online. But even more importantly, the Internet is changing Islam itself, by creating a virtual version of the ummah—the single nation of Islam that its followers consider themselves a part of. All kinds of online forums allow the open discussion of religious questions among men and women. Meanwhile, polygamy has resurfaced as a social issue not only in Moslem regions but also abroad. Women are sometimes brought over from countries such as Pakistan, Yemen, and Afghanistan to live as co-wives in closed immigrant communities in Western countries. Unable to travel freely or speak the local language, these women are trapped in a kind of modern harem. There is also the issue of the part-time wife—that is, a situation in which a man marries a woman in a religious ceremony only in order to have sex with her. Sheikh Ibrahim Mogra, an influential member of the Muslim Council of Great Britain, recently warned that keeping a secret second wife is a breach of the Koran, since “it fails to treat both wives equally.” And marriage just for sexual gratification is not valid; having a part-time wife is the same as having a mistress.
Another problem that immigration has brought to the doorstep of the West is female genital mutilation, in which little girls undergo the brutal, systematic torture of cl*toridectomy, often without an anesthetic. Unfortunately, given the power of social norms in close-knit traditional communities, legal prohibition and official advocacy have so far not succeeded in eradicating FGM. Enforcing submission in girls and women makes them vulnerable to rape and other forms of abuse. Teenage girls are often caught between their families’ restrictive culture and the aggression of boys their own age. The consequences—sexual harassment, forced marriage, gang rape, and murder —are heart-wrenching. Stories about honor killings continue to perpetuate the Orientalist fantasy—the sexual bondage of the Eastern woman and the severe punishment that comes to her if she goes against the rules. “Good girls stay home, clean the house, take care of their brothers and sisters, and only go out to go to school. Those who … dare to wear make-up, to go out, or to smoke, quickly earn the reputation as ‘little whor*s.’ ” Thankfully, groups like Ni Putes Ni Soumises (Neither whor*s nor Submissives) in France have begun to defy the conspiracy of silence surrounding the violence perpetrated against young minority women in the ghettos and offer them a new option: respect. The success of books such as Reading Lolita in Tehran is indicative of a deep interest among Westerners in understanding the consequences of the separation of women. The title is a provocative tease, the only taboo element in the book being the clandestine gathering of women to read forbidden Western classics in the home of their professor, Azar Nafisi, whose refusal to wear the veil has led to her expulsion from the university. Amina Wadud, an American scholar of Islam, has made a strong statement by leading the salat, Friday prayers, without gender separation, thus breaking shariah law, which allows only men to perform this role in mixedgender congregations. Moslem clerics around the world have generally regarded her act as un-Islamic and heretical. “There is a moral failure, a moral bankruptcy, a refusal to take on, in particular, Muslim gender apartheid,” points out Leyla Ahmed, an Egyptian-American scholar. “So you have many contemporary feminists
who say, ‘We have to be multiculturally relativist. We cannot uphold a single, or absolute, standard of human rights. And, therefore, we can’t condemn Islamic culture, because their countries have previously been colonized. By us.’ ” Similarly, in An American Bride in Kabul, Phyllis Chesler writes, “I hear some westerners preach the tortured cultural relativism that excuses the mistreatment of women in the name of Islam.… Unlike many other intellectuals and feminists, I don’t try to romanticize or rationalize it. … Because I see the burka on the streets of Paris and New York and feel that Afghanistan has followed me back to America.” In his most recent book, A Call to Action, Jimmy Carter addresses the suffering inflicted upon women by the false interpretation of carefully selected religious texts and a growing tolerance of violence and warfare. Some religious leaders omit key verses or quote them out of context to exalt the status of men and exclude women. And in nations that accept or even glorify violence, this perceived inequality could become the basis for abuse. Commendably, the conversation on the emerging presence of Moslems in the West has focused on progressive thinking and encouraged women to reach their highest potential. But we cannot do that if we insist on honoring those who, however sympathetic their backgrounds and moving their personal stories, make the mistake of demonizing all Moslems and bashing Islam. Rather, we must clarify the distinctions between radical and fanatic versions of Islam and moderate and centrist versions. When entire populations are represented in the public imagination by their worst elements, the consequences are damaging. The Qur’an does state that both men and women should dress modestly (33:59–60, 24:30–31; Ali’s translation). However, it does not use the words veil, hijab, burka, chador, or abaya but jilbab, meaning cloak, and khumur, meaning shawl—neither of which cover the face, hands, or feet. Furthermore, until the ninth century, women prayed in the mosques unveiled. Clothing that covers the head and body is a tradition established later from a conservative reading of the Qur’an by various mullahs. While some Moslem women insist that covering their heads is a cultural and political statement, others find it degrading. And while most resent being
portrayed as shriveled old babushkas, they also take umbrage at being depicted as exotic creatures who lounge around in harems looking bejeweled and ravishing. The continuous debate about this issue may never be resolved. Yet, from the perspective of contemporary Western political culture, these elements of dress remain the most visible marker of “otherness.” Debates about the veil are integral to negotiations about sexual, political, and economic boundaries. Since I wrote this book twenty-five years ago, the subject of harems has become my life’s work, providing the setting for my novels Seven Houses, Palace of Tears, and The Third Woman, and even a young-adult book, Leyla: The Black Tulip. And the topic has matured with me: I learned new things—some of which I’ve added to this new edition—and I reconsidered certain assumptions. The harem, an accretion of many cultural conventions, needs a new imagination, a new definition. I like the idea of it becoming women’s private space to reflect, to grow—“a room of one’s own,” legislated by women. Let’s return now to the pages of Harem: The World Behind the Veil and enjoy the beauty, the mystery, and the strange customs that characterize the historical harem. The pieces of the mosaic become more discernible, more refined, albeit constantly changing, reflecting both the beautiful and horrific. Although it is not the same picture for all of us, we somehow find ourselves in it. —Alev Lytle Croutier, San Francisco, 2014
Preface
These flower-women, women-flowers, he prefers them to any others, and spends his nights in the hothouses where he hides them as in a harem. —Guy de Maupassant, Un Cas de Divorce (1886) I was born in an old house in Izmir, Turkey, which had previously been inhabited by a pasha who had a harem. I grew up listening to stories that could easily have come from the One Thousand and One Nights. People often whispered things about harems; my own grandmother and her sister had been brought up in one. Since then, I have come to see that these were not ordinary stories. But for me, as a child, they were, for I had not yet known any others. My paternal grandmother, Zehra, was the first person from whom I heard the word harem and who made allusions to harem life. She was the daughter of a prosperous gunpowder maker in Macedonia. As was not uncommon until the twentieth century, she and her sisters had been brought up in a “harem”—which really means a separate part of a house where women lived in isolation, having no contact with men other than their blood relatives. The term does not necessarily imply the practice of polygamy.
Zehra Barutçu, my grandmother, about 1901
Rarely did they go out; and when they did, they were always heavily veiled. The most poignant image I know is that of silk tunnels being stretched from the door of the house to a carriage, so that the ladies could leave without being seen from the street. The family had already arranged their marriages. None of them saw their husbands until their wedding day. Then they moved to his house, to live together with his mother and other women relatives—and occasionally another wife or two. My grandmother married my grandfather when she was fourteen. He was forty and her father’s best friend. She was a simple, uneducated girl from Pirlepe. He was a respected scholar from Kavala. Ten years later, she would be widowed. Threatened by the Balkan Wars, my grandparents left everything behind in Macedonia, including their parents, and fled to Anatolia. They sought refuge and settled down in Istanbul in 1906. My grandfather soon died, and my grandmother moved in with one of her sisters for a time. The two women brought their children up together, as one family. In 1909, with the fall of Sultan Abdülhamid II, harems were abolished and declared unlawful. I do not remember very much of the house in Izmir (Smyrna) where I was born. In my memory, it faced the sea and was five stories high. (When I returned years later, I saw that it had only three stories.) It had a hamam where women in the neighborhood came together to bathe. Some of the windows were latticed, screening the outside world. A giant granite rock behind the house isolated it even more. It was said that sometime before us, an old pasha, his two wives, and other women had occupied the place. When my grandmother, her three sisters, and friends gathered together, they told stories and argued about facts and details, rarely agreeing. We children participated in rituals that the women had transported from their harem days. Like many girls of my generation, we learned to make concoctions to remove hair, brew good coffee, distribute a sacrificed sheep’s entrails to the poor, cast spells, and give the evil eye to protect ourselves.
Meryem, my great-aunt, with her husband, Faik Pasha, and daughters (clockwise), Muazzez, Mukaddes, and Ayhan. Faik Pasha made a gift of orphan odalisques to my family.
When I was eighteen years old, I left Turkey and came to live in the United States. Fifteen years later, I returned to Istanbul to visit my family and sort out my impressions of my birthplace. I returned, carrying new baggage with me: an expatriate’s eye and a self-conscious awareness of art history and feminist rhetoric. It was not surprising, then, that I found myself fascinated with the recently restored harem apartments of Topkapi Palace— the Grand Seraglio, or the Sublime Porte, as it was known in the West. It had belonged to the Padishah, sultans of the Ottoman Dynasty, who had hidden away their women here from around 1540 through the early 1900s— during four hundred years of life and culture. All that remained now of the thousands of women who had lived in these rooms, in fantastic luxury and isolation, were their empty boudoirs, their echoing baths, and countless, impenetrable mysteries.
Sadri and Yümniye Aksoy, my father and mother, in Turkish costume, 1942
This visit to the harem of the Topkapi Palace haunted me. I was obsessed with the notion that these same stairways once felt the flying feet; these alleys heard the soft rustle of their garments. The marble floors of the baths were worn out from centuries of water running. The walls seemed to whisper secrets pleading to be heard. Obviously, more was concealed here than the popular notion of sensuality attached to the word harem or what I
had learned from art history classes and childhood stories. It seemed as though I had stepped into a unique reality—a cocoon of women in their evolutionary cycle. Questions kept insinuating themselves. Why had we not studied the harem at school? We were taught ten years of Ottoman history and had to memorize the dates of all the wars and conquests and who killed whom. What had occurred here during all these years? Who were these women? What did they do from day to day? Why was it treated so perfunctorily? I began searching in earnest for documents on harems—books, letters, travelogues, paintings, photographs—to help reconstruct a candid image of this veiled world. What I found were fragments—romanticized descriptions of the imperial harem by Western travelers, writers, or diplomats, a few smuggled letters and poems written by the women themselves, and tedious studies by historians whose primary interest was royal life and palace politics, not the uncounted, unnamed women of the harem. Simultaneously I had to probe deeper into my own family history. When I expressed my need to find out everything about harems, on which nothing definitive had been written, relatives and friends came forth. They helped me remember things. They showed me strange books and letters. They shared ephemeral stories, things that had happened a long time ago, so that I could write about them.
Nesime and Sevim, my great cousins
My aunts Muazzez and Mukaddes (dressed in a World War I army uniform). Since, during the early twentieth century, it was usually inappropriate for women to be photographed with men, some posed with other women dressed in men’s clothes.
Aunt Ayhan with baby Genghiz. Ayhan was the beauty in the family. Even Kemal Atatürk, Turkey’s great reformer and first president, admired her.
Physical and spiritual isolation of women and polygamy, I discovered, were not unique to Turkey. Harems existed throughout history in different parts of the Asian world, known by different names, such as purdah (“curtain”) in India and, in Persia, enderun or zenane. In China, the Forbidden City of Peking also had cloistered women, protected and guarded by eunuchs. During the sixth century B.C., King Tamba of Banaras had a harem of some sixteen thousand women. A fifteenth-century sultan of Malwas, Ghiyas-ud-di Khilji, built Jahaz Mahal, the “ship palace,” to accommodate his large harem. Kublai Khan, the Mongol leader, had four empresses and around seven thousand concubines. It is rumored that every two years he would get rid of a couple hundred and replace them with a fresh supply. Emperor Jahangir of India also maintained a harem of six thousand women, as well as a thousand young men-in-waiting for those times when his appetite tended toward the other gender. But the most highly and
extensively developed harem was that of the Grand Seraglio. What happened there came to be seen as a paradigm of all harems. In the Seraglio alone, thousands of women lived and died with only each other to know of their lives. By piecing together the fragments collected over the years, I hoped to gain a glimpse into this mysterious, beautiful, and unbelievably repressive world concealed for so many centuries behind the veil. What will these women tell us, about themselves and about ourselves?
THE GRAND HAREM
Introduction
I am a harem woman, an Ottoman slave. I was conceived in an act of contemptuous rape and born in a sumptuous palace. Hot sand is my father; the Bosphorus, my mother; wisdom, my destiny; ignorance, my doom. I am richly dressed and poorly regarded; I am a slave-owner and a slave. I am anonymous, I am infamous; one thousand and one tales have been written about me. My home is this place where gods are buried and devils breed, the land of holiness, the backyard of hell. —Anonymous MEANING The word harem, derived from the Arabic haram ( ), means “unlawful,” “protected,” or “forbidden.” It is a term that implies respect for religious purity. The sacred area around Mecca and Medina is haram, closed to all but the Faithful. In its secular use, harem refers to the separate, protected part of a household where women, children, widowed relatives, and female servants lived in seclusion and privacy, cloistered from all but the master of the house and their immediate male relatives; in a noble or wealthy house, the harem would be guarded by eunuch slaves. The term may also be applied to the women themselves. In the West, harem implies a “house of joy,” a lessthan-religious acknowledgment of the master’s exclusive rights of sexual foraging. ORIGINS Harem, a world of isolated women, is the combined result of several traditions. It suggests a clear idea of the separation between things, the sublime duality of the sacred and profane, whereby reality is divided into
mutually exclusive categories and controlled by strict regulations known as taboos. Under such a system, men and women are among the first to be divided. Women symbolize passion; men, reason. Eve was the temptress, and patriarchal systems throughout the ages have tended to regard all women as such. Scripture notwithstanding, there was a world before the time of Adam and Eve—in some places, a prepatriarchal world. In the Sumerian, Egyptian, and Greek civilizations, for instance, women occupied high positions of spiritual power and ascended to the thrones of the gods. Under these essentially matriarchal systems, both female and male deities controlled the destinies of human beings and animals. They were equally powerful. The white goddess of birth, love, and death is the earliest-known deity. She was personified as the moon, full, new, and old, and was worshiped under infinite names, as Isis, Ishtar, Artemis, and others. She was the Great Goddess in her multifarious forms. At the dawn of civilization, clans migrated continually in search of food and game, everyone collaborating in a tribal act. In this set-up, the forms of subsistence left no surplus, and the concepts of private ownership, class distinction, masters and slaves did not exist. As agriculture began to provide a more reliable source of food than hunting and gathering, endless migration became less essential for survival. Tribes rooted down, claiming land and territory. At first, as incarnations of the connection between seeds and growing things, women rose to a privileged position in early societies. So did the female deities. Demeter, the Greek goddess of fertility, protected the crops; had she not been compelled to share her daughter, Persephone, with the male underworld, there could have been perpetual—rather than merely seasonal—abundance. Eventually, agricultural knowledge created a surplus of food for some, making it possible to exploit others who did not have the means to secure their own subsistence. The ownership of private property, especially land, replaced communal sharing, splitting society into landowners and varying degrees of slaves. This development was concurrent with the decline of women’s spiritual prestige; they ceased performing religious rituals.
The mother was no longer the axis of the family; the father became the paterfamilias. In ancient Rome, familia meant a man’s fields, property, money, and slaves, all of which were passed on to his sons. Woman became part of man’s familia, his property. And polygamy was established as an important part of an economic system in which a man needed hands to maintain his livelihood. The story of Adam and Eve appears in Judaism as a demonstration that woman is sinful and that her sin is sex. The story affirms a severance of body from soul, which Christianity embraced and exaggerated by representing Christ as a holy male born of a woman who had conceived asexually; Christ was so chaste that he was deprived of women and sexual expression.
Odalisque, early 17th century, Miniature from the Murabba Album, Topkapi Museum, Istanbul. The woman appears to be a version of Eve, with a pomegranate, an ancient fertility symbol.
This cornerstone of Judeo-Christian belief divided human beings from themselves, opposing to a humanitarian conviction of the essential goodness of the body, inherited from ancient Egyptian and Greco-Roman religions, a belief that the physical reality of the here and now was to be despised in dreams of “another” world of infinite and insubstantial spirituality. God had created man in his own image; God was spirit. But woman was the flesh or body, and the body was an animal dominated by passion, sensuality, and lust. Man personified the heavens, and woman could never be whole until married to one. By the thirteenth century, Thomas Aquinas and Albertus Magnus had promulgated their belief that women were capable of engaging in intercourse with Satan. On these grounds, the Inquisition identified and condemned certain women to be burned alive. Female spiritual submission was thus complete. Men, on the other hand, allowed themselves plenty of sexual freedom under the patriarchal system. Prostitution increased rapidly; indeed, a large portion of the Catholic Church’s income came from the brothels, and Martin Luther’s Reformation was partly an attempt to end this hypocrisy. As for Islam, it imposed segregation and the veil upon women, claiming they could not be trusted and had to be kept away from men (other than close relatives), whom they could not help but seduce. The need for special, secluded dwelling places for women became imperative—not to protect their bodies and honor, but to preserve the morals of men. POLYGAMY Polygamy is the practice of having more than one spouse; in common usage, this most often means more than one wife. Technically, polygyny is having more than one wife, and polyandry, more than one husband. Founded on agrarian necessity, polygamy has been part of many religions. Islam holds women in particularly low esteem, considering them intellectually dull, spiritually vapid, and valuable only to satisfy the passions of their masters and provide them male heirs. “Woman is a field; enter her as you wish,” says the Qur’an (2:223). “Men have dominion over women” (4:34).
A man is allowed four wives if he is able to keep them all in the same style and can share with them equal amounts of affection and wealth. The Prophet Mohammed had altruistic intentions when he sanctioned polygamy, seeing it as a solution to the pre-Islamic practice of female infanticide, as well as a practical way to deal with the surplus female population. It was mainly an economic measure, having little to do with Western romantic and erotic stereotypes. In Arabic, the first wife is called hatun (the great lady) and the second, durrah (parrot). If a husband wanted to get rid of any of his wives, he could divorce them with relative ease by saying, before a kadi (judge), “I divorce thee” three times. A wife could not initiate a divorce; she had few marital rights. A man could also own as many female slaves as he pleased. Multiple wives were expensive, not only to maintain, but also because it was the custom to raise a “bride price” for each wife. Poor men could barely afford one wife, although they sometimes took two anyway— separating the women in their humble dwelling by a mere curtain. Wealthy men sometimes exceeded the four “allowed” by the Islamic law and made a display of their wives as a status symbol. However, since too much show attracted tax collectors and other undesirables, this was not always a wise idea. SLAVE MARKETS The slave trade had flourished in the Middle East and around the Mediterranean since the Mesopotamian civilizations, two thousand years before Christ. Young boys and girls, captured in war or paid as tribute by their fathers or local rulers, were available for purchase on the open market in major cities. Alexandria and Cairo served as the main emporiums.
John Faed, Man Exchanging a Slave for Armor, ca. 1858, Oil on board, 171⁄4 × 24 in., Private collection
The slave markets intrigued distinguished travelers and writers. Within a ten-year period, we hear varying descriptions: The slave market was one of my favorite haunts.… One enters this building which is situated in a quarter the most dark, dirty and obscure of any at Cairo by a sort of lane.… In the center of this court, the slaves are exposed for sale and in general to the number of thirty to forty, nearly all young, many quite infants. The scene is of a revolting nature; yet I did not see as I expected the dejection and sorrow as I was led to imagine watching the master remove the entire covering of a female—a thick woollen cloth—and expose her to the gaze of the bystander. William James Muller (1838), British Orientalist painter
Not the least of their attractions was their hair; arranged in enormous plaits, it was also entirely saturated in butter which streamed down their shoulders and breast.… It was fashionable because it gave their hair more sheen, and made their faces more dazzling. The merchants were ready to have them strip: they poked open their mouths so that I could examine their teeth; they made them walk up and down and pointed out, above all, the elasticity of their breasts. These poor girls responded in the most carefree manner, and the scene was hardly a painful one, for most of them burst into uncontrollable laughter. Gerard de Nerval, Voyage en Orient (1843–51) When the dahabeeahs returned from their long and painful journeys on the Upper Nile, they install their human merchandise in those great okels which extend in Cairo along the ruined mosque of the Caliph Hakem; people go there to purchase a slave as they do here to the market to buy a turbot. Maxime du Camp, Souvenirs et paysages d’Orient (1849) Living in rooms opposite these slave girls, and seeing them at all hours of the day and night, I had frequent opportunities of studying them. They were average specimens of the steatopygous Abyssinian breed, broadshouldered, thin-flanked, fine-limbed, and with haunches of a prodigious size.… Their style of flirtation was peculiar. “How beautiful thou art, O Maryam!—what eyes!—what—” “Then why—” would respond the lady—“don’t you buy me?” “We are of one faith—of one creed, formed to form each other’s happiness.” “Then, why don’t you buy me?” “Conceive, O Maryam, the blessing of two hearts.” “Then, why don’t you buy me?” And so on. Most effectual gag to Cupid’s eloquence! Sir Richard Burton, Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Meccah (1853)
Edmund Dulac, Illustration to Quatrain XI of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1909), Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University, New York. “With me along the Strip of Herbage strown That just divides the desert from the sown, Where name of Slave and Sultan is forgot— And peace to Mahmud on his golden throne?”
HAREM OF THE SERAGLIO The Turkish tribes, including the Ottomans, practiced polygamy prior to the conquest of the Byzantine capital, Constantinople, in 1453. Sultan Mehmed II, known to history as “the Conqueror,” was obsessed with making his new metropolis, which he called Istanbul, a replica of Constantine’s—only more opulent. He allowed the Valide sultana (mother sultana) to organize her house as nearly as possible in the manner of the gynaecea (women’s apartments) of Empress Helen, widow of Constantine. The gynaecea were situated in the remotest part of her palace, lying beyond an interior court; women lived here separately, divided into task groups. Mehmed himself adopted such Byzantine customs as the sequestering of royalty, establishing a palace school, and the keeping of household slaves. The Islamic practice of polygamy combined neatly with these Byzantine customs and resulted in the harem.
A bird’s-eye view of the Grand Harem of Topkapi Palace—the Seraglio. Photograph by Sami Güner
Floor plan of the Grand Harem, Topkapi Palace
The early Ottoman sultans had married daughters of Anatolian governors and of the Byzantine royal family. After the conquest of Constantinople, it became customary to marry odalisques. The women in harems, except those born in it, came from all over Asia, Africa, and, occasionally, Europe. According to ancient legend, the Seraglio Point, a magnificent isthmus extending between the Marmara Sea and the Golden Horn, was named by the Delphic Oracle as the best site for a new colony and became the Acropolis of ancient Byzantium. A decade after the conquest, Mehmed the Conqueror built Topkapi Palace—known in the West as the Grand Seraglio or the Sublime Porte—on the same sacred point.
View of the Topkapi Palace and the Seraglio Point
In his poem “The Palace of Fortune” (1772), Sir William (Oriental) Jones invokes a palace of such opulence: In mazy curls the flowing jasper wav’d O’er its smooth bed with polish’d agate pav’d; And on a rock of ice, by magick rais’d High in the midst a gorgeous palace blaz’d.
John Frederick Lewis, The Reception, 1873, Oil on panel, 25 × 30 in., Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Connecticut; Paul Mellon Collection
The Seraglio was the seat of imperial power, housing thousands of people involved in the sultan’s personal and administrative service. The most private section, carefully separated from the rest of the palace, was the sultan’s harem, which moved to the Seraglio for the first time in 1541, with Sultana Roxalena, and lasted until 1909. The ever-changing female family lived, loved, and died here for four centuries. It became the ultimate symbol, the quintessence of harem, the system of sequestering women. The harem was located between the Mabeyn (Court)—the sultan’s private apartments—and the apartments of the chief black eunuch. It had almost four hundred rooms centered around the Courtyard of the Valide sultana, containing the apartments and dormitories of other women.
The Carriage House and the Bird House, which connected the harem to the outside world, were carefully guarded from within by the corps of eunuchs and, outside, by halberdiers, or royal guards. The Carriage House was the real entry to the harem; all contact with the outside was made through its gate, which opened at dawn and closed at dusk. The eunuchs’ quarters led into a courtyard, which opened on the right to the Golden Road, in the center to the Valide sultana’s quarters, and on the left to the apartments of the odalisques. The luxury of the living quarters depended on the status of the personage occupying them. The sultan, of course, had the most opulent accommodations. High-ranking women had private apartments, whereas the novice odalisques and eunuchs lived in dormitories. During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the population of the harem dropped from over a thousand women to a few hundred as a result of the young princes being assigned governorships in various provinces of the empire. They departed from the Seraglio, escorted by their own harems. After the seventeenth century, however, with reforms in the inheritance laws that allowed the princes to live in the palace with their own women— albeit as captives of the Kafes (the Golden Cage)—the overall harem population increased to almost two thousand. But there seems to be a contradiction here, since we are told that the women in the harems of the Golden Cage were sterilized so that they would not produce offspring. At its zenith, the Ottoman Empire was vast, stretching from the Caucasus Mountains to the Persian Gulf, from the Danube to the Nile. The history of the Seraglio and its harem symbolizes the fluctuating fortunes of the empire. The great expense of upkeep, the ruthless rivalry among the women, intrigues that influenced political affairs, and, ultimately, the exquisite beauty of these women of many nationalities fascinated the entire world—but no outsider would be allowed behind its walls. Foreign ambassadors and traveling artists and writers reported accounts obtained from peddlers or servant women who had once lived there, but such narratives were often muddled by wishful exoticism. To this day, the reliability of these stories is difficult to ascertain.
The Ottoman Empire at the time of its greatest extent, in the late seventeenth century
ACQUISITION OF SLAVES Young girls of extraordinary beauty, plucked from the slave markets, were reserved for the Padishah’s court, often as gifts from his governors and foreign dignitaries. Also, among the singular, lasting privileges of the Valide sultana was the right to present her son with a new slave girl on the eve of Kurban Bayram (the festival of the sacrifice) each year. The girls were non-Moslems, uprooted at a tender age. The fair, doe-eyed beauties from the Caucasus region were the most in demand. These Circassians, Georgians, and Abkhazians were proud mountain girls, believed to be the descendants of the Amazon women who had lived in Scythia near the Black Sea (and who had swept down through Greece as far as Athens, waging a war that nearly ended the city’s glamorous history). Now they were being kidnapped or sold by impoverished parents. A
customs declaration from around 1790 establishes their worth quite clearly: “Circassian girl, about eight years old; Abyssinian virgin, about ten; fiveyear-old Circassian virgin; Circassian woman, fifteen or sixteen years old; about twelve-year-old Georgian maiden; medium tall Negro slave; seventeen-year-old Negro slave. Costs about 1000–2000 kurush.” In those days one could buy a horse for around 5000 kurush.
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Odalisque and Slave, 1842, Oil on canvas, 30 × 411⁄2 in. Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore
The promise of a life of luxury and ease overcame parental scruples against delivering their children into concubinage. Circassian and Georgian families often encouraged their daughters to pursue the path of slavery: “Circassians take their own children to the market, as a way of providing for them handsomely … but the blacks and Abyssinians fight hard for their liberty,” reported Lucie Duff Gordon in her 1864 travel diary.
TRAINING OF ODALISQUES Before admitting the slave girls into the Seraglio harem, trained eunuchs carefully examined them for physical imperfections, such as pregnancy. If a girl were found to be satisfactory, the chief eunuch presented her to the Valide sultana for her approval. Once confined within the Seraglio, her Christian name was replaced with a Persian one that suited her particular qualities. If she had rosy cheeks, they called her Gulbahar; if she had ivory skin, Akbeyaz. Immediately converted to Islam, the new odalisque began an arduous training in the palace etiquette and Islamic culture.
Rudolph Ernst, Idle Hours in the Harem, ca. 1900, Oil on panel, 253⁄8 × 321⁄8 in., Private collection
The word odalisque comes from oda (room) and means literally “woman of the room,” implying a general servant status. They were also called halayik or cariye. Odalisques with extraordinary beauty and talent began their training as would-be concubines—learning to dance, recite poetry, play musical instruments, and master the erotic arts. Twelve of the most attractive and gifted ones were selected as gedikli, the sultan’s personal
attendants, responsible for dressing and bathing him, doing his laundry, and serving his food and coffee. Gio Maria Angiolello, an Italian youth who was captured by Mehmed II and stayed in his service until the sultan’s death, wrote in his Historia Turchesca (1480) that these girls were taught writing and religion, and trained in skills like sewing, embroidery, playing musical instruments, and singing. They were gifted women.
A tableau vivant representing harem life of the nineteenth century at the Topkapi Palace
If the sultan was pleased with their services, he kept them for himself or— in the case of those who had not yet become his concubines—gave them as gifts to one of his high officials. According to Moslem etiquette, the official had to free the girl before marrying her. Their courtly charms and breeding, as well as their important connections within the Seraglio, made these women highly desirable. Some odalisques were placed in the service of the Valide sultana, the kadins, the sultan’s daughters, or the chief eunuchs. Girls endowed with sturdy bodies became servants or administrators. Each novice was assigned to the oda of a Kalfa, an important lady in charge of a particular harem department. These “cabinet ministers” had intriguing names, such as mistress of the robes, keeper of the baths, keeper of the jewels, reader of the Qur’an, keeper of the storerooms, mistress of the sherbets, and head of table service. It was not impossible for an odalisque to climb up the ladder of the hierarchy and achieve the highest ranks in the Imperial Harem. On the other hand, if she happened to lack any particular talent, or manifested undesirable qualities, she was likely to be resold in the slave market. SULTANAS The sultan was a godlike entity, before whom no one could speak or raise their eyes. Contrary to the myth of the sultan throwing a handkerchief at the girl he intended to spend the night with, the actual means of favoring an odalisque was both less casual and less flamboyant: the chief black eunuch secretly escorted the girl into his majesty’s chamber. Seventeenth-century traveler Sir Paul Rycaut writes: “If the Sultan was pleased with the cariye, he would put her under the custody of the Mistress of the House. Only after she earned high rank—becoming, for example, an Ikbal (favorite)—would her relationship to the sultan be publicized. The girl would be returned to the harem with just as pompous a ceremony as her admittance to the Sultan’s bed. She would be bathed ceremoniously and moved into a private apartment and given a barge, carriage, and slaves.”
Leon Bakst, Odalisque. Costume design for the Diaghilev ballet Scheherazade, which featured the legendary Karsavina and Nijinsky, 1910. Watercolor and gold on paper, Private collection
Leon Bakst, The Red Sultana, 1910, Watercolor, gouache, and gold on paper, Private collection
When a favorite gave birth to the sultan’s child, she was elevated to the position of kadin or Haseki sultana. If, perchance, the child was a boy and became the sultan, his mother became the Valide sultana—the ruler of the harem and the most powerful woman in the empire. A Moslem man believed that heaven lay beneath his mother’s feet. After all, he could have as many wives and slaves as he wanted, but he had only one mother. He entrusted her with his most private and personal possessions—his women. Competition for the coveted position of Valide was vicious, and the stakes were high. Constant rivalries and feuds kept hearts pounding, brains alert. A seventeenth-century document in the Topkapi Palace archives describes the rivalry between Gülnush Sultana and the odalisque Gülbeyaz that led to a tragic end. When Sultan Mehmed IV grew enamored with Gülbeyaz, the Haseki sultana Gülnush, who was still in love with the sultan, became madly jealous. One day, as Gülbeyaz was sitting on a rock and watching the sea, Gülnush quietly pushed her off the cliff into the water below. Royal motherhood provided immense power and wealth, but very little security or feeling of peace. For a woman, to conceive was only to begin a perilous journey of self-defense, requiring great wit and courage. The prying eyes of jealous rivals were keen, and the threat to the mother or the potential heir was an everyday reality. Since a young prince stayed in the harem with his mother and nursed until puberty, his mother lived in constant stress. Kösem Sultana’s conspiracy to assassinate a child prince, Sultan Mehmed IV, and Roxalena’s banishment of prince Mustafa are two examples we will discuss later. With the ascension of a new sultan, the wives of his predecessor, along with their entourages, were sent to the Old Palace, known as the Palace of Unwanted Ones or the Palace of Tears. Their apartments in the Seraglio were torn down, and new ones erected and decorated for the next occupants —not that those occupants were always satisfied with their accommodations, no matter how luxurious: Dearest Kalfa, I have heard from someone that she will be moving to the apartment which should be mine. No! As the earth is old, so do I want that apartment
myself. I cannot bear a younger woman occupying such a spacious place, and if our mighty master heard my plea he wouldn’t object. Please, convey this to the valide sultana with my deepest respects. Why should she move there and I stay where I am? I must insist on my seniority privileges. If this cannot be changed, I will simply not move to the Seraglio, I swear. But if she refuses to, that’s a whole other affair. I will die rather than to let her have that beautiful apartment. Letter from Behice Sultana to the Kalfa (mistress of the house) (1839) EUNUCHS To guard their women, sultans retained an immensely valuable corps of eunuchs, at times as many as eight hundred strong. Eunuchs were male prisoners of war or slaves, castrated before puberty and condemned to a life of servitude. The white eunuchs served in the Selâmlik, where the sultan met with other men. The black eunuchs looked after the women. The chief black eunuchs exercised great political power in court, serving as the most important link between the sultan and his mother. Officially his position was as important as that of the grand vizier. Since they were often witnesses to the most intimate secrets of the harem and also had access to the outer world of powerful men, the eunuchs were potentially the most corrupt element of palace society. Surrounded by women trained to arouse passion, they were forever confronted by the loss of sexual prowess. Some compensated by becoming skillful intriguers, thus translating resentment into vengeance, like the creature in Montesquieu’s Persian Letters: The Seraglio is my Empire; and my ambition, the only passion left in me, finds no small gratification. I mark with pleasure that my presence is required at all times; I willingly incur the hatred of all these women, because it establishes me more firmly in my post. And they do not hate me for nothing, I can tell you: I interfere with their most innocent pleasures; I am always in the way, an insurmountable obstacle; before they know where they are, they find their schemes frustrated.
The palace dwarf, also a eunuch, was a kind of court jester. Since he presented little threat to the male ego, he often was included in the most intimate situations: an eighteenth-century album of miniatures shows a dwarf entertaining a woman as she gives birth. DYNASTY The laws of inheritance decreed that the sultanate pass to the oldest living male member of the family, rather than from father to son. Mehmed the Conqueror, skilled in court intrigue, formulated the regulations that governed Ottoman policies for centuries. He sanctioned a sultan’s killing his male relatives to secure his throne for his own offspring—which resulted in atrocities, as in 1595, when Mehmed III’s nineteen brothers, some of them infants, were murdered at the instigation of his mother, and seven of his father’s pregnant concubines stuffed into sacks and thrown into the Sea of Marmara: After the burial of the princes, the populace gathered in crowds outside the palace to watch their mothers and the other wives of the dead sultan leave the palace. All the coaches, carriages, horses, mules of the palace were employed for this purpose. Besides the wives of the sultan, his twenty-seven daughters and over two hundred odalisques under the protection of eunuchs were taken to the Old Palace.… There, they could cry as much as they wished in mourning for their dead sons. Ambassador H. G. Rosedale, in Queen Elizabeth and the Levant Company (1604) THE GOLDEN CAGE In 1666, Selim II issued an edict that softened the Conqueror’s cruel decree, allowing the imperial princes to survive, but not to participate in any public activities during the life of the reigning sovereign. From then on, the princes were kept secluded in the Kafes (Golden Cage), an apartment adjoining the harem but separated from it by a gate called the Djinn’s Kapi (Genie’s Gate), which was off-limits to everyone else in the harem. The princes spent their lives in isolation, except for the company of a few concubines whose ovaries or uterus had been removed. If, through some
oversight, any woman became pregnant by an outcast prince, she was immediately drowned. Guards, whose eardrums had been perforated and tongues slit, served the princes. These deaf-mutes were guardians—as well as potential assassins. Life in the Golden Cage was racked by fear and endured in ignorance of events occurring outside. If a prince lived long enough to ascend to the throne, he was most likely unfit to rule an empire. When Murad IV died in 1640, his successor Ibrahim I was so terrified of the crowd trying to enter the Cage to proclaim him sultan that he barred the door and would not come out until Murad’s dead body was displayed. Süleyman II, during the thirtynine years he spent in the Kafes, became an ascetic and a master calligrapher. Later, as the sultan, he had a deep longing to return to his former isolation and solitude. Other princes, like Ibrahim I, indulged in spasms of violent debauchery, taking vengeance for their lost years. DEATH The lives of the harem women were short. Endless stories of brutal murders and poisonings spread to the rest of the world. Henry Lello, English ambassador to the Ottoman court in 1600, cited the impossibility of enumerating the intrigues in the harem. Women were drowned, seized by the chief black eunuch, who stuffed them in sacks, tied the neck tightly, loaded them in a rowboat, and assisted in throwing the sacks overboard. In 1665, some women in the court of Mehmed IV, accused of stealing the jewels from the cradle of one of the royal infants, started a fire to cover up the theft. The fire caused considerable damage in the harem and other parts of the Seraglio. The women were immediately strangled. A story goes around that Mehmed the Conqueror killed his own wife Irene with a stroke of his scimitar. Thus Irene became a martyr, and, like all martyrs, she was proclaimed a saint and consigned to paradise. “The fortunate fair who has given pleasure to her lord will have the privilege of appearing before him in paradise,” says the Qur’an. “Like the crescent moon, she will preserve all her youth and her husband will never look older or younger than thirty-one years.” Was Mehmed recalling these words when he took Irene’s life?
THE WORLD OF EXTREMES The Grand Seraglio, the Golden Cage, and the harem were worlds of extremes—frightened women plotting with men who were not men against absolute rulers who kept their relatives immured for decades. The setting was rife with conflict, and frequent tragedies touched the innocent as well as the guilty. The sultan, or Padishah, known as the King of Kings, the Unique Arbiter of the World’s Destinies, the Master of the Two Continents and the Two Seas, and Sovereign of the East and the West, was himself the product of a union between a king and a slave woman. His sons and the entire Ottoman dynasty shared the same fate—kings born of slave mothers, procreating offspring with more slave mothers. The Turks viewed these rapid changes in fortune, the flirtation of good and evil, as the workings of kismet or kader. They believed that a divine being had already shaped everyone’s personal destiny. Whether tragedy or luck touched life, it was kismet. The universal acceptance of kismet among slaves, as well as royalty, somewhat explains the acquiescence to the deprivations, tortures, and sudden misfortunes that occurred daily in the harem. The common suffering often led to great compassion among the inmates of the exalted household. Deep bonds grew alongside jealousies and rivalries among women. To survive the turmoil and intrigue, they built strong and trusting relationships. To me, these bonds are the harem’s most touching secrets. All that remains now of these women’s lives are latticed windows, labyrinthine corridors, marbled baths, and dusty divans. Still, tales of the women behind the veil live on, an echo of the pathos and the pleasure of the One Thousand and One Nights, a part of our memory and also a part of tonight.
Daily Life in the Sultan’s Harem
And slender-waisted [maidens] would visit us after the rest from their chambers, Plump their buttocks, wearing rings upon their waists, Shining their faces, closely veiled, restraining their glances, dark-eyed, Luxuriating in [heavenly] bliss, drenched in ambergris, Sweeping along the robes of [their] charms, and undergarments, and silk, Never seeing the sun save as a pendant [glimpsed] through the gaps of [their] curtains.… —Abu’l-Atahiya (748–825), Arab poet; translation by A. J. Arberry HAREM WALLS The old Turkish proverb, “Our private lives must be walled,” reflects an attitude of Ottoman society. Harems literally walled the women. The historian Dursun Bey wrote, “If the sun had not been female [Shems, the word for sun, is feminine], even she would never have been allowed to enter the harem.” Actually, Gülbeyaz, favorite of Mehmed IV, wrote in the seventeenth century that “The sun never visits us. My skin is like ivory.” Intimacies rarely found their way outside the walls; very few personal accounts of day-to-day life in the harem are available. To gain a sense of its domestic pace and private rhythms, we can only assemble fragments from numerous, often contradictory, sources. A beguiling image does slowly materialize. In the painting The White Slave by Lecomte de Nouy, a dark-haired beauty smokes a cigarette as she stares into empty space. What does she do on any given day, one day in an endless series melting into months and years, with only the harem walls to witness the passage of her life? What about the
chocolate-colored girl in the background, squeezing out a towel? What is she thinking about? In Frederick Goodall’s A New Light in the Harem, a woman reclines on a divan while a black nurse amuses a naked baby with a birdlike toy. What are this reclining woman’s dreams? Is she the child’s mother, whose life depends on the whim of one all-powerful ruler, the sultan, and one all-powerful God, Allah? How many of the harem women accepted their fate as “written in their foreheads,” after being captured or bought as slaves and forced to convert to Islam? We know from a collection of letters written by various sultanas, Harem’den Mektuplar (1450–1850), that there were literate women in the harem who never mastered the language of their captors. Did Christian and Jewish women secretly pray to their God, begging for deliverance from the punishment He had visited upon them? Did they live with the shame of believing their souls could never be redeemed? We have evidence that the black arts were practiced in the harem. Fortunetelling, magic, and Cabalism all had their secret and overt adepts. The women looked for ways to predict the future, to ease the present, and to exorcise the demons incubating within. And we hear of the rebels, women who succumbed to the passions of their hearts, risking affairs and plotting clandestine rendezvous with their lovers. There is a beautiful lacquered closet in Topkapi that has a moving tale attached to it. Ahmed II hears that one of his odalisques has been carrying on with a handsome youth who has been entering the harem surreptitiously. The sultan, enraged, lays a trap for the lovers. Taken by surprise, they flee in terror through the corridors of the harem with the sultan in hot pursuit. When they reach the quarters of the black eunuchs, the lovers disappear into a closet. Dagger drawn, the sultan follows them into the closet. To his astonishment, it is empty. No sign of the lovers anywhere. Convinced that a miracle has occurred, the sultan falls to his knees and breaks into tears. He orders the sacred closet decorated with gold and made into a shrine. But this kind of divine intercession rarely came for violators of the harem rules.
Anton Ignaz Melling, The Royal Harem, Etching reproduced in Views of Constantinople and the Bosphorous, ca. 1815. Melling was appointed architect to Hatice Sultana, favorite sister of Selim III. Although Melling’s drawing is imaginary, it does re-create the daily rituals and customs of harem life quite accurately.
Everything that happened behind the harem walls was tempered by a certain knowledge that once a woman passed through the Gates of Felicity, there was no returning. Let us step now through those gates, into the House of Felicity, the imperial harem of the Topkapi Palace.
Alphonse-Etienne Dinet, Moonlight at Laghouat (“Clair de lune à Laghouat”), 1897, Oil on canvas, 181⁄4 × 285⁄8 in., Musée Saint-Denis, Reims, France
GARDENS A forest of plane trees and cypresses, filled with roses, jasmine, and verbena, surrounded the gardens. Footpaths led to tiny ponds with floating water lilies and exotic fish, to gilded gazebos and kiosks to shade the stroller from the sun. The gardens were a playground for the women, some taking pleasure in gardening, others simply savoring a leisurely promenade on a warm day. Followed by an entourage of odalisques and eunuchs, the favorites wandered the paths, picking flowers and fruit, eating kebabs and halvah, playing childlike games. In his 1766 account, Observations sur le commerce, Jean-Claude Flachat describes such an outing: “When everything is ready, the sultan calls for the halvet [the seclusion of the area]. All the gates opening onto the palace gardens are closed. The Bostanjis [sultan’s bodyguards] keep sentinel duty outside, and the eunuchs inside. Sultanas come out of the harem and follow the sultan into the garden. Women materialize from all directions, like swarms of bees flying from the hive in search of honey, and pausing when they find a flower.”
John Frederick Lewis, In the Bey’s Garden, Asia Minor, 1865, Oil on canvas, 42 × 27 in., Harris Museum and Art Gallery, Preston, England
A. Passini, Promenade of the Harem, n.d., Lithograph, 61⁄2 × 101⁄2 in., Collection of the author
GAMES Most of the games that the odalisques are portrayed as playing seem extremely simpleminded and naive, intended more for small children than grown women—but then, the average age in the harem was seventeen. In a game called “Istanbul Gentlemen,” for example, one of the women dressed as a man, her eyebrows thickened with kohl, a mustache painted on, a hollowed-out watermelon or pumpkin placed on her head as a hat, and a fur coat reversed and slipped on. She sat on a donkey, facing backwards, one hand holding the tail and the other prayer beads made of onion or garlic cloves. Someone kicked the donkey, and off she went, giggling and trying to maintain her balance in a kind of mock rodeo. Another popular game was a form of tag. One of the girls fell into a pool, pretending she had slipped. As she struggled to climb out, the others tried pushing her back in. If she succeeded in getting out, she chased after the other women, trying to push them into the water. The sultan watched this childish spectacle from his private quarters, often selecting his next favorite.
In another game, which outlasted the harem itself, one of the girls was blindfolded and the others asked, “Beauty or ugliness?” The blindfolded girl chose, and the other girls struck the appropriate poses. When the time was up, she removed the blindfold and selected her favorite player, who started the ritual all over again. Some daughters of the sultan played with Circassian slave girls they had received as gifts, like live dolls—bathing them, braiding their hair, making clothes for them with the help of their own royal mothers. They taught them things that only a princess should know. When these child-dolls grew up, they often became the attendants of the princesses, accompanying them into their new homes after the princesses were married.
Anton Ignaz Melling, Second View of the Bosphorous, taken from Kandilly, Etching reproduced in Views of Constantinople and the Bosphorous, ca. 1815
POOLS During the hot and humid summer months, the women amused themselves in a large marble pool containing small kayiks (rowboats). In another, they
splashed and lounged while black eunuchs kept guard. Murad III, a renowned womanizer exceptional even among sultans, watched from behind the arabesques as the naked girls frolicked in the water. Often he invented new games for them. These hours of passionate voyeurism must have had a stimulating effect, since he sired 103 children.
Jean-Léon Gérôme, Terrace of the Seraglio, 1886?, Photogravure, 7 × 10 in., Collection of the author
Ibrahim I is said to have thrown pearls and rubies into the water, enticing the girls to dive for them. During his reign, the chief black eunuch had bought a slave girl, supposedly a virgin. But shortly after she entered the harem, her belly began to grow, and she soon gave birth to a little boy. About the same time, Turhan Sultana, the first kadin, also gave birth to a boy. The slave girl was employed as the wet nurse for the young prince Mehmed and moved into the royal harem with her baby son. The sultan was so taken with this healthy and robust little boy, who seemed like such a contrast to his own anemic and fragile son, that he began neglecting the
little prince and favoring the slave girl’s son. When Turhan Sultana complained, Ibrahim became enraged. He tore the young prince from his mother’s arms and threw him into the pool. Mehmed survived, but he had a scar on his forehead from this incident all his life. RIDDLES AND STORIES It is easy to picture the women taking their leisure by the pools, endlessly chatting with each other for diversion, playing childish games, talking of cennet (heaven) and cehennem (hell), telling tales of fairies and giants. Younger women were spellbound by the narratives of old crones, who would concoct Persian fairy tales and love stories such as Leyla and Mejnun, a tale of the search for a lost beloved, who often turned up in animal form.
Conrad Kiesel, The Daughters of the Sheik, ca. 1889, Photogravure, 8 × 111⁄2 in., Collection of the author
The storytelling ritual always ended with, “Three apples have fallen from the sky; one belongs to the storyteller, the second to the listeners, and the third to me.” The “me” is presumably the protagonist of the story, with whom the listeners identified. After sunset and before sunrise, women were not allowed outdoors. That’s when the stories were born. It may be that the women told stories to each other in order to ease insomnia. They also told riddles, which often ended with a threat if the riddle was not solved. Yellow like saffron, Reads like the Qur’an; Either you’ll solve this riddle, Or tonight your death will take you. This riddle is supposed to have originated in the fifteenth century. When my great aunt asked it of me—I was ten years old—I was unable to come up with an answer. All evening, I was mortified that Azrael, the angel of death, was peeking over my left shoulder. My grandmother, sensing my terror, whispered “gold” in my ear, thereby delivering me from premature expiration.
Zehra and I, 1953
POETRY The women’s dissociation from the world, the surroundings, the quality and pace of their secluded existence lent themselves to poetic expression.
Tragedy, suffering, denial, unrequited love were the most common themes. Hatibullah Sultana, the sister of Mahmud II, was banished to a yali (seaside villa) on the Bosphorus as a result of political differences with her brother. Her last poem, “The Song of Death,” is a prophetic and visionary verse that alludes to taking poison and gives the impression that she herself had already chosen her own end: “The River [Bosphorus] is bitter to those who drink its water,” she wrote. There is an anonymous poem carved into the wall of the harem dungeon, written by a lamenting odalisque who was imprisoned for stealing a cheap mirror. She turned her tears into cryptic verse: For a two-bit Mirror lost, This sitting here is caught By the men of the century. It seems that poet sultanas passed their gift to their sons: out of thirty-four sultans, eleven were distinguished poets. There was a poem my grandmother often recited, with tears in her eyes and a quiver in her voice, that always remained with me. Although the words from Old Turkish were incomprehensible, the emotions were not. It evokes the image of a lonely young woman who sits behind the lattices, recalling the faraway Caucasus Mountains: Felek husnun diyarinda, Cuda Kuldu bizi shimdi. Aramizda yuce daglar, Iraktan merhaba shimdi.
Fate, in the land of love, Separates us now. Mighty mountains between us, Greetings from faraway now.
Zehra, shortly after she was widowed, with her sons Sadri—my father (left)—and Aladdin.
PRAYER Moslem women performed ablutions—washing face, feet, hands, and arms up to the elbows—before prayer. They covered their heads and laid a special prayer rug on the floor, and then began prayer by pressing the open palms of their hands over face and eyes, thus shutting out all evil. First, they made an initial bow toward the South, the direction of Mecca, and began the sequence of bending, kneeling, touching the forehead to the ground, and resting back on the heels while their lips moved in silent recitation. Since knees, hands, feet, nose, and forehead must touch the ground during prayer, it was a physical as well as a spiritual exercise—much like yoga. SECRETS OF FLOWERS AND BIRDS In John Frederick Lewis’s painting An Intercepted Correspondence, we see a woman caught with a bouquet of flowers. Her act creates a commotion, suggesting an illicit message from a secret lover. Each flower would have been assigned a symbolic meaning. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who had the privilege of being a guest in a harem, was intrigued with this form of communication and later popularized it in England, where it spread like an epidemic. Books were published deciphering the secret message and healing power of each flower and explaining how to communicate through flowers. English ladies quickly adopted the prescribed techniques to aid their own amorous encounters. The Seraglio also had a substantial menagerie. Children loved playing in the Elephant House, filled with lions, tigers, leopards, and all sorts of other wild beasts, including, of course, elephants. The sultans gave their wives and odalisques monkeys, storks, exotic birds, and gazelles as pets. The seventeenth-century transcendental poets, like Nedim and Baki, likened beautiful girls to gazelles. The gardens boasted coveys of nightingales, canaries, and doves. Colorful parrots and macaws cackled secrets from the private rooms. Abdülhamid II was obsessed with parrots, believing the birds could warn him of evil forces threatening his household. In his Yildiz Palace, cages of different birds filled each room and peaco*cks wandered the gardens like fantastic watchdogs, intimidating unwanted visitors.
Of all the birds, nightingales were most precious. “Even in a golden cage, the nightingale yearns for its native land,” says an old proverb. For all we know, the nightingale in this eighteenth-century fable may be a prince imprisoned in the Cage: Once a nightingale loved a rose, and the rose, aroused by its song, woke trembling on her stem. It was a white rose, like all the roses at that time, innocent and virginal. As it listened to the song, something in its rose heart stirred. Then the nightingale came ever so near the trembling rose and whispered, “Ben seviyorum seni gul, gul.” At those words, the little heart of the rose blushed, and in that instant, pink roses were born. Then, the nightingale came closer and closer, and though Allah, when he created the world, meant that the rose alone should never know earthly love, the rose opened its petals and the nightingale stole its virginity. In the morning, the rose turned red in its shame, giving birth to red roses. Since then the nightingale comes nightly to ask for divine love, the rose trembles at the voice of the nightingale but its petals remain closed, for Allah never meant rose and bird to mate. OPIUM Opium is distilled from the white poppy, which grows abundantly in Asia Minor. In its simplest form, it is black putty, sometimes mixed with hashish and spices. More elaborate preparations added ambergris, musk, and other essences. For important persons in the palace, opium was concocted into a jewelry paste, with pulverized pearls, lapis lazuli, rubies, and emeralds. The sultan’s opium pills, of course, were gilded, possibly the origin of the phrase, altin ilac. Was gilding the pill, the Turkish equivalent of gilding the lily? Most commonly used as a sedative for pain, opium produced euphoric sensations. Some of the sultans and their women took it for the keyf (ultimate fulfillment) brought on by the drowsy peace of the sated senses. The women are portrayed inhaling hookahs, the “elixir of the night.” Amnesia followed; night after night of this induced chronic insomnia. The women began forgetting their distant homes, their lives before the Seraglio. In order to remember, they told stories to one another. At first it was a
thousand nights of stories, but even numbers brought bad luck, so they added one. SONG AND DANCE The Hunkar sofasi (Hall of the Sultan) is the most spacious and elegant room in the harem, long and rectangular. At one end is a dais over which hangs a balcony. In this room, the sultans received their harem for pleasure and entertainment. One can imagine the Padishah sitting on a throne under a baldachin, dressed in scarlet robes edged with sable. The dagger at his waist is studded with diamonds, a white aigrette in his turban holds in place a cluster of emeralds and rubies, and his bejeweled nargileh (water pipe) is at his side. Before the throne is a carpet embroidered by the harem ladies themselves. The Valide sultana, kadins, and favorites rest on magnificent cushions. A group of odalisques, prohibited from sitting in the presence of the sultan, lean motionless against the wall. The beauty of these women, their exquisite silk and satin costumes enhanced with the most precious jewelry, the opulence of the furniture, all rival the wildest exaggerations of the One Thousand and One Nights.
Hunkar sofasi, the Hall of the Sultan, where the harem women entertained the sultans
Mukaddes (dancer on the right) and Muazzez (sitting on her right) with women friends in the courtyard of their house
Here, sazende (female musicians) performed on the balcony, while chengis (dancing girls) swayed before their lord. Dressed in low-necked muslin blouses, velvet vests, and voluminous skirts that opened like fans, they whirled around. The dances were performed in groups of twelve: the leader, ten dancers, and an apprentice. And the performance always ended with the dancers trying to reach a crystal ball suspended from the ceiling next to the throne. The sultan gave gifts to the girls who succeeded.
Three sazende (female musicians), ca. 1890
Selim III was a very fine musician and poet. During his reign (1789–1807) French dancing-masters and musicians were allowed into the outer courts of the harem to teach the girls—novices who had not yet converted to Islam— how to dance. When love affairs began flaring up between the odalisques and their music teachers, the sultans made sure the girls were never left alone with them; they studied in groups, chaperoned by eunuchs.
Henri Siemiradski, The Song of the Slave, n.d., Photogravure, 12 × 71⁄2 in., Collection of the author
Sometimes male actors and mimes were invited to perform for the women —always carefully blindfolded, however. The Wilder Shores of Love (1954), a collection of fictionalized biographies by Lesley Blanch, contains a story about the Debureau family (the subject of Marcel Carné’s magnificent 1945 film Children of Paradise): In 1810, the Debureau family, a Paris troupe famous for their thrilling acrobatic and pantomime acts, was invited to appear before the Sultan. What transpired was a rather peculiar form of theatre: They were ushered through the sumptuous halls into a mirrored pavilion. Absolute silence reigned: it was completely deserted.… The acrobats were mystified. How could they divine that from behind slits in a brocaded curtain the Harem elite were watching? As they hesitated, a turbaned negro motioned them to begin their act. In silence, they spread out their threadbare strip of druggeting, pitiable against the Seraglio’s Persian carpets. They went through their act, proceeding to its climax, a human pyramid. Father stood on uncle, brother supported cousin. Greatly daring, the young Debureau topped the whole swaying edifice, balanced on a ladder. … From the summit, Debureau could look down over the curtain, into the forbidden paradise below. Here the Sultan’s ladies were gathered, “the voluptuous odalisques of the Seraglio … whose very regard could lead to death.” His eyes met those of an unveiled odalisque. Overcome, he crashed to the ground, bringing the whole performance to an ignoble finish. SHADOW PUPPETS Shadow world loved shadow plays. Karagöz was an extremely popular shadow-puppet show, full of robustly lewd antics handed down from one generation to another, surviving well into the twentieth century. Sabri Esat Siyavuşgil describes it: The small screen of thin transparent cloth, hung about with handsome carpets to further conceal the mysterious puppet world behind it; illuminated but motionless, and adorned only with a large picture exquisitely cut and brilliantly colored. Sometimes this picture depicted a
galley whose oars, illuminated by the flickering candlelight, created an illusion of movement; sometimes it would be a basket of flowers in a design so stylized as to evoke an admiring thrill from any abstractionist artist; and again, it might be a marvelous and incredible seraglio, tottering and fit to collapse at the first passionate sigh of its odalisques, or burst of rage from its eunuchs. Karagöz plays were satirical shows with stock characters, often political. The play entitled The Great Marriage, for example, is a parody of arranged marriages in which the engaged couple do not see each other until the wedding night. The play ridicules this custom, which frequently caused a catastrophic row the day after. Chelebi has the laudable intention of marrying off his brother, the town drunkard, to make him give up his vice. Chelebi brings in Karagöz—always an abrasive male character—to play the role of the bride. A traditional wedding takes place, and the drunkard finds himself united in matrimony with a bearded creature. Confronted by this un appealing prospect, he promises to renounce his vice if the nightmare will only end. SHOPPING Occasionally, women were given the privilege of driving in their latticed arabas (carriages) to the bazaars. The araba would arrive at the gates of the market, where merchants displayed fabrics, scarves, ribbons, and slippers, and the eunuchs would purchase them. More often, peddlers brought such commodities in large bundles to the Seraglio, where the eunuchs greeted them at the gate, checked the bundles, and presented the goods to the women inside. Fabrics purchased were sent to the palace tailor or dressmaker, who kept a record of everyone’s measurements. Sometimes, female merchants, mostly Jewish women, were allowed inside the private apartments, bringing not only goods but also gossip from the outside. It was not uncommon for Christian merchants to marry Jewish women so that they could corner the harem market, or for these “bundle women” to become intermediaries for clandestine affairs and palace intrigues.
EXCURSIONS, VISITS, AND OUTINGS During the reign of Mahmud II (1808–39), a breath of “liberalism” stirred in the air. His mother, Nakshedil Sultana, is assumed to be the legendary Aimée de Rivery, a French girl from Martinique (and cousin to Josephine Bonaparte) who had been kidnapped by Levantine pirates on her way back to convent school in France. Sold to the Bey of Algiers, who gave her as a gift to Sultan Abdülhamid I, Aimée made the best of her unexpected destiny, slowly endearing herself to the sultan and eventually becoming the Valide sultana. During her reign, elements of French culture and etiquette insinuated themselves into the harem. Women like Aimée de Rivery helped loosen social structures in the harem, allowing for considerably more freedom to venture outside. Although heavily guarded by their eunuchs, the women were allowed to picnic at the Sweet Waters of Asia or Europe, two of the lovely estuaries opening into the Bosphorus. In a Preziosi painting we glimpse the fountain in the Sweet Waters, built by the queen mother Aimée de Rivery herself.
Amadeo Count Preziosi, The Sweet Waters of Europe, ca. 1845, Watercolor on paper, Private collection
The Sweet Waters of Europe, Goksu, was a vast, grassy field along the confluence of the two streams that form the Golden Horn. There, in the shade of walnuts, terebinths, palm trees, and sycamores that made a succession of leafy pavilions, women gathered in circular groups, surrounded by their slaves, eunuchs, and children. In the nineteenth century, pavilions and kiosks built by the sultans to entertain their harems became favorite flirting grounds for the aristocracy.
Postcard showing the Sweet Waters of Asia, ca. 1900
The women took kayiks along the stream for pleasure trips down the Bosphorus to the Sweet Waters of Asia, the meadow surrounding the Küçüksu stream. Like the Sweet Waters of Europe, it was a popular resort full of lovely yalis (seaside villas). In the meadow, people gathered to enjoy the fresh air; their lavish picnics included roast lamb cooked on spits over an open fire, corn-on-the-cob boiled in enormous black iron cauldrons, acrobats, puppet shows, dancing bears, gypsy fortune-tellers, Bulgarian shepherds playing on their pipes—all amid a field of tulips and hyacinths, gently swaying to the rhythm of the wind. Such pleasure trips made the harem come alive with excitement. When the day for an outing arrived, the secretary made the announcement and the harem began to reverberate with activity. The women, all dressed in the same color—as required—left in carriages with drawn curtains. They brought along pitchers inlaid with gems and filled with sherbets to quench their thirst, and chanta (velvet bags embroidered with gold or silver) containing handkerchiefs, baksheesh (tip money), alms for beggars, and
hand mirrors used in adjusting their veils. Eunuchs on horseback led the entourage and drew up ranks on both sides of the procession. The most important women occupied the forward and rear carriages, with novices riding in the middle. Occasionally, the women, accompanied by the ever-present eunuchs, took rides into the country, stopping by cool streams to refresh themselves. Popular minstrels and dancers entertained them, but, of course, a curtain always separated the performers from their audience. Sometimes the procession stopped at one of the villas along the way, where the women rested, recited their afternoon prayers, or sat in a gazebo eating fruit from the gardens and yogurt made by famous yogurt makers.
Harem women on an excursion in an araba (carriage)
When they returned to the palace, they embellished stories of their adventures for those who had stayed behind. They spun yarns about what they had eaten and whom they had seen, gossiping about things that had not happened but that nevertheless added romance to their lives.
In an interview recorded on the last day of her life (published in Haremin Içyüzü, 1936), Leyla Saz, poet, musician, and harem woman (1850–1936), describes an exquisite outing: How did you entertain yourself when you were young? Music. And dance? In the palace, we also danced. Prince Murad played the piano and his sister and I would dance the Polka. But our real joy was enjoying the simplicity of nature. We could run away from the city noise and throw ourselves into the water under the moon … Sweet Waters of Asia, Sweet Waters of Europe. Between Bebek and Emirgan [two small towns on the Bosphorus], there were hundreds of kayiks and women in silk and diaphanous veils like apparitions. I can never forget those beautiful days. The crystal voices [of the singers] licked the shores of the Bosphorus, trembling and dying into the water. We hid our emotions even from the moon, closed our eyes, and slipped into a reverie. The dawn found us like this. The painted and gilded kayiks of those days were luxurious boats with brocaded cushions, Oriental rugs, or velvet carpets richly embroidered in silver or gold, crimson or purple. They rowed up and down the Bosphorus, escorted by a sparkling shoal of jeweled fish ornaments, hirame, attached to the boats by chains, trailing from the stern and out over the surface of the water in a fan of splendor. FESTIVALS AND SPECIAL DAYS On the Persian New Year, nevruz, celebrated during the spring equinox, the grand vizier and other important ministers presented gifts to the sultan. In the harem, the women offered their own felicitations and received gifts from the sultan. In 1554, a Dutch envoy who visited Istanbul brought back to Holland something that would change the nature of its national identity. Ogier Busbecq stumbled upon a secret on the shores of the Sweet Waters of Asia: a field of strange flowers. He had never seen anything like it before, and
when he expressed his awe, someone presented him with a sack of bulbs. In the autumn, he planted them on the flats near his home in Holland, and in the early spring, tulips of all colors sprouted. People came from all over to see this miracle, and grew obsessed. Tulipomania spread throughout the Netherlands, almost leading the nation to bankruptcy. Carriages full of bulbs left Istanbul in 1562, arriving at their destination a few months later. This tradition continues to this day. Every summer a carriage loaded with a variety of tulip bulbs treks from Istanbul to Holland—though, over the years, the Dutch have developed their own hybrids. The name of the flower is derived from the Turkish nickname for it, tulbend, meaning turban. Istanbul was seized with its own tulipomania years later, during the early eighteenth century, known as the Reign of the Tulip. Sultan Ahmed III, who ruled from 1703 to 1730, and his grand vizier Ibrahim shunned war and focused on cultural enlightenment, building summer palaces along the Sweet Waters designed in both Persian and European architectural styles. Beds of tulips and myriad other flowers decorated gardens in a wild riot of colors. Istanbul glowed, and entertainments of unforgettable splendor took place, inspiring great literature. A new level of refinement was attained in the miniature painting for which Ottoman artists of this period, like Levni, are celebrated. JeanClaude Flachat, the French manufacturer to the sultan, gives a colorful account of a tulip fête in Observations sur le commerce (1766): It takes place in April. Wooden galleries are erected in the courtyard of the New Palace. Vases of tulips are placed on either side of these rows in the form of an amphitheater. Torches and, from the topmost shelves, cages of canaries hang, with glass balls full of colored water, alternating with the flowers. The reverberation of the light is as lovely a spectacle in the daytime as at night. The wooden structures around the courtyard, arbors, towers and pyramids are beautifully decorated and a feast to the eye. Art creates illusion, harmony brings this lovely place to life, enabling one to reach the mirage of one’s own dreams. The Sultan’s kiosk is in the center; here the gifts sent by the palace dignitaries are on display. The source of their origin is explained to His
Highness. It is an opportunity to see eagerness to please. Ambition and rivalry strive to create something new. What may be lacking in originality is replaced with magnificence and richness. On several occasions, the chief eunuch has described to me how the women display all their skills on such festive occasions as this, in order to obtain something they desire or to entertain everyone.… Each strives to distinguish herself. They are full of charms, each with the same objective. … One has never seen elsewhere to what lengths the resources of the intellect can go with women who want to seduce a man through vanity. The graceful dancing, melodic voices, harmonious music, elegant costumes, witty conversation, the ecstasies, the femininity and love—the most voluptuous, I might add that the most artful of coquetries of lust are displayed here. DISENCHANTMENT In the late nineteenth century, during the conservative reign of Abdülhamid II, the music ended and the frolicking stopped. Beset with paranoid fears of assassination, the sultan banned all gatherings, including musical performances, kayik excursions, and dances. Heavy black veils replaced the diaphanous yashmak. His reign became a period of social mourning. In Turkey Today (1908), Grace Ellison, a British feminist and journalist, records one woman’s response to this sad development. Halide Edip’s words (1914) speak of the pall that must have descended over all harems, deprived of the distractions that made the life of a captive tolerable: We are idle and useless and therefore, very unhappy. Women are sorely needed everywhere; there is work that we can all do, but the customs of the country will not allow us to do it. Had we possessed the blind fatalism of our grandmothers, we would probably suffer less, but with culture, as so often happens, we began to doubt the wisdom of the faith which would have been our consolation. We analyzed our life and discovered nothing but injustice and cruelty, unnecessary sorrow. Resignation and culture cannot go together. How can I impress upon you the anguish of our everyday life—our continual haunting dread? No one can imagine the sorrow of a Turkish
woman’s life but those who, like ourselves, have led this life. Sorrow indeed belongs to Turkish women; they have bought the exclusive rights with their very souls. Could the history of any country be more terrible than the reign we are living? You will say I am morbid; perhaps I am, but how can it be otherwise when the best years of my life have been poisoned? You ask how we spend the day! Dreaming, principally. What else can we do? The view of the Bosphorus with the ships coming and going is the consolation to us captives. The ships to us are fairy godmothers who will take us away one day, somewhere we know not—but we gaze at the beautiful Bosphorus through the latticed windows and thank Allah for at least this pleasure in life. Unlike most harem women, I write.… This correspondence is the dream side of my existence and in moments of extra despair and revolt, for we are always unhappy, I take refuge in this correspondence addressed to no one in particular. And yet in writing, I risk my life. What do I care? Listen to this: How I hate Western education and culture for the suffering it has brought me! Why should I have been born in a harem rather than one of those free Europeans about whom I read? Why should fate have chosen certain persons rather than others for this eternal suffering? Sometimes we sing, accompanying our Eastern music on the Turkish lute. But our songs are all in the minor key, our landscapes are all blotted out in sadness and sometimes the futility and unending sorrow of our lives rise up and choke us and cause the tears to flow, but often our life is too soul-crushing even for tears and nothing but death can alter this. Like a true daughter of my race, I start the day with “good resolutions.” I will do something to show that I have at least counted the hours as they drag themselves past! Night comes, my dadi [old nurse] comes to undress me and braid my hair.… I tumble onto my divan and am soon fast asleep, worn out with the exertion I have not even made.
Zeyneb Hanim, one of the women who inspired Pierre Loti’s harem novel, The Disenchanted
Costume and Finery
A thousand nymphs with many a sprightly glance Form’d round the radiant wheels an airy dance Celestial shapes! in fluid light array’d Like twinkling stars their beamy sandals play’d; Their lucid mantles glitter’d in the sun, (Webs half so bright the silkworm never spun) Transparent robes, that bore the rainbow’s hue, And finer than the nets of pearly dew That morning spreads o’er every opening flower. —Sir William (Oriental) Jones, The Seven Fountains (1772) Throughout the centuries, the harem was like a grand stage set, with the players performing in an extravagant costume drama. The sixteenth-century Kanun-name (Book of Laws) detailed the rules governing the customs and formalities of court dress and etiquette, and each ceremony became an occasion for displaying the most splendid costumes imaginable. The sultan never saw a woman wearing the same dress more than once.
Ayhan, posing in a traditional wedding dress of red velvet embroidered with gold
From the rare personal accounts by harem women, from reports of those who stole glimpses of the harem, from the description of one who befriended a eunuch, and from the marketplace gossip of the clothes dealers and vendors, we learn of rich gold and silver brocades, of fine satins and tricolored cloth, of velvets, silks, extraordinary jewels, and accessories. In 1717, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu described a girdle as broad as the broadest English ribbon, entirely covered with diamonds. Round her neck she wore three chains which reached to her knees; one of large pearls, at the bottom of which hung a fine colored emerald as big as a turkey egg; another consisting of two hundred emeralds closely joined … every one as large as a half-crown piece.… But her earrings eclipsed all the rest. They were two diamonds, shaped exactly like pears, as large as a big hazelnut.… She had four strings of pearls, the whitest and most perfect in the world, at least enough to make four necklaces, every one as large as the duch*ess of Marlborough’s. Lady Mary also wrote of large diamond bracelets, a gigantic ruby surrounded by twenty drops of clear diamond, and a headdress covered with “bodkins of emeralds and diamonds.” This dazzling extravaganza culminated in “five rings … the largest I ever saw in my life. It is for jewelers to compute the value of these things … but I am sure that no European Queen has half the quantity.” In a letter to her sister, Lady Mar, dated April 1, 1717, Lady Montagu described the clothes she herself wore when visiting the women of the sultan’s harem: The first piece of my dress is a pair of drawers, very full, that reach to my shoes, and conceal the legs more modestly than your petticoats. They are of rose-coloured damask, brocaded with silver flowers. My shoes are of white kid leather, embroidered with gold. Over this hangs my smock, of fine white silk gauze, edged with embroidery. This smock has wide sleeves, hanging half way down the arm, and is closed at the neck with a diamond button; but the shape and colour of the bosom very well to be distinguished through it. The antery is a waistcoat, made close to the
shape, of white and gold fringe, and should have diamond or pearl buttons. My caftan, of the same stuff with my drawers, is a robe exactly fitted to my shape, and reaching to my feet, with very long straight falling sleeves. Over this is the girdle, of about four fingers broad which all that can afford have entirely of diamonds or other precious stones; those who will not be at that expense have it of exquisite embroidery on satin; but it must be fastened before with a clasp of diamonds. The curdee is a loose robe they throw off or put on according to the weather, being of a rich brocade (mine is green and gold), either lined with ermine or sables; the sleeves reach very little below the shoulders. The headdress is composed of a cap, called kalpock which is in winter of fine velvet embroidered with pearls or diamonds, and in summer of a light shining silver stuff. This is fixed on one side of the head, hanging a little way down with a gold tassel, and bound on, either with a circle of diamonds or a rich embroidered handkerchief. On the other side of the head, the hair is laid flat; and here the ladies are at liberty to show their fancies; some putting flowers, others a plume of heron’s feathers, and in short, what they please; but the most general fashion is a large bouquet of jewels, made like natural flowers; that is, the buds of pearl; the rose, of different coloured rubies; the jessamines, of diamonds; the jonquils, of topazes, etc., so well set and enamelled, ’tis hard to imagine anything of that kind so beautiful. The hair hangs at its full length behind, divided into tresses braided with pearl or ribbon, which is always in great quantity. In a letter written on March 9, 1850, from Egypt, Florence Nightingale related a visit to a far more humble harem: Oh! What a curious sight it was—the incongruities!—the principal lady, the married sister, dressed like an Oriental queen, but without a shift or anything which could be washed, next to her skin, and sitting upon the mud floor—no furniture but a slave—and the square holes for windows stuffed with mats. The mother was baking downstairs; and two slave wives peeked in at the door. I never saw anything so beautiful, so really beautiful, as the woman’s dress—of course it was her only one:— Cachmire trousers, of a delicate small pattern—a yelek, with hanging
sleeves of exquisite Bursa silk, crimson and white, trimmed with gold binding,—a tob, with immense sleeves of lilac silk,—and over it (for the Arab never wears her gayest clothes outside) a purple gauze drapery embroidered with silver, and veil of same color, embroidered in silks; and withal she had the carriage of an empress. In I Costumi et i modi particolari de la vita de Turchi (1545), the Renaissance traveler Bassano da Zara describes women dressed richly in silk, with lined cloaks sweeping to the ground and laced-up boots fitting tight to the ankle. All had trousers and chemises of very fine linen or muslin, some white and some dyed red, yellow, or blue. On their heads they wore small round caps embroidered with satin, damask, or silk, and under these, colored strips of thin silk as wide as a priest’s stole, with a little fringe at the edges. Some preferred caps of velvet or brocade, to which a stole was attached. Some wore two caps, a small white one with another of silk on top.
A Turkish noblewoman in nineteenth-century costume
In a 1599 account contained in Early Voyages and Travels in the Levant, Thomas Dallam recalled the sight of thirty concubines spied through a grate in the harem wall: These wore upon theire heads nothinge bute a little capp of clothe of goulde, which did but cover the crowne of her heade; no bandes a boute their neckes, nor anthinge but faire cheans of pearle and a juell hanging on their breste, and juels in their ears; their coats were like a souldier’s mandilyon [a buttoned cloak], some of reed sattan and som of blew, and some of other collors, and girded like a lace of contraire color; they wore britchis of scamatie, fine clothe made of cotton woll, as whyte as snow and as fine as lane [muslin], for I could desarne the skin of their this through it. These britchis cam done to their mydlege; som of them did weare fine cordovan buskins, and som had their legs naked, with a goulde ringe on the smale of her legg; on her foute a velvet panttoble [shoe] 4 or 5 inches hie. I stood so longe loukinge upon them that he which had showed me all this kindness began to be verrie angrie with me. He made a wrye mouthe, and stamped with is foute to make me give over looking; to which I was verrie lothe to bow, for that sighte did please me wondrous well. Outdoors they always wore the veil. Bassano da Zara described it in I Costumi et i modi particolari de la vita de Turchi: They wear a towel (a cloth or woolen underscarf) round the neck and head, so that one can only see their eyes and mouth, and these they cover with a thin silk scarf a palm’s width each way, through which they can see and not be seen by others. The scarf is fastened with three pins to a suitable part of the head above the forehead, so that when they go through the streets and meet other women, they raise the scarf that hangs over their faces and kiss one another. The extravagant beauty of the women in the harem and their elaborate costumes were concealed in public, where they dressed with uniform drabness. On a rare boat trip to the Sweet Waters or on a shopping excursion to the Grand Bazaar, harem women became ghosts of their former beauty, dressed in the feradge, a long, square tunic with loose
sleeves, like a shapeless black cape falling from the shoulders to the feet, concealing everything. Rich women and members of the royal harem wore silk feradges in pink or lilac, with a lining of black or white satin and ornamentation of tassels, braiding, and velvet edging.
A woman wearing a feradge
PASSING OF THE VEIL
By tradition the veil signifies harem, sanctuary—still a powerful taboo. The Qur’an enjoins women believers to cover their faces and bodies from men, in order to prevent temptation. Gradually, the “Passing of the Veil” became an institution, marking the rite of passage from girlhood to womanhood and representing protection of virtue. As soon as a girl first menstruated, her face was veiled. From that point on, no man, except her close male relatives, was allowed to see her countenance. In traditional Islamic cultures, most women would sooner stand naked in a marketplace than uncover their faces. For the face is inviolate. As only the eyes are visible above the veil, immense meaning has to be conveyed by a mere glance. In Rama Mehta’s 1977 novel, Inside the Haveli, wearing a veil did have advantages. It allowed the wearer “to think while others talked, see everyone and yet not be seen by them.” After the conquest of Constantinople in 1453, the ladies of the harem insisted on a modification of their costume and obtained permission to wear the yashmak of the Byzantine women instead of the linen mask with two holes for the eyes. The yashmak was a diaphanous veil exclusive to Constantinople, made of two pieces of fine muslin (in the nineteenth century, tarlatan) which was folded across or left as a single thickness. One piece was bound around the head like a bandage, over the forehead down to the eyebrows, knotted just above the nape of the neck and left to fall over the back, reaching to the waist. The other covered the lower part of the face and was tied together in such a way with the first as to give the illusion of a single veil. It was either tucked in underneath the feradge or attached to the other piece at the nape of the neck. The translucency partially and tantalizingly revealed the facial features behind it. However, a woman was extremely careful not to expose the nose, which would identify her as an infidel or a prostitute. During the nineteenth century, the “jealous Turks” added a final touch to the veiling of their women—gloves—thereby hiding the final vestige of flesh, save the eyes.
A woman wearing a yashmak
A family member wearing a yashmak and carrying a chanta
The seventeenth-century Turkish writer Sinan Chelebi recorded this jewellike vignette in his Saadabad: Two beauties, one in lemon yellow, the other in pink, were going towards the green meadow in their glittering picnic carriages. Their yashmaks were crystal clear, their cheeks like roses, their necks like silver, their hair
like hyacinths. They were not afraid of the evil eye falling on them as they moved in tiny steps like beautiful doves in their chedik shoes. The cedik, or chedik, was a shoe or slipper-boot for strolling in the garden; it was high in front, usually made of yellow Moroccan leather but sometimes made of velvet or other soft fabrics. The Prophet Mohammed considered beautiful hands the most seductive part of a woman’s body. To compensate for being almost completely shrouded, women could make use of their hands and their eyes, their only visible assets. With a subtle gesture they could speak a thousand words. Sunshades, parasols, and fans offered protection not only from the elements but also from the curious glances of strangers. Parasols had lace tops, beads, and flowers; some featured ribs of gold studded with sapphires. Fans were made of peaco*ck or ostrich feathers and adorned with diamonds, rubies, and emeralds, their handles of tortoiseshell, ivory, or mother-ofpearl. The indoor fan, which every guest room offered, was made of date leaves with an ivory handle. The mendil (handkerchief) had a special place in the hearts of women. Fruits and gifts were wrapped in them, and stories were told of handkerchiefs “filled with Turkish delight” and furtively passed to strangers or fantasy lovers. The color of the handkerchief, too, always conveyed an unspoken message: red orange green pink purple black blue
• • • • • • •
passionate love heartache intention love bond suffering from love hopelessness, separation hope for union
A handkerchief that was torn and burned signified, “I am dying of heartache —fading and wilting.” “When I first came here, I did not quite understand what the attraction could be about the mystery with which the more interesting half of the
people of the Orient enshrouds itself,” the French writer Gérard de Nerval wrote in Voyage en Orient (1843–51). “But a few days sufficed to show me that a woman who knows herself to be the object of attention can usually find an opportunity to let herself be seen—if she is beautiful.” For a woman not tethered to a eunuch or skilled in the ways of eluding one, the drabness of her attire had a redeeming value. It made one woman indistinguishable from another, and for a man to approach or talk with a woman on the street was unthinkable, since her veil and cloak were as sacred as the doors of the harem. A husband could not tell his wife apart from all the rest of the monotonous dark figures. Even under suspicion, there was no way of confirming a woman’s identity. Thus, she could take advantage of her anonymity to slip away for a clandestine meeting with her lover—often on her way to the baths. Gérard de Nerval observed: As for freedom to go out and pay calls, a woman of free birth undoubtedly possesses it. The husband’s right in this matter is limited to sending slaves to accompany her, but as a precaution, that is of little consequence, for it would be perfectly easy for the wives, either to buy the slaves over or else to go out in disguise, either from the bath or from one of their friends’ houses, whilst the attendants were watching at the door. In reality, the mask and uniformity of dress would give them much greater freedom than Europeans, if they were inclined to go in for intrigues. The merry stories told at night in the cafes often deal with the adventures of lovers who disguise themselves as women so as to make their way into some harem.
The Baths
Forty days after a baby was born, his mother and the midwife took him to the baths for the first time for a special ceremony. The midwife broke a duck’s egg inside a bowl and smeared it on the baby’s face. This was so done that the child would have the ability to swim as well as a duck. —Musahipzade Celal, Eski Istanbul Yaşayisi (19th century) Women of the harem were renowned for their luminous complexions and satin skin. To wash and purify oneself was a religious obligation. This may perhaps explain the existence of so many baths in the Seraglio. The sultan, the Valide, and the wives all had private baths, while the other women of the harem shared a large bathhouse, which sometimes welcomed the sultan as well—the stuff of Orientalist fantasy. The hamam (Turkish bath) is an adaptation of the Byzantine bath, which itself derived from the Roman thermae. Many of the famous Ottoman baths were renovated from the Byzantine originals. While thermae were concentrated in urban areas and fashionable resorts, hamams were scattered throughout the provinces. Until recently, Roman aqueducts supplied the baths, distributing water under the floor, through the floor, or through numerous foundations. A central source often heated the two adjoining hamams, with the women’s bath on one side and the men’s on the other.
Ignaze Mouradja d’Ohsson, Women’s Public Baths, 1787, Lithograph, 91⁄2 × 131⁄2 in., From d’Ohsson, Tableau général de l’Empire Othoman (1787), Collection of the author
For harem women, deprived of so many freedoms, the hamam became an all-consuming passion and a most luxurious pastime. The bathing ritual could take several hours, often lasting into the evening, as the British woman journalist Julia Pardoe describes in her Beauties of the Bosphorus (1830): “The heavy, dense, sulphurous vapour filled the place and almost suffocated me—the subdued laughter and whispered conversations of … [the slaves’] mistresses, murmuring along in an undercurrent of sound —the sight of nearly three hundred women, only partially dressed, and that in fine linen so perfectly saturated with vapour that it revealed the whole outline of the figure—the busy slaves passing and repassing, naked from the waist upwards, and with their arms folded upon their bosoms, balancing on their heads piles of fringed or embroidered napkins—groups of lovely girls, laughing, chatting, and refreshing themselves with sweetmeats, sherbet, and lemonade—parties of playful children, apparently quite
indifferent to the dense atmosphere which made me struggle for breath … all combined to form a picture like the illusory semblance of a phantasmagoria, almost leaving me in doubt whether that on which I looked were indeed reality, or the mere creation of a distempered brain.” It was common for upper-class women to call on women in other harems and stay for several days. Servants greeted and immediately escorted them to the baths to clean and refresh themselves. In her 1908 memoir Haremlik, Demetra Vaka, a young Greek woman, returns to Istanbul after traveling abroad and visits her Turkish friends: “Slave women undressed us and took us to the bathing house on the shore of the sea. After the bath, we were put in loose, clean garments lent to us by the mistress.” An anonymous Italian work, Constantinopoli e di Turchi (1510), contains an engraving of ladies proceeding to the baths, followed by a train of slaves carrying on their heads magnificent bathing robes, towels, perfumes, and baskets full of the fruit and pastry their mistresses will consume during their long retreat at the bathhouse. For women living in harems, the baths provided a chance to go out into the world. For some, the pilgrimage afforded sufficient freedom to arrange clandestine meetings. For all, the public baths were a center for gossip and a wellspring of invented scandal. They were the women’s private clubs. At one time, the Seraglio had thirty or so baths, but today very few remain intact. Most have been torn down and converted into other rooms—the clues to their past found only in the perforated domes that identify the hamam. The two adjoining baths in the Seraglio, the sultan’s and the Valide sultana’s, do survive—marble edifices with tall narrow columns and a skylight. Once, the floors and the walls were inlaid with the most opulent faience tiles; the water ran from brass faucets into large marble sinks, and women poured it over themselves out of bowls of silver and gold. No tubs were used because of a superstitious belief that still water contained ifrits (evil beings). In the hamam, the women were not permitted to recite verses from the Qur’an, since the baths were generally a favorite resort of ifrits and djinns. Mrs. Harvey, an English traveler in Turkey, found the baths less than appealing: “In an instant I felt as a shrimp, if he feels at all, must feel in
boiling water—I was boiled,” she wrote in her Travels (1871). “I looked at my companion; her face was a gorgeous scarlet. In our best Turkish and in faint and imploring accents, we gasped ‘Take us away!’ All in vain. We had to be boiled and rubbed and boiled and rubbed we must be.” Women ladled perfumed water over one another and hennaed their hair, hands, and feet. On special occasions, like weddings, floral designs made from henna were stamped on their bodies. In I Costumi et i modi particolari de la vita de Turchi, Bassano da Zara details the use of henna: They are fond of black hair, and if any woman by nature does not possess it she acquires it by artificial means. If they are fair or grey through old age they use a red dye like that with which horses’ tails are dyed. It’s called Chnà [henna]. The same is used on their nails, sometimes whole hand, sometimes the foot following the shape of the shoe, and again some dye the pubic region and four fingers’ length above it. And for this reason they remove their hairs, considering it a sin to have any on their private parts. “Just as in the case of henna, which is a good preventative against perspiration,” A. M. Penzer reports in The Harem (1936), “so certain forms of eye-black [kohl, surme, kajal, tutia, etc.] give coolness to the eyes and help to prevent opthalmalia, as well as being a guard against the evil eye. The meeting of the eyebrows, while considered beautiful in Mohammedan countries, is not liked among the Hindus, and in Iceland, Denmark, Germany, Greece, and Bohemia it is considered a sign of a werewolf or a vampire.” “It is not altogether easy to define the beauty of the Turkish women,” Edmondo de Amicis explains in his 1896 travelogue Constantinople. “In thinking of them, I may say I always see a very white face, two black eyes, a crimson mouth, and a sweet expression. But then, they almost all of them paint, whiten their skin with almond and jasmine paste, lengthen their eyebrows with India ink, color their eyelids, powder their necks, draw circles around their eyes and put patches on their cheeks; but in all these they employ taste and discretion, unlike the belles of Fez, who use whitewash brushes to beautify themselves with.”
Spices such as cloves and ginger were used not simply in cooking and making potpourri, but were rubbed on the body because the harem ladies believed that certain mixtures increased powers of seduction. The English explorer Samuel Baker described how a woman would make a hole in the ground, fill it with embers of sandalwood, frankincense, and myrrh, and crouch over the hole, her clothes arranged around her as a sort of tent to capture the fumes. This ritual perfumed the body and the clothes as well as warded off the evil eye. We see an exquisite re-creation of this in the John Singer Sargent painting Fumée d’Ambre Gris.
Husein Fazil Enderuni, Women’s Bath, 18th century, Miniature from Zanan-Name, Istanbul University Library
Sometimes arguments arose among the women, culminating in clogs and bowls flying in the air. Sturdy bath attendants seized the culprits and pushed them out into a cold courtyard to cool off. Those clogs—high-stilted wooden contraptions called pattens—were required footwear inside the baths. Art objects, decorated with inlaid mother-of-pearl and other precious stones, pattens also preserved tender feet from the hot, wet marble floors and reduced the danger of slipping. They kept the wearer well above the flowing water, protecting her skin from corrosive depilatories and other ungodly substances swirling around on the floor. They also prevented contamination by jealous ifrits and djinns hiding in the secret and dark corners of the hamam. To have body hair was considered a sin, and harem women, especially observant of this point, scurried off to the hamams at the first sign of hair. They removed hair not only from their legs and underarms, but also from all orifices, even nostrils and ears. They spread a burning paste on their bodies which was later scraped off with the sharp edges of mussel shells. According to Jean Thevenot’s Travels into the Levant (1656), “A certain mineral called rusma, beat into a powder, and with lime and water is made into a paste, which they apply to the parts where they would have their hair fetcht off, and in less than half a quarter of an hour, all the hair falls off with the paste, by throwing hot water upon it: They know when it is time to throw water by seeing if the hair comes off with the paste; for if it be left too long sticking on the place, after it had eaten off the hair, it would corrode the flesh.” Rusma contained arsenic and could tarnish the flesh unless applied meticulously. The advantage of using a depilatory rather than a razor was that the paste removed the hair at the follicle, while shaving only leveled off the surface of the epidermis, and the hair grew back faster and stronger than before. Like many, I was introduced to ada by my grandmother. This simple, candylike paste of lemon and sugar—still a popular form of depilatory in the provinces—is difficult to bring to the right consistency. Two parts granulated sugar are caramelized and added to one part lemon juice, while stirring constantly over low heat until it begins to bubble. It is removed quickly from the heat and tested by dropping a tiny ball in a glass of water.
If it crystallizes, the ada is done; if it dissolves, it needs to cook longer. When ready, it is puttied in cool hands, spread on the hairy part of the body, and then vigorously pulled off—yanking the hair with it. After hours of being steamed, scrubbed, and massaged, the bathers moved to the tepidarium, a resting room where the sensual pleasure of bathing culminated in sweet exhaustion and relaxation. Tepidariums had private and public rooms. After passing through a vestibule and a series of warm rooms into a fountain of tepid water, women were massaged, scraped, and pumiced. In an adjoining room, they were rinsed, left to rest on mattresses, given coffee or tea, and told the latest gossip. Beautiful gilded hangings, encrusted with pearls, decorated the walls. Heavy Persian rugs and low sofas, upholstered in gold and silver embroideries and piled high with cushions, completed the decor. The women took naps, groomed each other, smoked bejeweled chibouks (very long pipes), and nibbled on slices of melon or savored delicately perfumed sherbets. “When at length they venture into the outer hall,” observed Julia Pardoe in Beauties of the Bosphorus, “they at once spring upon their sofas, where the attentive slaves fold them in warm cloths, and pour essence upon their hair, which they twist loosely without attempting to dislodge the wet, and then cover with handsome headkerchiefs or embroidered muslin; perfumed water is scattered over the face and hands, and the exhausted bather sinks into a luxurious slumber beneath a coverlet of satin or of eider down. The centre of the floor, meanwhile, is like a fair; sweet-meat, sherbet, fruitmerchants … parade up and down, hawking their wares. Negresses pass to and fro with the dinners or chibouques of their several mistresses; secrets are whispered—confidences are made; and altogether, the scene is so strange, so new, and withal so attractive, that no European can fail to be both interested and amused by a visit to a Turkish Hammam.”
Jean-Léon Gérôme, The Great Bath at Bursa, ca. 1885, Photogravure, 91⁄2 × 61⁄2 in., Collection of the author. The waters of Bursa have long been renowned for their healing powers; the sultans built several beautiful hamams (baths) to take advantage of this.
The hamam was also the place where women could easily be observed by outsiders, who were usually bedazzled, not shocked, by what they saw. Lady Montagu, writing in 1717, registers strong hom*oerotic overtones: The first sofas were covered with cushions and rich carpets, on which sat the ladies; and on the second, their slaves behind them, but without any distinction of rank by their dress, all being in the state of nature, that is, in plain English, stark naked, without any beauty or defect concealed. Yet there was not the least wanton smile or immodest gesture amongst them. They walked and moved with the same majestic grace which Milton describes of our general mother. There were many amongst them as exactly proportioned as ever any goddess was drawn by the pencil of Guido or Titian—and most of their skins shiningly white, only adorned by their beautiful hair divided into many tresses, hanging on their shoulders,
braided either with pearl or ribbon, perfectly representing the figures of the Graces.… to see so many fine women naked, in different postures, some in conversation, some working, others drinking coffee or sherbet, and many negligently lying on their cushions, while their slaves (generally pretty girls of seventeen or eighteen) were employed in braiding their hair in several pretty fancies. In short, it is the women’s coffee-house, where all the news of the town is told, scandal invented, etc. The hamams were also places where women examined each other, and the go-betweens and marriage brokers had an eye feast. A sultan’s sister describes a slave woman she intends to present to her mighty brother: “Her proportions were perfect. She had a body like crystal, arms like marrows, and narrow wrists. She had an indescribably fine complexion! Like fresh feta cheese or Turkish delight. And the color? Like roses. Forty-one Mashallah [God protect her]!”
Paul-Louis Bouchard, A Harem Beauty, ca. 1890, Oil on canvas, 845⁄8 × 491⁄4 in., Private collection
The baths were not only a source of sensuous escape for women but also provided the harem masters with an opportunity for voyeurism. JeanClaude Flachat, a French industrialist, describes how Sultan Mahmud I devised a game for his odalisques. All the odalisques were given chemises to wear, but this devious master had had the stitches removed and the fabric lightly glued at the seams. He watched with amusem*nt from behind a secret window as the chemises peeled off the women’s bodies when they came in contact with the steaming water. Eroticism in the baths was not reserved for the master alone. For women who rarely attained the sultan’s bed, it was a chance to feast their eyes on beautiful bodies and touch each other. While washing and massaging one another, while scrutinizing closely for the first signs of emerging hair, the women could become lovers as well as friends. Bassano da Zara reflects: “It is common knowledge that as a result of this familiarity in washing and massaging women fall very much in love with each other. And one often sees a woman in love with another one just like a man and woman. And I have known Greek and Turkish women, on seeing a lovely young girl, seek occasion to bathe with her just to see her naked and handle her.”
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, The Turkish Bath, 1832, Oil on canvas on wood, diameter: 431⁄4 in., Musée du Louvre, Paris
Edmondo de Amicis makes a similar observation: “Women have the most ardent relationships with one another. They wear the same colors, same perfumes, put on patches of the same size and shape, and make enthusiastic demonstrations. A European woman traveler claims that, “all the vices of ancient Babylon exist among them.” The baths also figure in the projections of the Orientalist writers and painters, who created a world that was far from the truth.
Food
The dinner was set on a velvet cloth embroidered with silver threads. A silver tray was placed on a six-legged silver stand, decked with salads, caviar, olives, and cheeses. The salt, pepper, and cinnamon shakers were inlaid with precious gems. Lemon juice was served in a carved crystal pitcher. In the center was a silver trivet. Around the tray were delicately embroidered silk napkins wrapped in rings made of mother-of-pearl with diamonds. —Leyla Saz, Haremin Içyüzü (1921) Afiyet şeker olsun. (May your taste turn to sugar.) Each meal started with those words before anyone touched a morsel. Eating was not a casual activity in the harem, but an elaborate ritual. All day long, an endless stream of confections and sherbets passed through the corridors to the apartments of the Valide sultana, the kadins, and the favorites, most of whom cherished a sweet tooth.
Unknown artist, Harem Scene at the Court of Shah Jahan (album leaf), second quarter of 17th century, Ink, colors and gold on paper, 77⁄8 × 5 in. (131⁄8 × 81⁄4 in. sheet), The Metropolitan Museum of
Art, New York; Theodore M. Davis Collection, Bequest of Theodore M. Davis, 1915
Some sherbets required a seventy-mile trip from Mount Olympus, where snow from the great ice pits was wrapped in flannel and carried to the Seraglio on mules. According to Evliya Chelebi’s travelogue, Seyahat-name (1630–72), the snowmen wore turbans made of snow, and mounds of the purest snow gathered from Mount Olympus, as large as cupolas, were piled on wagons and pulled by a file of seventy to eighty mules. In his eighteenth-century Tableau général de l’empire ottoman, M. de M. D’Ohsson describes the Gülhane (Rose House), where sherbets and preserves were made: “The care that they took in making sherbets was as intricate as the French took in making their wine. Sherbet would usually be a concoction of different fruit juices, as well as essence of flowers, such as rose, gardenia, pansy, linden flower, and chamomile; and it was perfumed with musk, ambergris, and aloes.” Sherbets were made from violets and roses, and coffee flavored with cloves, cinnamon, and rose petals. Before being served, the sultan’s food was tasted for poison in the Kushane (Bird House). Stone shelves lined an entire wall in the Food Corridor, where the black eunuchs gathered the brass trays from the royal kitchens to be distributed in the harem. The food was placed next to the doors of the sultana’s apartments. Servants carried the trays over their heads and placed them in the center of the room. Well-trained odalisques waited on the Valide sultana, while the kadins and the favorites who had been granted their own apartments ate out of silver trays placed on small low tables. Not until the reign of Mahmud II (1808–39) was silverware introduced to the harem. Before this, the women ate with their hands—maintaining that taste is first transmitted through the fingertips. This happened to be a stylized and refined art form that odalisques were carefully trained to perform with delicacy, lightness, and grace. They manipulated the fingers in much the same way as the Japanese do in the tea ceremony, every movement—reaching, bending, turning—a dance of extreme skill and precision. They reserved the right hand for food (the left was for unclean tasks), using only three fingers and scarcely getting the tips soiled.
After a meal, servants delivered a silver pitcher and basin for washing the hands, and embroidered towels for drying them. Then it was time to recline on the cushions and smoke. Tobacco was of very high quality and one of the greatest joys of harem life. Women smoked profusely and indiscriminately—except in the presence of men. The novices, who were not allowed to smoke, did so secretly. Elizabeth Warnock Fernea, in Guests of the Sheik (1965), describes the conflict over tobacco between two wives in an Iraqi harem: “It is better not to smoke,” said the old woman who had guided me to Selma’s door. “Haji Hamid does not like women who smoke.” Selma looked at the old woman. “Kulthum,” she said, “Haji Hamid is my husband as well as yours,” and then deliberately lit cigarettes for herself and several others. Chibouks and nargileh (water pipes) added elegance to the smoking ritual. Théophile Gautier himself indulged: Nothing is more propitious to the fostering of poetical reveries than relaxing on the cushions of a divan and inhaling, in short intakes, this fragrant smoke, cooled by the water through which it moves, which reaches the smoker after being propelled through red or green leather tubes that intertwine with his arms, making him somewhat resemble a Cairo snake charmer playing with serpents.
Paul-Desiré Trouillebert, The Harem Servant, 1874, Oil on canvas, 511⁄8 × 381⁄8 in., Musée des Beaux-Arts, Nice
The gustatory excess that characterized harem life fattened the inmates. “They have … crooked feet, and this comes from sitting on the ground cross-wise,” Bassano da Zara observed. “For the most part they are fat because they eat a lot of rice with bullock’s meat and butter, much more than men do. They do not drink wine, but sugared water, or Cervoza (herbbeer) made in their own manner.” By “cervoza” da Zara must have meant boza, a fermented barley drink, deliciously sour, served cool, sprinkled with leblebi (roasted chickpeas) or cinnamon. (The best way I know to describe the taste is something like sake and tapioca blended together.) When I was a child, “boza men,” dressed all in white, strolled the streets on autumn nights, bellowing, “Boza, boza, Akman’s boza, marvelous bozaaaa!” They carried on their shoulders brass buckets full of this sweet and sour drink. We would run out to the street to have boza poured into our tall glass mugs. When I recently returned to Turkey, these calls of “boza, boza, marvelous boza,” the last cry of the Ottoman Empire, no longer echoed through the streets. The drink was about to disappear forever, but the enterprising Akman and other boza makers bottled it to sell at pastry cafés. Lunch and dinner were the big meals, always a feast: lamb dishes, börek (pastries filled with meat, cheese, or spinach), pilav, eggplant dishes, choices of vegetables cooked in olive oil, and always lots of rich desserts and compotes. And then a mid-evening snack of fruits and sweet desserts that had voluptuous and erotic names like “Lips of the Beauty,” “Hanum’s Fingers,” “Ladies’ Thighs,” or “Woman’s Navel.” Many of the harem women were accomplished confectioners. Turkish delight was the most craved of all sweets; several thousand tons were—and still are—exported annually. This chewy paste is made from the pulp of white grapes or mulberries, semolina flour, honey, rose water, and assorted nuts, rejoicing in the name Rahat Lokum—“to give rest to the throat,” a rest absolutely essential after a harem feast. LIPS OF THE BEAUTY
Syrup:
Rolls:
21⁄2 cups sugar
1
1 tsp lemon juice
13⁄4 cups water
⁄2 stick butter
3 cups water
11⁄2 cups flour 1 tsp salt 2 beaten eggs & 1 egg yolk 1 cup safflower oil
Make a syrup, mixing together the sugar, lemon juice, and water; boil for 15 minutes, stirring occasionally. Set aside to cool. Heat butter in a saucepan until it begins to change color. Add the flour and the salt to make a paste and slowly pour in the water. Cook over very low heat for about 10 minutes, stirring constantly. Remove from heat and cool to room temperature. Add the two eggs and the yolk slowly, and beat well with a fork until blended. Turn on a floured board and knead thoroughly. Divide the dough into walnut-size pieces and shape into rolls folded over like Parker House rolls, to resemble lips. Heat the oil and place the lip-shaped rolls in it. Fry on both sides until golden brown. Remove and drain off excess oil. Pour the syrup over it and serve warm. After the sweets came the coffee ritual. One attendant brought in the coffee, another carried a tray with diamond-studded accoutrements, and a third actually served the coffee. Turkish coffee was not grown in Turkey but came from Yemen—and initially met a hostile reception. Considered a source of immorality, it was banned for many years. By the mid seventeenth century, its virtues were extolled with deliberate extravagance in such works as Katib Chelebi’s The Balance of Truth (1650), which claimed, among other things, that boiling-hot coffee miraculously causes no burns: Coffee is indubitably cold and dry. Even when it is boiled in water and an infusion made of it, its coldness does not depart: perhaps it increases, for water too is cold. That is why coffee quenches thirst, and does not burn if poured on a limb, for its heat is a strange heat, with no effect. To those of moist temperament, and especially to women, it is highly suited. They should drink a great deal of strong coffee. Excess of it will do them no harm so long as they are not melancholic.
What distinguishes Turkish coffee is its texture of very finely ground grains, almost pulverized, and its idiosyncratic method of preparation. TURKISH COFFEE
⁄2 cup water
1
2 Tbsp sugar 2 tsp pulverized coffee Pour cold water in a jezve (a small cylindrical pot with a long handle). Add sugar and coffee. Stir well. Place over low flame and heat until small bubbles barely begin to form. Remove from the flame and pour off froth into demitasse cups. Bring to boil, but do not allow it to boil over. Remove from flame. Pour coffee over the froth to fill cups and serve. It seems very simple, but making it perfectly is a challenge. It has to have just the right amount of froth, and this is a function of timing. Coffee making was a crucially important part of a young woman’s life, since her merits as a wife were initially and continually evaluated on the basis of how her coffee tasted. She painstakingly practiced to get it just right, in order to win the heart of her beloved’s mother.
Camille Rogier, Women in the Imperial Harem, Oil, Topkapi Museum, Istanbul
I myself went through an intensive training when I was about nine years old and assumed somehow that this custom of one generation of women teaching a younger generation would survive forever. But this, too, is a vanishing tradition. Indeed, Turkish coffee is nearly obsolete. Everyone has been favoring “Nescafé,” which means any kind of instant coffee, and Starbucks has found its way to the cafés.
Me at nine years old, learning to dance, sing, and brew good Turkish coffee
Drinking alcohol is taboo in Islam but for the most part was tolerated, except during the reign of certain sultans, such as that of Murad IV in the seventeenth century, when not only alcohol but also coffee and tobacco were prohibited. But under any circ*mstances, it was not considered good form for women to drink alcohol. They did serve the men raki, a beverage distilled from grapes and flavored with anise, similar to pastis, ouzo, or sambuca. This colorless liquid turns a milky white color when ice or water is added to it. No mild libation, it is called “Lion’s Milk.” In contrast to the other meals, harem breakfasts were simple and modest, consisting of clotted cream, honey, feta cheese, jams, and olives, with strong Russian tea—never coffee. In fact, it is still considered inappropriate to order coffee for breakfast. Leyla Saz recalled in Haremin Içyüzü: “Certain cream cheeses and feta cheeses were made in silver containers and delivered to the palace in baskets. These special treats were for the Royal Palace only and were never sold elsewhere. In return for these delicacies, the merchant would be rewarded with stuffed mussels.” Cleopatra is reputed to have had twenty-four kitchens, one for every hour. In the Seraglio there were ten double (or twenty single) kitchens allocated to the sultan, the Valide sultana, the kadins, the eunuchs, and other members of the court—sufficient to impress Ottaviano Bon in his Narrative of Travels (1604): The kitchen utensils are a sight to see, because the pots, cauldrons, and other necessary things are so huge and nearly all of copper that of things of this kind it would be impossible to see any more beautiful or better kept. The service of dishes is of copper tinned over, and kept in such continual good repair and so spotless that it is an amazing sight to behold. There is an enormous quantity of them and they are a very considerable expense of the Porte, and especially because the kitchens provide food for so many both within and without, particularly on the four days of the Public Divan (a time when an extra 4,000 to 5,000 would be fed, in addition to the usual 1,000 or more).… The royal kitchens had 150 cooks, the most prestigious position among them being the dresser of the sultan’s food. According to Nicolas de
Nicolay, who visited the Seraglio in 1551, “Those of the privy kitchens have their furnaces apart, to dress and make ready the meat without the smell of smoke, which, being sodden and dressed, they lay in platters of porcelain, and so deliver it unto the Cecigners, whom we do call carvers, to serve the same unto the great lord, the taste [for poison] being made in his presence.” The wood to keep the braziers burning and to stoke the fires in the harem kitchens came from the sultan’s own forests. Thirty enormous lumberjacks in the service of the Seraglio sailed the Black Sea regularly to keep the stockpiles high, taking slaves along with them to cut and load the wood.
Sultanas
Live among diamonds and splendor as the wife of the sultan! —Circassian lullaby MARRIAGE OF SULTANS In 1346, the marriage between Sultan Orhan and the Byzantine princess Theodora was celebrated with incredible pomp and ceremony on the European shores of Constantinople, which did not yet belong to the Ottomans. Orhan, camped on the Asian shore, sent a fleet of thirty vessels and an escort of cavalry to retrieve his purple bride. “At a signal,” Edward Gibbon wrote in The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, “the curtains were suddenly drawn, to disclose the bride, or the victim, encircled by kneeling eunuchs and hymeneal torches; the sound of flutes and trumpets proclaimed the joyful event; and her pretended happiness was the theme of the nuptial song, which was chanted by such poets as the age could produce. Without the rites of the church, Theodora was delivered to her barbarous lord; but it had been stipulated that she could preserve her religion in the harem of Bursa.”
Jean-Joseph Benjamin-Constant, Harem, ca. 1885, Oil on canvas, 40 × 30 in., Private collection
In the early years of the Ottoman Empire, the sultans married daughters of Byzantine emperors, Anatolian princes, and Balkan kings. These marriages were strictly diplomatic arrangements. After the conquest of Constantinople, however, the royal harem became populated with non-royal odalisques in order to prevent any other dynasties becoming more powerful. This tradition continued until the fall of the empire. Since these slave girls were his property, in accordance with Islamic law, the sultan was not required to marry any of them. But, once in a while, a sultan—such as Süleyman the Magnificent—chose to marry a special woman. In contrast to the odalisques, a sultan’s concubines were considered his wives, kadinlar or kadinefendiler, the number varying from four to eight. The first wife was called bash kadin (head woman), followed by ikinci kadin (second), uchuncu (third), and on down. If any one of the kadins died, the others below her moved up a rank, but not before the chief black eunuch delivered the sultan’s approval for such a promotion. It is a common fantasy to imagine sultans actually having sexual relations with hundreds of women in their harem. In very rare cases, this might have been true. For example, when Murad III died, over a hundred cradles were being rocked. But several sultans chose to take only one kadin—Selim I, Mehmed III, Murad IV, Ahmed II—and as far as we can conjecture, they remained faithful to these women. Most sultans spent nights with different of their favored women in turn, and to prevent disputes among them, they kept a schedule. The haznedar (chief treasurer) recorded each “couching” in a special diary in order to establish the birth and legitimacy of the children. This extraordinary chronicle, which survives today, discloses not only sexual intimacies but also such historical events as the execution of Gülfem Kadin, one of Süleyman’s wives, for selling her “couching” turn to another woman. Much to the chagrin of the Western imagination, there seem to have been no outright orgies involving the sultan and his many women. It is not difficult to assume, however, that some of the more debauched and insane rulers, like Ibrahim, did indulge in less routine sexual pursuits.
Jean-Léon Gérôme, Palace Guard, 1865, Oil on panel, 131⁄2 × 91⁄2 in., The Fine Art Society, London. The guard depicted here is a halberdier keeping evening watch.
A sultan’s failure to favor each wife with equal enthusiasm stirred up a great deal of anxiety, insecurity—and malevolence. Mahidevran Sultana, for example, mutilated Roxalena’s face, Gülnush Sultana pushed the odalisque Gülbeyaz off a cliff, Hürrem Sultana was strangled, and Bezmialem Sultana mysteriously vanished. Each glass of sherbet potentially contained poison. There were alliances, cliques, and a perpetual silent war. This ambience affected not only the emotional climate of the harem but also of state politics. “The rigorous discipline, which turns the harem into a prison, is justified by the passionate disposition of these women, which may impel them to who knows what aberrations,” commented historian Alain Grosrichard in Structure du serail (1979). If an odalisque became sexually involved with a prince, she was likely to become his kadin when he ascended the throne. Kadins could not sit in the presence of the sultan without permission, and on all occasions they were highly mannered, talking and acting with great ceremony. The mothers of the princes always received their sons standing up and addressed them as “My Lion.” The relationships among the wives were also quite formal. When they wished to talk with one another, the Kalfa officially conveyed the request. Harem etiquette required treating elders with respect and courtesy. All the women were expected to kiss the skirts of the wives out of traditional respect; often, out of reciprocal courtesy, the wives asked them not to. Princes always kissed the hands of their fathers’ kadins. HAREM WOMEN AND POLITICS The excessive interference of the harem women in state politics was instrumental in the decline and fall of the Ottoman Empire. Ironically, such meddling began during the reign of Süleyman the Magnificent, the most powerful period in the empire’s history (1520–66), when the women moved with Roxalena from the Old Palace, built by Mehmed the Conqueror, to the Topkapi harem (1541), and claimed the seat of power. This marked the beginning of the Reign of Women, which lasted a century and a half, until the end of the struggle between Kösem and Turhan sultanas (1687).
After Süleyman’s death, the sultans no longer led their armies on campaign or in battle, retiring instead to the womb of the harem. Most of them detached themselves from world affairs and spent their time in the company of women. This royal seclusion ultimately diminished their ability to govern, and in varying degrees, sultanas began wielding influence over state officials, with bribery and patronage supplanting promotion on the basis of merit. A succession of child sultans and mentally deranged ones after Mehmed III’s death in 1603 made women the power behind the throne. It is interesting to note how these ladies turned their disadvantaged situation to advantage. Almost every empire has experienced the behindthe-scenes influence of certain legendary women, such as Madame Pompadour in France or China’s Dowager Empress Jung-shu, but in no other nation’s history do we actually witness them taking command—albeit secretly—of so much power. They justified this by insisting on their social and political duty as members of the royal family. From their luxurious prison, they bent the court, the Divan (Chancery of State), and the entire Seraglio to their will. Through the chief eunuchs, they communicated to the grand vizier and other important political figures and sometimes even held interviews through a curtain or a latticed window. As co-regents, they gained knowledge not only of the court politics but also of the rest of the world—at times overthrowing their enemies and elevating allies. They elected governors and even formed intrigues with foreign countries. For example, Turkish corsairs had captured the Venetian Baffa, who became Nur Banu Sultana, in 1537 en route to Paros, where her father, of the noble Baffo family, was the governor. Sold to the harem of Selim II, she was determined to look after the interests of Venice, as a form of vengeance. Even when Venetian naval vessels offered insult and injury to Turkish shipping, she was able to dissuade the sultan from attacking her native Saint Mark’s, and to persuade him to give Venice especially favorable commercial advantages. Both the Venetian ambassador and Catherine de Medici communicated with Nur Banu through a Jewess, Chiarezza (Kiraze), who posed as a bundle woman, bringing cloth and jewels to the Seraglio. Nur Banu’s son,
Sultan Mehmed III, was aware of her dubious activities but revered her too much to interfere. Nevertheless, Baffa ended her days miserably, mysteriously strangled in her bed in 1583. A Genoese paper reported the death of this woman who had been born in the rival city-state of Venice: “La stata assasine aquella Sultana, che si chiama La Sporca, che le fu una vecchia materola.” (That wicked old woman, the filthy Sultana, has been assassinated.) VALIDE PROCESSION A shift of power began with the ascension of each new sultan, as a new kadin became the Valide sultana. In the early days of the empire, a procession sometimes involving as many as a hundred beautiful carriages along a road lined with janissaries transported her litter from the Palace of Tears to the Seraglio. Her steward trailed behind, bearing a scepter and the heralds of the Divan, accompanied by another high palace official who scattered coins to the people watching the procession. Coaches carrying the odalisques and other members of the sultan’s retinue followed. At the Imperial Gate, the sultan, riding on a horse, met his mother, kissed her hand, and led her into the harem of the Seraglio. Once the harem moved to Topkapi, the ceremony lost its splendor. PRINCESS SULTANAS The sultan’s daughters grew up playing with other royal children and the child odalisques in the Seraglio. Like their brothers, they were formally educated at the palace school until they reached puberty. Marriages of the princesses were largely political arrangements, as in most other monarchies. The sultan chose the husbands for his daughters and sisters, and the grand vizier served the decree formally. As soon as a prospective groom received the decree, he was required to divorce his former wives. Until the early nineteenth century, the princesses were married to important statesmen much older than themselves. Consequently, they often became widows at an early age. Some of the girls were only two or three years old when they were betrothed. In the annals of the Seraglio, there is a beautiful recollection of the wedding (1709) between the five-year-old
Princess Fatma, daughter of Ahmed III, and his courtier Ali Pasha, who was a middle-aged man. The ceremony was symbolic, and the bridegroom was required to wait for eight years before the actual marriage, in fact never being permitted unchaperoned in his wife’s presence until she reached puberty. However, this marriage was never consummated, because Ali Pasha was killed in battle seven years after the ceremony, before the princess came of age. During the nineteenth century, the practice of child marriage was ended and puberty determined the minimum age for marriage. Some princesses were even allowed to select their own husbands, thereby achieving greater freedom than any other women in Islamic society. Some actually married for love; some married several times. The sultans spent lavishly on their daughters’ weddings, and the bride’s trousseau was displayed to the public, as Baron Helmut von Moltke reported on the occasion of Mihrimah Sultana’s wedding: Yesterday [Wednesday, May 4, 1836] the princess’s trousseau was taken to her new residence. Guarded by cavalrymen and preceded by several pashas, the procession consisted of forty mules loaded with bales of precious cloth, twenty coaches loaded with shawls, carpets, silk garments and other items, and behind these, three hundred and sixty porters bearing large silver trays on their heads. On the first of these trays was a splendid Qur’an with a gold binding set with pearls, followed by silver chairs, braziers, boxes of jewelry, gold bird cages and the Lord knows what else. Probably some of these things would be secretly returned to the treasury to be displayed again at the next marriage of a princess. Feasting, dancing, music, fireworks often lasted for several weeks. Every day of the wedding, a new form of entertainment was organized. Drummers, jugglers, acrobats, wrestlers, and co*ckfights entertained people in all parts of the city. After the ceremony and feasting, the newlyweds moved to a palace that the sultan had bought and furnished for them. The bride groom entered the bride’s chamber, accompanied by the chief black eunuch. He performed his prayers first, and then crawled to the bed as the
royal etiquette demanded and kissed the princess’s feet. Thus began the nuptial night. Some of the princesses, like Süleyman the Magnificent’s daughter Mihrimah and his granddaughter Ayshe Humashah, wielded a great deal of power over their fathers and husbands. Hatice Sultana, another daughter of Ahmed III (1703–30), was the real power during the Tulip Era, influencing the sultan and her husband Nevsehirli Ibrahim Pasha, the grand vizier, while indulging in intrigues with the Marquis de Villeneuve, furthering the cause of France in its war with Russia. REMARRIAGE OF SULTANAS The sultans sometimes offered in marriage to other men members of their harem who were unable to conceive or had produced a stillbirth. Marriages were also arranged for odalisques and childless favorites. This was an honor bestowed upon the influential men in the empire. When a sultan died, his favorites were no longer the favorites. Suddenly deprived of all privileges, they were sent to the Old Palace, and a new harem was established in the Seraglio. Sometimes these widows remarried. ACCOUCHEMENT AND BIRTH In preparation for birth, one of the larger kiosks in the Seraglio would be cleaned impeccably and decorated. The bedcovers and the quilts were red; the washing bowls, ewers, and other utensils, either gold or silver. Sitting, rather than lying down, was considered the most natural position for delivery, and to facilitate this, special birthing chairs were built. An entourage of ladies-in-waiting kept the mother company while the midwife delivered the baby. Sometimes singers, dancers, or the palace dwarf, who was a eunuch, were invited in to distract the woman during labor. The entire event was treated more like a celebration than an ordeal.
Birth chair, early 18th century
Husein Fazil Enderuni, An Accouchement in the Harem, Miniature from Zanan-Name, 17th century, Istanbul University Library. A sultana in labor sits on a special birth chair while she is entertained
by her odalisques and the palace dwarf, a eunuch.
The wet nurse took over immediately after birth, while the chief black eunuch spread the news to the rest of the palace. Each department sacrificed five rams for a boy child and three rams for a girl. The cannons fired seven rounds for a boy and three for a girl, repeating five times during twentyfour hours, once during each prayer. The Valide sultana and the grand vizier arranged audiences, presenting the baby, the mother, and the other women of power in the harem with fine gifts. Exquisite cradles, inlaid with gems, and silk quilts awaited the arrival of the royal babies. Town criers spread the news to the inhabitants of the city; poets immortalized the happy event in verse and song. The harem was suddenly transformed into a world of light and color, bustling with a great deal of activity during the weeklong birth celebrations. Lanterns, lamps, and torches illuminated the interior and the exterior. Wealthy Ottoman gentry showed off their extravagant wares. During that one week, the entire city truly turned into a spectacle out of One Thousand and One Nights. Everyone was joyous, except perhaps the other concubines, whose climb to the Valide status was suddenly threatened. DEATH OF SULTANAS A great deal of mystery surrounds the woman who sleeps next to Mehmed the Conqueror in a nameless coffin. The mullahs (Moslem theologians) claim it is Irene, later declared an Orthodox saint, with whom the sultan had become obsessed: “He not only consumed days and nights with her but burned with continual jealousie,” according to William Pointer’s 1566 allegory Palace of Pleasure. According to this unconfirmed story, he offered her everything, but Irene would not abjure her faith. The mullahs reproached the sultan for courting a gavur (infidel). According to Richard Davey’s Sultan and His Subjects (1897), one day Mehmed gathered all the mullahs in the courtyard of his palace. Irene stood in the center, concealed under a glittering veil, which the sultan slowly lifted, revealing her exquisite beauty. “You see, she is more beautiful than any woman you have ever seen,” he said, “lovelier than the houries of your dreams. And I love her more than I do my own life. But my
life is worthless compared to my love for Islam.” He seized and twisted the long, golden tresses of Irene and, with one stroke of his scimitar, severed her head from her body. In his poem Irene (1708), Charles Goring immortalizes this excruciating moment: Jealous of Empire and my lost Renown, I stabb’d a Mistress, to preserve my Crown, But had the faire returned my generous flames, I’d slighted Empire and embraced the Dame. Süleyman the Magnificent ordered the execution of his kadin Gülfem when she failed one night to appear in his bed. During one of his debauches, the mad Sultan Ibrahim ordered all his women seized during the night, stuffed in sacks, and thrown into the Bosphorus. One of these young women was saved by some French sailors and taken to Paris, where she must have had some stories to tell. Among the many powerful and interesting sultanas who lived, loved, and ruled in the Seraglio, three deserve special attention. Each embodies the nuances of the century in which she lived. Roxalena (1526–58), as we know, was the first woman to legally marry a sultan, move into the Seraglio with her entourage, and gain complete ascendancy over her husband, Süleyman the Magnificent. Kösem reigned the longest and must have witnessed the most dramatic events in palace history. And Nakshedil Sultana—Aimée de Rivery—lived the sort of life legends are made of. ROXALENA (HÜRREM SULTANA) On the third of Istanbul’s seven hills rises the Mosque of Süleyman the Magnificent, the most glorious silhouette above the promontory. It is colossal and imposing, but it also has a capricious charm, reflecting the genius and exuberant spirit of its architect, Sinan. Smaller domes are scattered whimsically around the central dome like soap bubbles. Four stiletto minarets soar above the skyline. Inside, the mosque is dark and somber, despite the beautiful windows of jeweled Persian glass and the colorful tiles around the mihrab (niche indicating Mecca). Its quiet dimness, its silence and desertion make it seem
peaceful, almost ethereal, as is the garden in back, which shelters the mausoleums of Süleyman and his wife Roxalena. A grapevine straggles over the walls of their tombs, and a profusion of blood-red amaranthus, the flower known as “love lies bleeding,” sprouts out of the earth. The lovers slumber in their graves, once the most powerful mortals of this city, now sacks of bones. It makes one think of Istanbul’s contradictions: the Bosphorus separating two continents, unable to make up its mind where its allegiance lies, caught between wealth and starvation, between the physical and the spiritual, the sacred and profane. The prayer chant from the minaret wafts like smoke over the rooftops of the city, just as it must have done when Süleyman and Roxalena were alive. As with most of the women who passed through the Grand Harem, Roxalena’s origins are shrouded in mystery. We know she was a slave from the Ukraine and her real name was Aleksandra Lisovska. Presumably, she was purchased at the open-air market by Süleyman’s best friend, the grand vizier, Ibrahim (no relation to the mad sultan of that name). Her portraits suggest a mosaic refinement, with classical features and blazing red hair. There is depth and intelligence in her eyes. An extraordinary strategist and a true political artist, Roxalena planned her moves as if she were playing chess. Süleyman was a poet. He loved the language of poetry, and within Roxalena was the blood of a poet as well. They courted each other through verse, her voice carrying through the fields of battle, muting the sounds of cannon and slashing swords.
Portrait of Roxalena (Hürrem Sultana), 16th century, Topkapi Palace Portrait Gallery, Istanbul
At the beginning, Süleyman was attracted to her silent charm, and she became his favorite. Soon she bore him a son, which elevated her to the status of the third kadin. Roxalena was aware that, according to the Code of Laws established by Mehmed the Conqueror, the throne passed to the oldest male, obliging him to get rid of all his brothers in order to secure it for his own offspring. As such, Prince Mustafa was the heir apparent, which meant the death warrant of her own male children. In 1526, Pietro Bragadino, Venetian bailie (ambassador) in Istanbul, reported to the Venetian Senate a vicious quarrel between the two sultanas, in which Gülbahar Sultana, first kadin and Mustafa’s mother, pulled Roxalena’s hair and scratched her face badly. Roxalena confined herself in her apartments, refusing to appear before Süleyman, using her disfigurement as an excuse. She continued withholding her favors, demanding that Süleyman marry her legally and consent to share not only pleasure but also power. This obstinacy might well have cost Roxalena her life, but Süleyman was impressed by her sharp mind and her fearlessness. To please her, he sent his son Prince Mustafa to be a governor of Manisa, far from the seat of power. Mustafa’s mother, Gülbahar, accompanied him, in accordance with protocol. To cement his fidelity to Roxalena, Süleyman slowly released his other concubines, marrying them off to his pashas. He acceded to her every wish, and Roxalena became the first woman to marry a sultan officially—the significance of which did not escape a contemporary English observer, Sir George Young (1530): This week there has occurred in this city a most extraordinary event, one absolutely unprecedented in the history of the sultans. The Grand Signor Suleiman has taken to himself as his Empress a slave woman from Russia, called Roxalena, and there has been great feasting. The ceremony took place in the Seraglio, and the festivities have been beyond all record. There was a public procession of the presents. At night the principal streets were gaily illuminated and there is much music and feasting. The Houses are festooned with garlands and there are everywhere swings in which the people swing by the hour with great enjoyment. In the old Hippodrome a great tribune is set up, the place reserved for the Empress
and her ladies screened with gilt lattice. Here Roxalena and the court attended a great tournament, in which both Christian and Moslem Knights were engaged, and tumblers and jugglers and a procession of wild beasts, and giraffes with necks so long they, as it were, touched the sky.… There is a great deal of talk about the marriage and none can say what it means. Süleyman thus distinguished himself as the first sultan to submit to the paramount influence of a woman. He had found a woman who was his match, who not only fulfilled him in bed but also became his companion in affairs of state and in a shared appreciation of the arts. The harem was transformed into a place of beauty, a place of enlightenment, rather than a dark dungeon. “The only unfavorable thing one could cite against Süleyman is his excessive devotion to his wife,” wrote the Hapsburg envoy. This beautiful, ambitious woman ruled over Süleyman until her death thirty-two years later. Bassano da Zara reflected: He bears her such love and keeps such faith to her that all of his subjects marvel and say that she has bewitched him, and they call her the ziadi [jadi], or the witch. On this account the army and the court hate her and her children, but because he loves her, no one dares to protest: For myself I have always heard every one speak ill of her and of her children, and well of the first-born and his mother. Roxalena was so full of light that Süleyman seemed blind to her dark side. He named her Hürrem, “the laughing one,” because of her crystalline laughter and freedom from inhibition. Yet Hürrem was secretly tormented. In 1541, when the Old Palace, which housed the sultan’s harem, partially burned down, Roxalena, with her entourage of odalisques and eunuchs, moved to the Grand Seraglio, where she could be closer to Süleyman and the seat of power, a move that marked the beginning of the Grand Harem and “The Reign of Women.” With Mustafa and Gülbahar tucked far away, Roxalena had still another antagonist to deal with, the man who had originally owned her, the
inseparable friend and companion of Süleyman, Ibrahim, who shared Süleyman’s tent and his dreams, who had been promoted from the status of royal falconer to Lord of Rumelia and, later, grand vizier. Ibrahim had been chosen to marry the sultan’s own sister, Hatice Sultana, and had been the object of endless wealth and honor. He may have presented Roxalena to Süleyman as a move to consolidate his power; if so, the scheme had backfired. Grown resentful of his influence and jealous of Süleyman’s affection for him, Roxalena set out to orchestrate his demise. She took advantage of every bit of gossip and information to inflame Süleyman’s mind against his friend. One night, when Ibrahim was in the Seraglio as a privileged friend of the sultan, the deaf-mute guards strangled him in his sleep. Roxalena was suspected in Ibrahim’s assassination, and although many accused her, there was no conclusive evidence.
Anton Ignaz Melling, Interior of the Palace of Hatice Sultana, Etching reproduced in Views of Constantinople and the Bosphorous, ca. 1815
Shortly after this, Süleyman wanted to build her a new palace. Hürrem feared that putting her out of sight might mean putting her out of mind— and, eventually, out of favor. To distract Süleyman, she came up with a
more challenging project: a mosque to be built by the greatest architect of the time, Sinan, and to be named after the sultan himself, the Süleymaniye, the Mosque of Süleyman the Magnificent. Once again she had triumphed. The year was 1549. As Roxalena’s sons grew older, Prince Mustafa loomed as a greater and greater obstacle. He was an able and intelligent prince, much admired by the people and the army. He was also Süleyman’s favorite son. How to cause his fall from grace? A forged letter supposedly written by Mustafa to the shah of Persia, declaring that he wanted to dethrone his father and asking for the shah’s assistance, turned father against son and provoked a battle on the plains of Ereğli. It is said that several times both Süleyman and Mustafa turned back as they rode to the field, but something urged them forward: history had already been written by fate. Mustafa ran to his father, alone, unarmed, to redeem himself. He reached the sultan’s tent, going through four partitions. When he came to the fifth, his cries echoed through the plains. It is said that Süleyman shed tears for the son he had killed, and for the father who could kill such a son. Of Roxalena’s four sons, Mehmed died young of natural causes; Cihangir, possessed of a brilliant mind, was deformed and epileptic; Beyazit was able but cruel. Selim was her choice as heir, because she was convinced that his soft nature would not allow him to murder his brothers. She also knew that Selim drank to dull his prophetic awareness of impending death. Risking Süleyman’s wrath, she was not reluctant to supply the wine to ease her son’s pain. He became known as Selim the Sot and one of the least effective sultans of the dynasty. Roxalena did not live to realize her dream of becoming the Valide sultana. Nor did she live to see the twist of fate that set brother against brother, father against son. She would not see the struggle for the throne between Selim and Beyazit, which drove Beyazit to take refuge with the shah of Persia. She would not see how Süleyman forced the shah to extradite Beyazit, and how he promptly assassinated him, as well as the shah and his sons.
Roxalena died in 1558. Her daughter Mihrimah and her granddaughter Ayshe Humashah occupied her palace. Selim the Sot and his son Murad III both preferred women and pleasure to political matters. Their sisters, wives, and daughters took full advantage of the weak nature of the pair, dabbling in politics and securing important posts for their own husbands and sons. It was Mihrimah, rather than his sons, that Süleyman consulted on important issues. Roxalena had trained her daughter well. Her life has inspired paintings, musical compositions—including Joseph Haydn’s Symphony no. 63—an opera by Denys Sichynsky, a ballet, plays, and a number of novels, written mostly in Ukrainian, but also in English, French, and German. KÖSEM SULTANA Princes Ahmed and Mustafa lived together in the Golden Cage. When Ahmed became the Padishah, not having the heart to murder his brother, he kept Mustafa in the Cage—with just a few women. He built a wall to block the entrance, leaving a small window through which food was passed to Mustafa, as well as alcohol and opium. Fourteen years later, this same wall was hammered down, and the utterly demented Mustafa was declared sultan. His own years of isolation had created in Ahmed a void that consumed continual diversion. He took a different woman to bed each night, but he favored the Greek beauty Kösem, lavishing on her the finest jewels from his hoard. Kösem was the daughter of a priest from the island of Tinos. She was fifteen years old when she became the favorite of fifteen-year-old Ahmed I.
Jean-Léon Gérôme, Greek Interior, 1848, Oil on canvas, Musée d’Orsay, Paris
Ahmed ruled from 1603 to 1617, leaving Kösem a young widow. Mustafa was released from the Cage to become sultan, while Kösem’s own sons, Murad, Beyazit, and Ibrahim, took his place there, and she was transferred to the Old Palace. After only a few months, the eunuch corps dethroned the crazed Mustafa and returned him to the Cage. Mustafa’s son Osman succeeded him, but the young sultan fell victim to the uprising of the janissaries and the sipahis (cavalry). Troops marched into the Seraglio and dragged the sultan to the common Yedikule (Seven Towers) prison. He was murdered, his ear cut off and presented to his mother as an affront. Although fratricide was common in the Ottoman Empire, this was the first act of regicide. Once again, mad Mustafa was dragged out of the Cage (1622) and enthroned. This time he ordered the execution of Kösem’s sons. The eunuch corps—again—intervened and crowned Kösem’s oldest son as Murad IV in 1623. Thus, Kösem returned as Valide sultana but also, because her son was
a minor, as official regent between 1623 and 1632, making her one of the few women in history to rule a Moslem empire officially. During most of the reign of Murad IV, she effectively ran the empire, attending meetings of the Divan from behind a curtain even after she was no longer regent. But Murad’s cruelty disturbed her. Although he passed a law prohibiting drinking and smoking throughout the empire, he himself abused both habits. He ordered the execution of anyone else breaking this law. In a drunken stupor and accompanied by a mysterious dervish, Murad wandered the streets incognito, searching for victims. Corpses hung at every street corner. Kösem’s youngest son, Ibrahim, was also deranged. She set her hopes on handsome, astute, and brave Beyazit, who was highly skilled in jousting. One day, Beyazit threw Murad off in a joust. Shortly thereafter, while campaigning in Persia, Beyazit was killed by order of his brother, an incident that inspired Racine’s great tragedy Bejazit. Debauchery ultimately brought about Murad’s demise. On his deathbed, he told his mother how much he disdained his brother Ibrahim, and how it would be better for the dynasty to end rather than continue with an insane royal seed. He ordered Ibrahim’s death, but Kösem intervened. Ibrahim was ordered out of the Cage. He was too terrified to come out, convinced that his cruel brother was playing a game to torment him. He refused to leave until Murad’s corpse was brought before him, and even then Kösem had to coax him out as if she were cajoling a frightened kitten with food. It was Ibrahim’s reign (1640–48) that marked Kösem’s real power as Valide. With the help of the grand vizier, Mustafa Pasha, the empire was hers to rule. Feeble Ibrahim, entirely absorbed in the joys of the harem, was being devoured by lust, debauchery, and madness. The French called him “Le Fou de Fourrures” because of his obsession with furs; he wanted to touch, feel, and see furs everywhere in the harem. He searched the empire for its fattest woman, an Armenian, with whom he became madly infatuated, and declared her the Governor General of Damascus. Favored ladies were allowed to take what they pleased from the bazaars. He made his sisters serve the odalisques and presented his odalisques with the
wealthiest imperial estates. In a night of madness, he had his entire harem put in sacks and drowned. It would have been better for the empire if Ibrahim had remained childless. But Kösem was determined to hold power as long as possible. She employed a man named Cinci Hoca (Keeper of the Djinns) to concoct various herbs of fertility. Perhaps they were all too effective; Ibrahim had six sons, one after another. Tales of Ibrahim’s madness spread over the empire, finally provoking the janissaries to mutiny; they marched to the Gates of Felicity and demanded the sultan’s head. Kösem pleaded with them for several hours. She surrendered when they promised not to kill him but instead to put him back in the Cage. Confined once again, Ibrahim became a raving lunatic. His cries pierced the thick walls day and night. Ten days after his incarceration, he was strangled by order of the Mufti (the head imam, or Moslem priest). Ibrahim’s seven-year-old son, Mehmed, by Turhan Sultana, became the new sultan. Kösem presented him to the Divan with the words “Here he is! See what you can do with him!” Thus, she declared herself official queen regnant for the second time. Kösem had no intention of relinquishing the office of Valide to Turhan, and she refused to move to the Palace of Tears. She schemed to have Mehmed poisoned, so that she could elevate to the throne a young orphan prince whom she could manipulate. A war of two sultanas had begun. The year was 1651. The janissaries supported Kösem, but the new grand vizier, Koprülü Mehmed Pasha, and the rest of the palace administration favored Turhan. Kösem conspired to admit the janissaries into the harem one night to dispatch the young sultan and his mother. But Turhan had been informed about this conspiracy. Kösem found herself facing the eunuch corps instead, supporters of Turhan, who demanded her life. She went mad, stuffing her precious jewels into her pockets and fleeing through the intricate mazes of the harem, which she knew better than anyone. She crept into a small cabinet, hoping that the eunuchs would go past her and the janissaries would come to the rescue. But a piece of her skirt caught in the door, betraying her hiding place. The eunuchs dragged her out, tearing her clothes, stealing her jewels. She fought; but she was an
old woman now. One of her attackers strangled her with a curtain. Her naked, bleeding body was dragged outside and flaunted before the janissaries. Kösem had enjoyed the longest reign of any of the harem women, almost half a century. But she died in horror and abject loneliness. Turhan triumphed. Her son a child, she assumed absolute power. While she was well liked in the harem, Turhan was a simple woman, unsophisticated in state affairs. With her death in 1687, the Reign of Women came to an end.
Leon Bakst, Yellow Sultana, ca. 1912, Crayon, watercolor, gouache, and gold and silver paint on paper, 181⁄2 × 27 in., Private collection
AIMÉE DEBUCQ DE RIVERY (NAKSHEDIL SULTANA) Her life is shrouded in such mystery that, to this day, no one is sure whether Nakshedil and Aimée de Rivery, the fair, blue-eyed girl from Martinique, were indeed one and the same. The facts are contradictory yet the story so romantic that there is a tendency to want to believe it. Nakshedil’s life has
been the subject of 174 historical novels worldwide, as well as the film The Favorite. I learned about her from an early age because my grandmother Zehra made up a story about my great-great-grandmother Naime. It went like this. During the reign of Sultan Abdülaziz, some time in the middle of the nineteenth century, the French Empress Eugénie came to Istanbul. The empress wanted to visit the women in the sultan’s harem; this was arranged, and the ladies met. They fascinated one another, but could not converse. “Is there any among you who speaks French?” the empress managed to convey. They all looked at each other, whispered, and shook their heads. “Then,” my grandmother continued, “an old woman spoke up: ‘Before Nakshedil, the French Sultana, died, there was a young girl she liked. She named her Naime because it sounded,’ she said, ‘like her own name before she was brought to the palace. She taught this girl the language of the French. And I think the girl still lives in the Old Palace.’ ” Immediately Naime was delivered from the darkness of the Palace of Tears and brought to the empress. She was a shy little girl, but she indeed spoke fluent French, with a peculiar Martinique accent. When the sultan saw how much Empress Eugénie liked this forgotten girl, he offered Naime to her as a present to take back with her to France. However, a young man in Eugénie’s entourage fell in love with Naime and finally asked the empress for Naime’s hand in marriage. At this, the sultan intervened, saying the girl was a Moslem and the only way a gavur (infidel) could marry her was by converting to Islam. Though he was from a devout Catholic family, the young man did not hesitate to change his faith and his name. As a Moslem, he was given a ward in Macedonia, a town called Prilep, near Skopje. The couple moved there, had many children, and started first a vineyard, which was a failure, then a successful gunpowder business, the name of which became our family’s, Barutçu (gunpowder makers). This story was one of my favorites, and I made my grandmother tell it over and over again. I never profaned it by asking what language the old lady spoke who told the empress about Naime. Neither did I question the fact that Naime would have to be in her sixties if indeed she was Nakshedil
Sultana’s pet! My father, who was the family archivist, denied any truth to the story—although he had no explanation for the origins of great-greatgrandmother Naime and her mysterious dönme (convert) husband in Prilep. Family records did not go back far enough, having been lost during the Balkan wars, when surviving members of my grandmother’s family left their estate in Prilep and fled to Istanbul. Is it genuine history? I doubt it. But it made such an impression on me that it became the subject of my novel, The Palace of Tears. We do know that Aimée DeBucq de Rivery was born in 1763 to a noble family in Martinique. Her cousin Josephine Tascher de la Pagerie married Napoleon Bonaparte. Lesley Blanche tells the story of the two young girls consulting a Creole fortune-teller in Porte Royale, who predicted that they would both grow up to be queens, one to rule the East, the other the West. In 1784, on her voyage back to Martinique, after attending convent school in Nantes, Aimée was kidnapped by Barbarossa’s corsairs. At twenty-one years old, Aimée was sold to the Dey of Algiers, who, captivated by her unusual charm, saw an opportunity to win the sultan’s favor. He presented the girl to Abdülhamid I. Aimée was fair, demure, and intelligent. The sultan named her Nakshedil (Embroidered on the Heart) and made her his favorite. She rose to the status of fourth kadin (although some sources cite her as the thirteenth), and found herself in the political crossfire of the harem: the first kadin, Nükhet Seza, and the second kadin, Mihrimah, were each trying to put their sons on the throne. Nakshedil observed and learned. In 1789, the year of the French Revolution, Abdülhamid died. At the age of twenty-seven, Selim III became sultan. He asked Nakshedil to remain at the Seraglio harem with her son, Mahmud—his nephew. For Selim, Nakshedil was a personification of the France he had always admired. She became his confidante. She taught him French; and for the first time, a permanent ambassador was sent from Istanbul to Paris. Selim started a French newspaper and let Nakshedil decorate the palace in rococo style. These Francophile reforms cost him his life. Religious fanatics who disapproved of his liberalism assassinated Selim in 1807. The assassins also sought to kill Mahmud, but Nakshedil saved her son by concealing him
inside a furnace. When Mahmud became sultan, he accomplished significant reforms in the empire that are, for the most part, attributed to the influence of his mother. Although Aimée accepted Islam as part of the harem etiquette, she always remained a Christian in her heart. Her last wish was for a priest to perform the last rites. Her son did not deny her this: as Aimée lay dying, a Catholic priest passed—for the first time—through the Gates of Felicity and into the harem.
Eunuchs
One evening, I was leaving the house of a wealthy Mussulman, one of whose four wives was ill with ear disease; it was my third visit, and on coming away, as well as on entering, I was always preceded by a tall eunuch who called aloud the customary warning, ‘Women, withdraw,’ in order that ladies and female slaves might know that there was a man in the harem and keep out of sight. On reaching the courtyard the eunuch returned, leaving me to make my way out alone. On this occasion, just as I was about to open the door, I felt a light touch on my arm: turning around I found, standing close by me, another eunuch, a good-looking youth of eighteen or twenty, who stood gazing silently at me, his eyes filled with tears. Finding that he did not speak, I asked him what I could do for him. He hesitated a moment, and then, clasping my hand convulsively in both of his, he said in a hoarse voice, in which there was a ring of despair, ‘Doctor, you know some remedy for every malady; tell me, is there none for mine?’ I cannot express to you the effect those simple words produced upon me: I wanted to answer him but my voice seemed to die away, and finally, not knowing what to do or say I pulled the door open and fled. But that night and for many nights after I kept seeing his face and hearing those mournful words; and I can tell you that more than once I could feel the tears rising at the recollection. —Edmondo de Amicis, a young doctor of Pera, Constantinople (1896) SÜLEYMAN AĞA When I was a small child living in Izmir during the late forties, in a big house that once held the harem of a pasha, I knew a eunuch. His name was
Süleyman Ağa, a gingerbread-colored man without hair on his face, so that he looked much younger than he was. Süleyman Ağa always seemed to have a special gift just for me. I don’t remember anymore what all these gifts were, except one. Once, when I was sitting on his lap, he pinched my pinkie between his own pudgy dark fingers and put on it a ring with a bright red stone. He put another ring on my ring finger, a dazzling one with a colorless stone. Next, my middle finger received another ring, this time with a green stone. He continued placing rings on all my fingers: on the index finger, one with a blue stone and on my thumb, a ring with a purple one. He brought each ring out of his pocket slowly, very slowly, each time showing his amusem*nt, his eyes fixed on my face, observing my expressions. No one has since spoiled me to that degree. Later, in the fifties, when we moved to Ankara, he continued to visit us now and then, always bringing a large box of cream-filled chocolates. My favorite was banana cream. (I hated the crème de menthe.) Although he came unannounced, often just as the family was sitting down to dinner, I was delighted to see him each time. I felt a leaping in my heart as I answered the door and saw his flaccid figure standing before me. My eyes immediately traveled to his hands, which held the most seductive chocolate box. “Open sesame, open,” he would say, his golden front teeth flashing at me, his voice pitched high—although I did not really know what that signified. But I did know that he seemed more like a woman than a man, in the way he slouched forward and caved in right around his belly, and in the softness of his face. He had an hourglass figure, and to me he felt like an old aunt.
With my parents at our house in Izmir, 1949
In his absence, my parents referred to him as the hadim (eunuch) or kose —a word, my mother told me, that meant “beardless”; some men were just that way. Another time I overheard my father saying that there weren’t many of “them” left anymore, and when these die, the species will completely disappear from the country, and it will be the close of an embarrassing era. I was about nine when the news came of his death. Somewhere around that time, I found out that a eunuch meant a castrated man. And since I was not yet familiar with the details of male anatomy, I imagined a man with his penis cut off; it was a disturbing picture. I had passed the age of asking intimate questions of my parents, or anyone else, except for my close girlfriends, who did not seem to know much more than I. In history class, we did study about these castrated men from the days of the sultans. We learned how important they were and how they meddled in politics. Süleyman Ağa was one of the last. Since then, I have seen re-creations of eunuchs in movies or dance or opera. They are often played by beautifully muscled, athletic, and seminaked black men with gorgeous turbans and flashy daggers, but they are so unlike Süleyman Ağa that it is hard to imagine that the word eunuch describes both. ORIGINS Even more than the sexual fantasies implicit in the harem, the eunuch commands utter fascination, as morbid as it is irresistible. I have not tried to resist here. How did eunuchs come to be? Whose idea were they—and why? Clues lie in the things I have read, but mostly it is speculative. The first traces of eunuchry appear in Mesopotamia, the cradle of civilization, between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates, which eventually become one and empty into the Persian Gulf. In that delta, a beautiful valley nurtured many tribes— predominantly matriarchal societies. During the ninth century B.C., Semiramis, queen of Assyria, castrated male slaves. So did other queens. In Voyage en Orient, Gérard de Nerval describes a retinue of eunuchs who traveled with the Queen of Sheba (Saba).
TYPES OF EUNUCHS Eunuchs could be congenital, castrated by other men, or castrated voluntarily as a means of achieving chastity. As the Apostle Matthew declares (19:12), “there are eunuchs, which were so born from their mother’s womb: and there are eunuchs, which were made eunuchs by men: and there are eunuchs, which made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake.” The word eunuch is from the Greek eune (bed) and ekhein (to keep), initially meaning a trusted servant, a “bed keeper.” Archaeological finds at Çatalhöyük suggest that castration practices were common as far back as 7500 B.C. in the worship of a goddess similar to Cybele. The earliest records of intentional castration date back to the Sumerian cities of Lagash in the twenty-first century B.C. Eunuchs were also common in the Assyrian Empire and in the court of the Egyptian pharaohs—down to the Ptolemies. The tradition of eunuchs traveled east, through Persia and India to China. Warring Persian tribes castrated Ionian prisoners and offered them, along with the loveliest virgins among the vanquished, to their kings. In 538 B.C., when Cyrus, King of Persia, captured Babylon, he proclaimed that since eunuchs were incapable of procreating and having their own families, they could be the most loyal of servants. As Xenophon, the ancient Greek historian and biographer (400 B.C.), records: He drew this conclusion from the case of other animals: for instance, vicious horses when gelded, stop biting and prancing about, to be sure, but are none the less fit for service in war: and bulls, when castrated, lose part of their high spirit and unruliness but are not deprived of their strength, nor capacity for work. And in the same way dogs, when castrated, stop running away from their masters, but are no less useful for watching or hunting. And men, too, in the same way become gentler when deprived of this desire, but no less careful of that which is entrusted to them. The Judeo-Christian notion of chastity and the perception of women as obstacles to achieving it encouraged castration. Tertullian, the secondcentury theologian, declared that the Kingdom of Heaven was open to
eunuchs, encouraging boys to castrate themselves. Most who did later regretted their decision. Herodotus tells of a slaver named Panionus from the island of Chios (Scio), infamous for his sexual practices. Panionus bought boys of extraordinary beauty, then castrated and sold them at the slave emporiums. A boy named Hermotimus was among these. Years later, the paths of the slave trader and the eunuch crossed again. Hermotimus had acquired a great deal of power in Sardis as the chief eunuch in a palace. He convinced Panionus to move there with his family, promising him power and wealth. Panionus, unaware of Hermotimus’s hunger for revenge, agreed and moved his family into the palace—only to find himself overpowered by the eunuch, who forced him to castrate his four sons, and then forced the sons to castrate their father—the stuff of Greek tragedy. The Catholic Church had castrated boys to preserve their soprano voices for the papal choir of the Sistine Chapel since the Renaissance—a practice that did not cease until 1878. In the eighteenth century, Italian opera favored castrati as well, some of whom became superstars, such as Farinelli, Grimaldi, and Nicolini. The holy mosques of Islam in Mecca and Medina employed several hundred eunuchs, since the attendants had to come in contact with women who visited. Such contact was not permissible between men and women in Islamic society, especially in a holy place. Therefore, the attendants had to be something less than men. In the late eighteenth century, in Central Russia, a secret sect called the Skoptsi (from skopets, or eunuch) flourished. The Skoptsi believed in an unusual Garden of Eden myth, in which Adam and Eve had been created sexless. After the fall, however, sections of the forbidden fruit were grafted onto them as genitalia and breasts. In order to regain the pure, prelapsarian state, many willingly endured a castration ritual, often mutilating themselves with knives, sharp stones, even broken glass. Skoptsi still exist. Several members of the twentieth-century Heaven’s Gate cult were also found to have been castrated, apparently voluntarily and for the same reasons.
In Asia Minor, during the fifth century B.C., the priests of the Temple of Artemis in Ephesus (one of the seven wonders of the world) and the Temple of Cybele were eunuchs. Later on, the sacred function of eunuchs changed into a form of luxury in Greece and Rome. As Gibbon recounts: “Restrained by the severe edicts of Domitian and Nerva, cherished by the pride of Diocletian, reduced to a humble station by the prudence of Constantine, they multiplied in the palaces of his degenerate sons, and insensibly acquired the knowledge, and at length the direction, of the secret councils of Constantius.” The custom lingered among the Byzantines and passed on to the Ottoman Turks. During the fourteenth century, when the Ottomans first began secluding their women, the Byzantines supplied them with eunuchs, but it did not take the Turks long to establish their own trade. In China, castration was already a well-established practice at this time, flourishing until the fall of the Great Palace of Peking. But while the eunuchs in China were all Chinese, in Turkey they were anything but Turks, since castration was forbidden in Islam. At first, the Turks acquired white eunuchs from conquered Christian areas such as Circassia, Georgia, and Armenia, but these eunuchs often proved fragile, and the mortality rate was high. Since black eunuchs manifested more strength and better endurance, Egypt, Abyssinia, and the Sudan became lucrative hunting grounds. EUNUCH TRADE According to Islam, slaves captured in war become the property of their captor and, as all property, could be transferred. Slave traders pursued certain African chiefs who willingly sold their people. Such transactions established a lucrative trade. The majority of slaves came from the upper reaches of the Nile, from Kordofan, Darfur, Dongola, and near Lake Chad. They were shipped upriver to Alexandria or Cairo, packed spoon-fashion in boats; or from Darfur and Sennar in the Sudan, crossing the Sahara partly on foot and partly on camels. Other slaves were transported from Abyssinia to the Red Sea ports and eventually to the greatest slave emporiums on the Mediterranean—Mecca, Medina, Beirut, Smyrna, and Constantinople.
PROCEDURES Egyptian Christians or Jews castrated some young black boys on the way at rest stops, since Islam prohibited the practice. It was a risky operation with a high mortality rate, and the hot, arid climate was not conducive to easy recovery. Desert sand being considered the most efficacious balm, the newly castrated were buried up to their necks until their wound healed. The boys who survived the pain, hemorrhage, and subsequent burial became luxury items, bringing enormous profit to the traders. And since they attracted wealthy purchasers, the eunuchs’ futures actually held opportunity for position and power. A great deal of secrecy still surrounds the shady trade of eunuch-making, but the etymological history of terms associated with castration offers clues about the various procedures, which involved crushing, striking, cutting, and pulling. During the Classical era, according to historian N. M. Penzer, the varieties of eunuchs were clearly defined: Castrati, clean-cut, both penis and testicl*s removed Spadones, testicl*s removed by a method of dragging Thlibiae, testicl*s bruised and crushed, the seminal glands permanently damaged—primarily performed on very young boys Sir Richard Burton, the famous traveler and Arabist, lists three similar types of castration practice in the Orient: Sandali, or clean-cut. The genitals swept off by a single incision of a razor, a tube inserted into the urethra, the wound cauterized with boiling oil, and the patient planted in a fresh dunghill. The diet is milk and, under puberty, survival rate high. Eunuch, whose penis is removed, still retaining the ability for copulation and procreation without the wherewithal. Eunuch, similar to thlibiae, rendered sexless by removing the testicl*s with a stone knife or by bruising, twisting or searing.
The methods of castration seem to be universal around the world, except for variations in procedures for control of hemorrhage. Carter Stent describes how Chinese eunuchs were castrated (1877): The operation is performed in this manner: white ligatures or bandages are bound tightly round the belly and upper parts of the thighs, to prevent much hemorrhage. The parts to be operated on are then bathed three times with hot pepper-water, the intended eunuch being in a reclining position. When the parts have been sufficiently bathed, the whole—both testicl*s and penis—are cut off as closely as possible with a curved knife, in the shape of a sickle. The emasculation being effected, a pewter needle or spigot is carefully thrust into the main orifice at the root of the penis; the wound is then covered with paper saturated in cold water and carefully bound up. After the wound is dressed, the patient is made to walk around the room supported by two “knifers” for two or three hours, when he is allowed to lie down. The patient is not allowed to drink anything for three days, during which time he suffers great agony, not only from thirst, but from intense pain, and from the impossibility of relieving nature during that period. At the end of three days, the bandage is taken off, the spigot is pulled out, and the sufferer obtains relief in the copious flow of urine which spurts out like a fountain. If this takes place satisfactorily, the patient is considered out of danger and congratulated on it; but if the unfortunate wretch cannot make water, he is doomed to a death of agony, for the passages have become swollen and nothing can save him. The historian Paul Rycaut also describes eunuchs concealing a silver quill in their turbans, which they inserted into the urethra in order to urinate. Prepubescent boys had the best chance of surviving the operation. After puberty, castration brought on a sense of irreparable loss and despair, mingled with frustration and longings for vengeance. CHINESE EUNUCHS The Forbidden City of Peking was almost exclusively male, and most of the inhabitants were eunuchs. During the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644), more than a thousand eunuchs lived within the walled city. Their number
gradually dwindled, leaving only two hundred by the time of the last emperor Pu Yi’s reign at the beginning of the twentieth century. Although most of the eunuchs within the walled city performed menial tasks, great opportunities for promotion actually attracted the poor. Castration was an inexpensive operation with about a 4 to 5 percent mortality rate—a risk many considered worth taking. It was helpful for the novices to have connections within the walled city since recruitment was sponsored by eunuchs already employed there. They received a good education and were eventually employed as clerks. The ones with good singing voices acted in theatricals; others became confidants of high officials. Since Confucian tradition required the burial of the whole body to attain heaven, they kept their sex organs in tiny jars full of brine, and carried them on their persons. A lucrative black market trade existed in these relics for those who were unable to preserve their own organs. EFFECTS OF CASTRATION The physical effects of castration are lack of body hair, a falsetto voice, flabbiness, and obesity. Eunuchs also suffer from weak bladders, short memory, insomnia, and poor eyesight. They try to stay off alcohol, because it dissipates their energy and causes pain in the urethra. According to various accounts, harem eunuchs on the whole were partial to material delights. They enjoyed eating rich and sweet confections, chocolate, and pastries. They had an affinity for storytelling, savoring the wildest myths and fairy tales. They also enjoyed music and dance, which must have evoked the spirit of their native Africa: “Eunuchs and slaves went through the swaying measure of the dance, half hidden in clouds of burning spices and perfumes, which breezes from the Black Sea wafted over the entire Seraglio, and accompanied by strains of barbaric warlike music,” writes Edmondo de Amicis in Constantinople (1896). SEXUAL DESIRE AND CONSUMMATION The loss of sexual organs does not necessarily remove all sexual desire, especially if castration is performed at puberty, according to the Roman satirist Juvenal: “The height of their enjoyment, however, is when the lads
have been led to the doctor in the heat and flush of youth with a bush of dark hairs already visible; and the testicl*s they have waited for and encouraged to grow in the early stages.” A eunuch who had lost only his testicl*s could still have erections and enjoy sex. Sir Richard Burton, in his voluminous translation of the One Thousand and One Nights, points out that an erection could last as long as the heart kept pounding and passion remained intact. In “Tale of the First Eunuch,” a black youth takes advantage of a girl and is punished by castration. Later, he becomes her eunuch and continues making love to her until her death. According to some records, eunuchs had passionate affairs with harem women. Montesquieu’s Persian Letters evokes the suffering of an aroused eunuch: When I entered the Seraglio, where everything filled me with regret for what I had lost, my agitation increased every moment, rage in my heart and despair unutterable in my soul.… I remember one day, as I attended a lady at the bath, I was so carried away that I lost command of myself and dared lay my hand where I should not. My first thought was that my last day had come. I was, however, fortunate enough to escape a dreadful death; but the fair one, whom I had made the witness of my weakness, extorted a heavy price for her silence: I entirely lost command of her, and she forced me, each time at the risk of my life, to comply with a thousand caprices. Harem women favored a eunuch who still had his penis, because of his ability to prolong his partner’s pleasure. Besides, eunuchs had an absolute corner on birth control. They sometimes kept their own odalisques, and others preferred young boys, as a court halberdier remarked in Risale-i Taberdariye fi Ahzal-i Ağa’yi Darüssade (1714): These wretched men, they fall in love with handsome youths too and keep them close, these wretches have so much desire in their corrupt bodies. Every single one of them buys a couple of slave girls and secretly keeps them in their room, jealous of the others of their kind. They fight with each
other over these women they keep in their rooms. How could a traitor commit such an act without sexual urge? Eunuchs were also known to experiment with aphrodisiacs and erotic paraphernalia. Having contact with the outside, they were able to obtain a variety of sex toys, including artificial phalli and other erotic succedanea. They were also highly skilled in the art of oral sex; a woman who married after having made love to a eunuch was often dissatisfied with her husband’s performance, according to a halberdier: Is it said that these odalisques who become intimate with eunuchs develop a voracious sexual appetite? That they do is a well-known fact all over Istanbul. Two odalisques were given their freedom and married off. A week after their weddings, the husbands divorced them. The reason being that the odalisques told their husbands they did not perform as well as the eunuchs. Because of that, the husbands divorced them. This incident occurred in my time. Eunuchs seem to have been rather unselfish in their sexual pursuits; therefore, we know less about the process of their own fulfillment, as they left us little discussion of it. Their erogenous zones were around the urethra and the anal cavity. Burton became acquainted with a eunuch’s wife, who told him that her husband experimented with masturbation, fellati*, and anal sex until these acts induced a venereal org*sm from a secretion of the prostate gland. As he was about to climax, she would hold a pillow for him to bite. She was afraid that, in an unbearable fit of passion, he might have torn her breasts or face. MARRIAGE OF EUNUCHS Marriage between eunuchs and odalisques in the Seraglio was not uncommon; but, once married, they lived outside of the harem. Sümbül Ağa, Ibrahim’s chief eunuch, married a pregnant girl in order to have not only a wife but also a child to take care of. Many others filled harems of their own with virgins. “I was not looking for love, but for passion. I was unable to satisfy this irresistible desire in the palace,” recorded a nineteenth-century chief black eunuch. “There were many women on whom
I looked with desire, but I was deterred by visions of the gallows. Finally, I decided to get married. I married a woman who had come from the palace. You might ask how such a woman could marry such a man as I. I do not know. I never asked this once in all the years that we lived together.” In his Diaries (1699–1700), John Richards writes of such marriage practices with great disdain: There is a sort of Marriage if it may be so called between a Eunuch and a Woman and I hear meane those who are cut close, notwithstanding it is credibly reported that they have commerce in a manner unknown to us, and it is no great matter, nay even the Women amongst themselves have ways of Supplying the Deffect of Men & it is not to be wondered at that these miserable Creatures who have no other knowledge themselves than that [they] are made for the use of Man, nor that faith which teaches a future reward and punishment for Vertue & Vice, it is not to be admired at, they should give themselves up to all manner of Lusts & Sensuality in which they say they excel all other Women. REGENERATION OF GENITALS It is difficult to believe but, apparently, sexual organs sometimes grew back! Carter Stent records that after an investigation in a Chinese court, several eunuchs were discovered still endowed. They were immediately recastrated, but this time, being at a more vulnerable age, most did not survive the operation. A eunuch named Wei-chung-hsien, in the court of Peking, secretly kept a concubine and tried everything possible to regenerate his sexual organs. A doctor told him that if he ate the brains of seven men, he could retrieve his genitals. Wei-chung-hsien procured seven criminals, had their heads split open and the brains extracted from them, and devoured everything. We do not know whether this regenerated his genitals or created a monster. Eunuchs were carefully scrutinized before admission to the Seraglio. Physicians examined them on arrival and checked them periodically to make certain that nothing had grown back. Also, eunuchs with unattractive faces were preferred; the beautiful, bejeweled, “blue” eunuchs were left to the pages of One Thousand and One Nights.
As many as six to eight hundred eunuchs were employed in the Seraglio at the height of the Ottoman Empire. Like the odalisques, they were mostly gifts from the governors of different provinces. Their living quarters were located immediately beyond the entrance to the harem through the Gates of Felicity. The only entry was through two consecutive pairs of doors, one of iron, the other of brass. The chief eunuch received the keys every night from the watchman, the baltacilar (axe-man, or halberdier), and returned them in the morning. The anteroom still contains the bastinado sticks used on the newcomers. Each novice eunuch was subjected to the sticks, whether he deserved them or not. He would be stretched out on the floor, his hands and feet bound together, while an older eunuch hit his soles with the sticks for as long as the young boy could tolerate the pain. All the others were forced to observe and learn: “The boys are watched and disciplined by the other youths of the Seraglio, till at a certain age they are ready for service. They are then removed thence and sent to the women and placed under others in the service of the Sultana, being under the command of the chief eunuch, or head of the girls. They get a considerable allowance, of 60 to 100 akcha/day, two robes of the finest silk and other gifts throughout the year, besides what is plentifully bestowed upon them from other quarters. They bear names of flowers, such as Hyacinth, Narcissus, Rose and Carnation; since they are in the service of women they have names suitable to virginity, whiteness and fragrance,” wrote Ottaviano Bon in Seraglio of the Grand Signor (1608).
Two eunuchs in the seraglio courtyard
They slept in a crowded dormitory while apprenticing with older eunuchs, and they grew up playing with other boys and child odalisques. The discipline of their training for the corps of eunuch guards was comparable to that in a military school. At the end of this training, like the odalisques, each was assigned to the service of a luminary in the harem—a prince, a kadin, a daughter or sister of the sultan, or the Valide sultana. Their dream was to reach the status of the kizlar ağasi (master of the girls), the chief black eunuch. THE CHIEF BLACK EUNUCH (KIZLAR AĞASI)
The kizlar ağasi (girls’ master) was the highest-ranking officer in the empire after the sultan and the grand vizier. He was the commander of the corps of baltacilar, a pasha, and carried other illustrious titles. He could approach the sultan at any time and functioned as the private messenger between the sultan and the grand vizier, and as the liaison between the sultan and his mother. Any woman within the harem wanting to approach the sultan had to be screened by him. He was a wealthy man, greatly feared, and, consequently, said to be the most bribed official in the whole Ottoman Empire. One of his duties was to lead a new odalisque to the sultan’s bedroom, a ceremony Jean-Claude Flachat describes in Observations sur le commerce (1766): Finally the Saray Usta (Mistress of the House) presents to the sultan the girl which he finds most attractive.… She makes haste to display all her skills to please him. He throws a handkerchief to her as indication that he wishes to stay with her, and immediately the curtains around the room where he is sitting are drawn. The Kizlar Aga waits there for the signal to draw the curtains back, while all the other women who are dispersed here and there—some dancing, some singing, some playing musical instruments, and many resting—enter the kiosk and present their respects to the sultan and their congratulations to the new favorite. If any emergency occurred during the night, the kizlar ağasi was the only person allowed to enter the harem. His duties besides protecting the women were to provide the necessary odalisques for the harem; oversee the promotion of the women and the other eunuchs; act as a witness at the sultan’s marriage and birth ceremonies; arrange all the royal ceremonial events, such as circumcision parties, weddings, and fêtes; and deliver sentence to harem women accused of crimes. He was the one who took the girls to the executioner, and the one who had them put in sacks to be drowned. In the second half of the sixteenth century, the power of the eunuchs grew. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the eunuchs, like the Haseki sultanas, took advantage of child sultans and mentally incompetent ones to
gain political power. During the Reign of Women (1558–1687), the chief black eunuch was the Valide sultana’s and the kadins’ most intimate and valued accomplice. Together, they played a significant role in the decline of the Ottoman Empire: Although it was said that forty of them did not have sufficient brains between them to fill a fig pip, the murders committed as a result of the influence wielded by these harem aghas were innumerable. During the reign of Abdülhamid, those who rose to the highest rank of musahip (gentleman-in-waiting to the sultan) were as powerful as the sultan himself. In the time of Abdülhamid, the Kizlar Agha frequently received the highest statesmen of the time in his rooms. One of the conspirators behind the March 31st tragedy was Jevher Agha. After the proclamation of Second Tanzimat the war office ordered his execution. My own experiences in the palace led me to divide the eunuchs into three different categories: the oversensitive, the foolish and the stupid. At the very mention of the word ‘black’ some would take umbrage. They would not drink coffee because it was black, instead they drank tea. Ali Seydi Bey, Teşrifat ve Teşkilatimiz (Our Ceremony and Organization) (1904) From the early nineteenth century until the fall of the empire, the power of the chief eunuch declined. By the early twentieth century, his job was simply to supervise the dress of the women, making sure that it was appropriate; to accompany the women in their outings and oversee their itineraries, making certain that everything was conducted according to the rules; to prohibit merchants, workers, and fortune-tellers from entering the harem at will; to grant or deny permission to women visitors to enter or exit the harem; and to be on call in case something critical happened after hours. With the disappearance of harems, so expired the eunuchs. During the last days of the Ottoman Empire, there was a great deal of concern about their survival in old age. They feebly attempted forming unions. Nobody wanted to deal with them anymore, because they stood for a past everyone wanted to bury. “In the midst of a crowded bazaar,” Edmondo de Amicis writes in Constantinople (1896), “among the throng of pleasure seekers at the Sweet
Waters, beneath the columns of the mosques, beside the carriages, on the steamboats, in kayiks, at all the festivals, wherever people are assembled together, one sees those phantoms of men, these melancholy countenances, like a dark shadow thrown across every aspect of gay Oriental life.”
HAREM LIFE IN THE CITY
Ordinary Harems
The Oriental woman is no more than a machine: she makes no distinction between one man and another man. Smoking, going to the baths, painting her eyelids and drinking coffee. Such is the circle of occupations within which her existence is confined. As for physical pleasure, it must be very slight, since the well-known button, the seat of same, is sliced off at an early age. —Gustave Flaubert, Letter to his mistress, Louise Colet (1850) Prior to the twentieth century, women were segregated in almost every Moslem household in the Ottoman Empire—even in a few of the Christian and Jewish ones. While the wealthy lords kept opulent harems that were smaller versions of the one in the Seraglio, with numerous eunuchs and odalisques, even a few of the poor might keep two wives in one small room, a mere curtain separating them. Unlike the sultans, ordinary Moslem citizens generally married daughters of other Moslem citizens. These women had been born into and stayed in their father’s harem until they were married. Then they moved into their husband’s harem, managed by the man’s mother, the Valide. (“Harem” here does not necessarily imply the practice of polygamy but rather that the women of the house lived separately.)
Edmund Dulac, Illustration to Quatrain LXXII of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1909), Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University, New York Alas, that Spring should vanish with the Rose! That Youth’s sweet-scented Manuscript should close!
Marriages were arranged by families, and each man was allowed four legal wives under Moslem law (if he wanted to comply), whom he was
expected to keep in the same style and lavish equal affection upon. However, the first wife was considered the most important and often had greater legal privileges. In addition to the four wives, girls were available for purchase and brought into the harems as servants. On rare occasions the men had sexual contact with or even married these servant women to legitimize their children. THE GO-BETWEENS Since men and women did not associate socially, marriages were arranged by görücü (go-betweens), “agents” who visited harems, studied the merits of a certain girl, and passed their judgment on to the man’s family. Sometimes these arrangements were orchestrated between relatives to strengthen the bonds of kinship. The betrothal of first cousins was and still is prevalent in some Islamic countries. Görücü were still operating during the 1960s. Most of these women were self-proclaimed busybodies who prided themselves on their talent for matchmaking. They sought out pubescent girls for widowed, middle-aged, or unmarried men who seemed incapable of finding wives for themselves. Unannounced, the görücü showed up at a girl’s house. Islamic custom not allowing one to turn away a guest, the girl’s relatives would welcome the görücü—because that was their obligation. They served her coffee and sweets, acted polite, and made small talk. Meanwhile, the young girl would be hiding in the kitchen or in another room, until her mother or aunts invited her in. She would be required to make and serve Turkish coffee, since great importance was attached to her ability to brew this concoction. Her eyes cast down, she served the coffee to the görücü and her entourage, either leaving the room immediately after they had sufficient opportunity to scrutinize her or sitting silently on the edge of her seat, listening to the other women carry on.
Henry T. Schafer, The Bride, ca. 1889, Photogravure, 71⁄2 × 121⁄2 in., Collection of the author
My friends and I used to make fun of this primitive custom, but since we were living in a country still caught in uneasy change, it was inevitable that we, too, would encounter the görücü. I recall on several occasions peeking behind the door and watching these women come for older girls in the family. I became very familiar with the ritual and antics. Barely after I had reached puberty, it was my turn. I was incensed at their gall and resisted coming out to meet them, but the older women in my family, steeped in tradition, insisted that I present myself. In my rebellion, I did what I could to make myself unattractive, undesirable, and unwomanly—at least according to the prescribed standards. I dressed inappropriately, made bad coffee, and talked too much. It was a great relief when they left, but often a source of quarrel, since my women relatives felt I had misbehaved, and I myself was humiliated by having been subjected to this archaic ritual. Although they sympathized with me—and it was always understood that I would find and choose my own husband—they felt hurt to see the age-old tradition crumble and realize that they were its last relics. ROMANCE Despite the interference of görücü and the custom of arranged marriages, romance still smoldered in the imagination of young men and women. Pubescent girls, discovering their hearts for the first time, spent endless hours composing symbolic verses to imaginary handsome lovers. Thousands of small artifacts, such as flowers, fruits, blades of grass, feathers, and stones, were endowed with special meaning in the language of love. A few cloves, a scrap of paper, a slice of pear, a bit of soap, a match, a piece of gold thread, a stick of cinnamon, and a corn of pepper signified “I have long loved you. I pant, languish, and die with love for you. Give me a little hope. Do not reject me. Answer me with a word.” The girls often got so carried away with their fantasy lovers that when their arranged husbands came along, heartbreak was inevitable.
Two common Eastern fantasies depicted on Iranian postcards: lovers served food and wine by a houri—an image that also symbolizes cennet (paradise) on earth—and a dying old man surrounded by a harem of houris.
For their part, young men were also romantics: “I could see that he was terribly in love, for with Arabs, a very little goes a long way; and never being allowed to see the young ladies, they fall in love merely through talking about them,” observed Lady Anne Blunt in her 1878 journal. Romance or not, families decided who married whom. My grandmother was promised to her father’s best friend when she was merely a child. When they eventually got married, she was fourteen and my grandfather was forty. GIFTS In the nineteenth century, if the husband-to-be came from a wealthy family, he would give his betrothed, as engagement presents, a silver mirror, perfumes, spice trays, pitchers of syrup, jam in crystal bowls, slippers stitched with golden thread for the fiancée, and slippers for the entire household fashioned according to the status of each. The bride-to-be responded with chibouks inlaid with pearls, money and watch cases, an ablution set, towels embroidered with gold, and a silk shirt. Middle-class people presented more or less the same things but of lesser value, while men from the lower classes gave slippers to the bride-to-be and her mother, and finely ground coffee and sugar to the rest of the family. HENNA NIGHT One of the most quaint and enjoyable aspects of the wedding preparations was the henna night, which occurred on the evening before the wedding. Women spent the day at the hamam, bathing, grooming, and luxuriating. At night, they gathered together in the same house and ceremoniously decorated the bride’s hands, feet, and face with henna, then took turns applying it to one another. At the time of my childhood, henna nights had come to be considered a rural custom and were never practiced in the cities. But I do remember visiting relatives in the country and, for the first time, having both my hands covered with a gray-green paste that smelled like horse manure and that kept getting colder as the evening wore on. Then, my hands were wrapped
in cloth like twin mummies. I spent a restless night not being able to move my fingers, yet so curious of the outcome that I would not dream of taking the bandages off. The next morning, one of the women carefully unwrapped my hands and washed off the hardened mud. Underneath, my fingers were bright orange. When I returned to the city, other children made fun of me. The henna did not come off for weeks, no matter how well I washed and scrubbed my hands. In the recent years, henna nights have become a sort of trendy ritual among the more secular and Westernized brides-to-be, as a way of embracing an old tradition but also enjoying female company, not unlike a bridal shower. WEDDINGS The bride and groom did not meet prior to the wedding. In his novel The Disenchanted, Pierre Loti dramatizes the unfairness of this situation: “During this last supreme day, still her own, she wanted to prepare herself as if for death, sort her papers, and a thousand little treasures, and, above all, burn things, burn them for fear of the unknown man who in a few hours would be her master. There was no haven of refuge for her distressful soul, and her terror and revolt increased as the day went on.… All these treasures, all the little secrets of beautiful young women, their suppressed indignation, their vain laments—all turned to ashes, piled up and mingled in a copper brazier, the only Oriental object in the room.” The wedding ceremony began with the arrival of the bride at the groom’s house, heavily veiled, often wearing a red wedding gown and an ornate tiara. She came through a silk tunnel stretched from the carriage to the front door. She was not allowed to look to the right or left but had to keep her head straight while an older woman relative, usually an aunt, led her to the bridal throne set on a dais. As she sat down, the women guests started trilling, and a drumbeat began. The groom then entered, lifted the veil, and saw his bride’s face for the first time. It was a critical moment. He had the right to reject her if what he saw did not appeal to him. By throwing a handful of coins at the spectators, all women, he expressed his satisfaction and acceptance. The women made a wild dash for the money, squealing and
elbowing each other. Many of these heavily veiled women were present at every wedding, and there were rumors about men shrouding themselves in women’s guise just to catch a glimpse of the bride’s face. Next the groom took the bride’s hand, and together they went out of the room. Soon afterward, the groom left the house, not to see the bride again for the rest of the day. After his departure, a feast began—lasting the entire day; in wealthier households, sometimes several days. “It lasted forty days and forty nights” was the catchphrase that described some of the more opulent weddings. Later that night the bride was delivered to the groom’s bedroom by her male relatives. She entered the nuptial bed at the foot, lifting the bedcovers in an elaborate ritual. She remembered that even in paradise, a wife’s place was beneath the “soles of her husband’s feet.” And if that night her hymen did not bleed, the groom had the right to get rid of her. Sheets with bloodstains were displayed from the balconies to attest to a bride’s virginity. This was my grandmother’s world, but it did not seem that remote; and these tales were utterly terrifying. We heard many stories about such wedding nights, when a couple who had no previous contact was thrown together into a most intimate encounter. My grandmother told us how shocked she was when my grandfather removed his turban and, underneath, had no hair. Since all the male members of her family possessed abundant hair, she had never seen or imagined a bald man. Her wedding night was spent in tears and hysteria. But a rooster was sacrificed to save her honor. HUSBAND-WIFE RELATIONSHIPS The singular duty of a married woman was to win her husband’s approval and thereby redeem herself in this life and throughout eternity. The Qur’an declares: “The good wife has a chance of eternal happiness only if that is her husband’s will.… The fortunate fair who has given pleasure to her master will have the privilege of appearing before him in paradise. Like the crescent moon, she will preserve all her youth and beauty until the end of time, and her husband will never look older or younger than thirty-one years.”
Rules compounded rules in enforcing the separation that formed the basis of the harem. Husbands and wives maintained a more or less formal relationship. It was a man’s privilege to look freely upon the faces of his wives, but if curiosity should take him any further, his eyes were accursed. Women were not expected to offer companionship in a man’s intellectual life or other interests. They belonged to his private world; they belonged in his harem. Women and men often dined separately. Men were forbidden not only to enter another man’s harem but even to talk to other men about their own wives. It was sacrilegious—or haram—to make any reference to the female gender in public. Even in announcing the birth of a daughter, a man referred to “a veiled one,” “a hidden one,” or “a little stranger.” POLYGAMY One of the slips of parchment that the Archangel Gabriel passed on to Mohammed said: “If your wives do not obey you, chastise them. If one wife does not suffice, take four.” Mohammed himself had fifteen wives, an example that led to legalized abuse of the Qur’an’s four-wife injunction. According to the Qur’an, a woman’s consent is not necessary for marriage. She can neither object to being one of four wives nor to her husband’s having an unlimited number of odalisques. However, each of the four women must be treated with impartiality: each must have her own apartments, her own servants, and her own jewels. In Turkey, before early twentieth-century reforms, Islamic law recognized four wives and odalisques, but only the first wife was considered legal under civil law. She was the one married with the ceremony described above and she held more privileges above the other wives. Although most men confessed to the temptation to have several wives, they found it less troublesome to have just one. An old Turkish proverb says: “A house with four wives, a ship in a storm.” Indeed, women often competed for supremacy in the harems, which disturbed the happiness and peace of the entire household. “The wisest men preferred to enjoy a concubine episodically, or even to repudiate their wives, rather than harbor under the same roof the bitter rivalry of ‘competing’ wives,” according to Nadia Tazi in her book Harems. “And those who did decide to have several
legal spouses eluded the troublesome side of harem life by maintaining various separate households in different districts of the city, among which they divided their time.” Good husbands were diplomatic. They abided by the Qur’an and gave the impression of treating all of their women equally. If one got a new pair of slippers, the others received the same. Often, all the womenfolk lived in one big, rambling house. If jealousy arose among the wives, the husband was obligated to separate them into different households. “And,” according to Gérard de Nerval, “if she does consent to live in the same house as another wife, she has the right to live entirely separately, and she does not take part with the slaves, as people imagine, in any delightful tableau, beneath the eye of the master and the spouse.” The husbands alternated nights in the bedrooms, spending Friday nights exclusively with their first wives. Indeed, K. Mikes, a Hungarian who lived in Gallipoli and Istanbul for forty-four years, notes in his collection of letters, Turkiye Mektuplari (1944–45), that first wives did have certain sexual rights: “If her husband neglects her for three consecutive Friday nights (this must be night joining Thursday to Friday) the wife can complain to the judge. If he neglects her for even longer, then she can obtain a divorce. This is rare, but Shariat (canonical law) permits it.” RELATIONSHIPS AMONG WIVES Most second and third marriages occurred during middle age and tended to be for pleasure—related to a sort of midlife crisis. Men whose wives were barren or had passed the childbearing age often sought young girls. Sometimes the older wife even persuaded her husband to take in a pubescent girl who could fulfill his desires and bear children. Vicariously, she relived her youth and passion through mentoring the young wife, assuming responsibility as the head of the harem and finding additional wives for her husband, if necessary. One Western sojourner in Turkey found it difficult to believe that a wife could reconcile herself to such sharing of affection: The older wife had no children so she herself had chosen a wife for him young enough to be her daughter.… Both women were busy with
preparations for the expected baby, to whom the first wife referred as ‘our child’ and she seemed to be as worried about the fate of her rival as she would have been about her daughter. Yet, who knows what sorrow was gnawing at her heart strings, for she loved ‘the master.’ Can one share the object of one’s affections without a pang? Grace Ellison, Turkey Today (1928) Yet aging women were obliged to suppress such emotions. If they were no longer desirable or useful, often there was no place for them to go unless they had close relatives willing to take them in. Besides, a divorced woman was not kindly looked upon by society. When he came in, he kissed his first wife first, then his second, and it seemed to me that there was a difference in his manner to the two, the first being that of a lover, the second that of an older man to a pet child. Demetra Vaka, Haremlik (1909) We used to have a maid, a tiny, withered, birdlike creature with a beak nose and missing teeth. I think her name was Sherife Hanum. She was married to an attendant of my father’s, and they had no children. I remember the old woman eyeing a laundry girl whom she later chose to be her kuma (literally, “rival”). The kuma bore her husband three children the old woman called her own, and she worked her tired muscles to support her husband’s wife and children. Women’s emancipation in Turkey had officially abolished such situations, but the attitudes of the people had not caught up with this change. Still, it was humiliating for many women to live through this kind of ordeal. A great deal of anguish occupied women’s hearts; they felt inadequate to please their husbands and fulfill their religious obligations. The following description of a home with two wives, written around 1909, comes from the able pen of the Turkish author Halide Edip: When a woman suffers because of her husband’s secret love affairs, the pain may be strong, but its quality is different. When a second wife enters her home and usurps half her power, she is a public martyr and considers
herself an object of curiosity and pity. However humiliating this may be, the position gives a woman unquestioned prominence and isolation. Whatever theories people may regard ideal as family constructions, there remains one irrefutable fact about the human heart, to whichever sex it may belong—it is almost organic in us to suffer when we have to share the object of our love, sexual or otherwise. As many degrees and forms of jealousy exist as human affection. But suppose time and conditioning were able to tone down this elemental feeling, the family problem still will not be solved. The nature and consequences of the suffering of a wife who in the same house shares a husband lawfully with a second wife and equal partner, differ both in kind and degree from that of a woman who shares him with a temporary lover. In the former case, the suffering extends to children, servants and relations whose interests are themselves more or less antagonistic, and who are living in a destructive atmosphere of distrust and struggle for supremacy. In my own childhood polygamy and its results produced a very ugly and distressing impression. The constant tension in our home made every simple family ceremony seem like physical pain, and the consequences of it hardly ever left me. The rooms of the wives were opposite each other and my father visited them in turn. When it was Teize’s turn everyone in the house showed a tender sympathy to Abla, while when it was her turn no one heeded the obvious grief of Teize. She would leave the table with eyes full of tears, and one could be sure of finding her in her room crying or fainting. I remember very clearly my feeling of intense bitterness against polygamy. It was a curse, a poison which our unhappy household could not get out of the system. I was so full of Teize’s suffering and so constantly haunted by her thin, pale face, tear stained and distorted with grief even when she was kneeling on her prayer rug, that this vision had become a barrier between me and Abla. Yet one emotion of sudden pity for Abla was just as natural to my heart as the other. Huda Sharaawi, Egypt’s revered feminist, was betrothed to her cousin in 1891, at the tender age of thirteen. The cousin was old enough to be her
father and already had a slave concubine and children by her. Huda’s mother made the groom sign an affidavit attesting that he would not take any more wives. Sensitive Huda was crushed by this marriage—from which, to her great relief, she was delivered after eighteen months, when her husband made another woman pregnant, thereby annulling the marriage. Man’s pleasure is like the noonday halt under the shady tree; it must not— it cannot—be prolonged. Arab proverb Huda’s friend Attiya Saqqaf records in her memoirs (1879–1924) several breaches of confidence, when her husband, who often traveled, acquired more wives on the road—a common practice among “traveling men”: “During the annual haj season he had worked on the pilgrim ships bound for Arabia. He would marry a woman aboard ship and divorce her upon arrival. His marriages were so numerous he couldn’t count them nor did he know the number of children he had. Meanwhile, I found him chasing after servant girls in the house.” Sometimes men concealed from their first wife the fact that elsewhere they had another wife—sometimes even other children. When such a secret was discovered, the wife usually attempted to return to her father’s house. In At the Drop of a Veil, Marianne Alireza tells how her brother-in-law kept another wife in Egypt, and when his first wife found out, she tried escaping to her family home—but was not able to get a driver to take her. For however disturbed a wife might be by the discovery of a secret wife, custom compelled her ultimately to take the revelation in stride.
Pierre Auguste Renoir, Odalisque, 1870, Oil on canvas, 241⁄4 × 481⁄4 in., National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Chester Dale Collection
Paul Bowles, in his haunting novel The Sheltering Sky, describes a young American woman whose husband dies in the desert while they are traveling. A caravan picks her up, and one of the leaders claims her as his own. He takes her back to his house, disguised as a boy so that his three wives will not feel threatened. He keeps “the boy” locked up in a tiny room he enters every afternoon to make wild love to her: “It would occur to her when he left and she lay alone in the evening, remembering the intensity and insistence of his ardor, that the three wives must certainly be suffering considerable neglect.… What she did not guess was that the three wives were not being neglected at all, and that even if such had been the case, and they believed a boy to be the cause of it, it never would occur to them to be jealous of him.” Harems housed extended families: wives, mothers, unmarried sisters and daughters, sometimes other distant women relatives who needed shelter. The wives, never knowing when the husband might visit the harem, kept themselves decked out in anticipation at all times. They always did their best to put on a cheerful, happy exterior and to conceal their anguish or displeasure at all costs. One of my aunts had a maid named Rabia. When Rabia was sixteen, she married a man who already had a wife. My parents talked about this disapprovingly. A few months later, Rabia returned. She had run away, she
said, because the first wife and the mother-in-law had been torturing her. They made her slave away all day long, cleaning, cooking, and washing the laundry. She’d work so hard, she could not stay awake until the time her husband returned. But those awful women told her husband that she was lazy, stubborn, and good for nothing. All she did was sit around all day while they exhausted themselves. Elizabeth Warnock Fernea, in Guests of the Sheik, describes a similar situation in an Iraqi village: “ ‘They hate me, they hide the sugar and steal my cigarettes, they pour salt in the food I prepare for my husband, they gossip about me to the neighbors and they tell my husband I am mean and will not help with the housework. They want nothing except to get me out. How can I make friends with them?’ She broke down and sobbed loudly in her abayah [long veil].” SUPERSTITION AND CHARMS Women resorted to numerous superstitious practices to compensate for their situation. They dissipated their jewels and other worldly goods among the gypsies, herbalists, and jadis (witches), buying concoctions to make their rivals barren and to prevent their husbands from desiring other women. Gypsies read palms, coffee grounds, or beads. They gave talismans to women to preserve their youth, or decoctions to make a love philter, or a fetish to make cruel husbands kind, or evil-eye charms to protect children. It was considered a bad omen to say good things about a child’s health and growth because that was tantamount to inviting the evil eye, so women looked at each other’s children and said, “Poor thing.” A tinker lived near my grandparents in Karshiyaka. His wife, Dudu, was an enormous woman with a bad temper. She especially disliked children. She threw stones whenever she saw us picking cones for pine nuts, even though the trees did not belong to her. Everyone gossiped about how the poor tinker, a mild-mannered man, should find another wife—especially since Dudu could not even bear him children. One summer, the rumor was that the tinker indeed had eyes for another woman, a young widow with a little boy. Everyone thought this would be a good match; it would not only
offer him a pleasant woman who could bear children, but also provide a home for her orphaned son. We did not see Dudu for days, even when we picked pinecones behind her house. Rumor said she had gone to see a witch woman. Some days later, as my friend Esin and I were playing in a field, we saw Dudu walking at a very fast pace down the road, carrying a live rooster upside down, which kept pecking at her hands and flapping its wings. When she went into her house, we hid behind the fence to watch her. She came back out, carrying the rooster, a basin of water, and a kitchen knife. She immersed the bird’s neck in the water and struck the jugular. The bird blissfully bled to death in the water. A few days later, the young widow’s son was diagnosed with meningitis. He did not live very long. It was the rooster that did it, they said. It was charmed. The widow left town, and the poor tinker was stuck with nasty, shrewd Dudu. UPKEEP More wives were brought in as the maintenance of a household became more complex and demanded more attention. There were children to take care of, servants to supervise, and guests to entertain. New blood was needed to perform some of these tasks. So the harems grew. Nerval compares them to a sort of convent: “When there are many women, which only happens in the case of people of position, the harem is a kind of convent governed by rigid rule. Its main occupation is bringing up children and the direction of the slaves in the household work. A visit from the husband is a ceremonial affair, as is that of close relatives, and as he does not take his meals with his wives, all he can do to pass the time is to smoke his nargileh seriously, and drink coffee or sherbets. It is the proper thing for him to give notice of his coming in advance.” “They do not, as the common description of harem life leads us to believe,” comments historian C. B. Kluzinger (1878), “recline the live-long day on a soft divan enjoying dolce far niente, adorned with gold and jewels, smoking and supporting upon the yielding pillow those arms that indolence makes so plump, while eunuchs and female slaves stand before them
watching their every sign, and anxious to spare them the slightest movement.”
Osman Hamdi, Girl Arranging Flowers in a Vase, 1881, Oil on canvas, 57 × 38 in., Istanbul Resim ve Heykel Müzesi (Istanbul Painting and Sculpture Museum). Osman Hamdi was a Turkish painter
who studied in Paris under Gérôme.
ODALISQUES Besides the wives, the men had the servant women to reckon with. Odalisques (besleme) had no rights at all until they were married, and even marriage freed them only from being outright slaves; they were now the property of their husbands. My great uncle Rüstem had a besleme, a beautiful woman named Pakize, who served him as his wife until he died. Even though, for all practical purposes, she was the wife, the rest of the women in the family, the “legitimates,” were prejudiced against her and looked down on her as a servant.
My great-uncle Rüstem and his odalisque/wife, Pakize.
In large households, where several male family members shared the selâmlik (the men’s section), the odalisques had a more difficult plight. A carnival troupe who used to perform in Izmir during my childhood had a popular song, which they sang to the tune of “Baa, Baa, Black Sheep,” about a slave girl who became pregnant and was called before the family to tell who, among the masters of the big household, was the father. “Tell us who, tell us who?” sang a chorus of men. “I cannot, I cannot, for I don’t know who,” responded the girl. “Tell us who, tell us who, don’t be afraid to.” After a long pause, the girl coquettishly began singing, “Well, there was old master so and so and the young one, too. And the older brother of the master, and the brother of the mistress …” and so on. All the slave women in the house were at the disposal of the master. The children born of these slaves were considered legitimate, and the woman rose to the rank of wife. Leyla Saz summarizes the precarious position of the odalisques: The odalisques who were favorites of the master of the household or who had borne children, had one or two rooms each. However, if their master became tired of them, two or three of them were cluttered into one room, their status even lower than a black slave, who could at least be in the master’s presence. These unfortunates were terrified to meet the heartless man, and spent their lives fawning upon his mistress, trying to quench their pangs of jealousy. Even worse, it was quite simple to get rid of unwanted wives or odalisques with perfect impunity; for no man, not even a police inspector, could enter another’s harem.
Sir Frank Dicksee, Leila, 1892, Oil on canvas, The Fine Art Society, London
JEWELRY A woman’s jewelry was considered her only insurance against disaster; legal action could be taken against any man who attempted to seize a woman’s gold or gems. When my grandmother was widowed, she sold all her jewelry, little by little, to put her sons through school. Sometimes with tears in her eyes she would describe an emerald necklace with thousands of tiny baby pearls, which she had inherited from her own grandmother. “But it’s all right, it’s all right, because it bought this house.” She was referring to the house in the Karatash district of Izmir, where I was born. To a child’s mind, used to judging the value of things by their size, it was incomprehensible that a necklace could actually buy an entire house.
LIVING QUARTERS The windows of the women’s apartments either opened onto an inner courtyard or were closely barred with latticework, concealing them from the outside world. These artfully designed, intricately woven lattices are undoubtedly some of the most beautiful elements of Islamic architecture. But what made them most compelling were the silhouettes of the shadows behind them. “Almost all the rooms are small,” according to Edmondo de Amicis’s Constantinople (1896), “the floors covered with Chinese matting or rugs, screens painted with flowers and fruits, a wide divan runs all around the wall, pots of flowers stand on the window sills, there is a copper brazier in the center, and lattices cover the windows. In the Selâmlik, a man works, eats, receives his friends, takes his siesta, and sometimes sleeps at night. The wives are never allowed to enter. Although it is separated from the harem simply by a narrow corridor, it is like two separate houses. Often different servants serve the two sections and there are separate kitchens.”
A woman plays ud in a real Turkish harem. At the turn of the century the harems were decorated in Oriental style mixed with European Art Nouveau.
Enclosed balconies with latticed windows allowed women to observe what was going on outside without being seen. Courtyards, roof gazebos, and gardens gave them a chance for a breath of fresh air, though these places were still considered haram. Roof terraces were favorite places to watch the boats go by, take a siesta, and enjoy refreshments. Women in harems frequently visited each other, bringing gossip, unusual recipes, and embroideries, and showing off their new clothes and jewelry. Often these visits were unannounced. If the husband found slippers at the entrance to the harem, it was an indication that the wives were entertaining guests and he was not supposed to go in. Some guests stayed on for several days. In our house in Istanbul, two very old spinsters lived on the first floor. They were sisters, neither of whom had married because their father had wanted to keep them for himself. Their youth had been spent behind harem lattices, which they still imposed upon themselves in order to perpetuate
existence in a murky shadow world. They had jalousie shades put up to bar themselves from the vision of those who passed by and to watch the world parade before them without being seen. Whenever I walked down the stairs to go out the front door we shared, I could hear their footsteps padding to the windows, where they would situate themselves at a vantage behind the shutters from which to observe me. They seemed to experience vicarious pleasure in ogling the innocence of youth. They also seemed to be seeking any sign of scandal they could turn to gossip. A sheik tells Gérard de Nerval: The arrangement of a harem is the same.… There are always a number of little rooms surrounding the large halls. There are divans everywhere, and the only furniture consists of tortoiseshell tables. Little arches cut into the wainscoting hold narghiles, vases of flowers, and coffee cups. The only thing which these harems, even the most princely of them, seem to lack is a bed. “Where do they sleep, these women and their slaves?” I asked the sheik. “On the divans.” “But they have no coverlets?” “They sleep fully dressed. But there are woollen or silken covers for the wintertime.” “That is all very well, but where is the husband’s place?” “Oh, the husband sleeps in his room and the women in theirs, and the odalisques on the divans in the larger rooms. If the divans and the cushions don’t make a comfortable bed, mattresses are put down in the middle of the room, and they sleep there.” “Fully dressed?” “Always, but only in the most simple of clothes, trousers, vest and robe. The law forbids men as well as women to uncover themselves before the other sex, anywhere below the neck.” “I can understand,” I said, “that the husband does not greatly care to pass the night in a room filled with women fully dressed, and that he is ready enough to sleep in his own; but if he takes two or three of these ladies with him …”
“Two or three!” cried the sheik indignantly. “What dogs do you imagine would act in such a way? God alive! Is there a woman in the world, even an infidel, who would consent to share her honorable couch with another? Is that how they behave in Europe?” “In Europe,” I replied, “certainly not; but the Christians have only one wife, and they imagine that the Turks, who have several, live with them as with one only.” “If there were Mussulmans so depraved as to act as the Christians imagine, their lawful wives would immediately demand a divorce, and even their slaves would have the right to leave them.” BUNDLE WOMEN European merchants sometimes married local Christian or Jewish women so that they could infiltrate the harems with their merchandise. Marianne Alireza describes such an encounter: “I guessed that she was some poor soul who had come for a handout and that the bundles contained our contribution. But she was a lady peddler and the bundles contained her wares. She was Circassian and had come many years before to perform the pilgrimage and like so many others decided to stay. Her goods were mostly notions and cheap toys, some bangles and trinkets, and a buksha with cheap gaudy fabrics and some lace. From a sheer need for some kind of excitement, women of the harem purchased almost everything.” Bundle women, bohcaci, often appeared at our doorstep, and I cannot forget my excitement and wonder as I watched their goods slip out of the bundles. They were strange things, bedspreads of garish colors and tacky baroque designs from Damascus, diaphanous nightgowns made of Shile fabric, and a profusion of lace and ribbons. My grandmother and my mother always bought something for my hope chest, which, I must have known deep down, was more for them than for me. Over the years, the hope chest dwindled, the bedspreads and those ethereal nightgowns given away as gifts to women relatives who got married or people who had been good to the family.
A harem lady visited by a bundle woman and a gypsy fortune-teller: precious contact with the outside world. Collection of the author
“Alev’s hope chest” was still in my parents’ house when I visited them a few years ago. Inside, there were just a very few things: some doilies, scarves, and the Damascus bedspread I personally remembered buying from a bundle woman long ago. My mother insisted that I take it back with me, and I was caught between wanting to please her and being appalled by the bright orange, yellow, and green florals. It would never do. But I took it with me anyway, slightly embarrassed when Turkish customs searched my suitcase and this particular artifact was questioned. Was it an antique? Did I have special permission from the government to export it? I told them it was a gift from the family, and that it had been in my family ever since I could remember. Why was I going through such an ordeal for something I was embarrassed by and would probably give to the Goodwill as soon as I returned home? (It turned out that a friend fell in love with this ungodly piece of “art,” and it now adorns her bedroom in San Francisco.)
Again, during the same visit, I was sitting in a café in the Prince Islands, surrounded by a bevy of Arab harem women, waiting for the ferry, when a Circassian woman came through the crowd, carrying two suitcases, which in today’s world had replaced the old “bundle.” She spilled the contents and could not escape my own curious eyes as she held them up for us to see. I was disappointed that the exotics I remembered were gone; no more strange kaftans, Damask silks, Egyptian cottons. Now the bundle woman was selling mainly crochet and knit items made from synthetic yarns, which are ever so popular today in the Middle East, and there were some cheap Turkish towels and burnooses (bathrobes) from the tourist loom. The romance of the bundle was over. DEATH Moslems believe that death is a departure from the life of this world, but not the end of a person’s existence. Rather, eternal life is to come, and they pray for God’s mercy for the departed, in hopes that they may find peace and happiness in the hereafter. The dead were washed, shrouded, and buried as soon as possible. Coffins were not used, because it was believed that the body must be returned directly to the earth. On the evening of the funeral, they read the Qur’an with neighbors and friends, to pray for the soul of the deceased, and a special halvah made of farina, cinnamon, and nuts—which is delicious— was served. There was no group service over the body, but for forty days the family was expected to open their door to the public, who would visit and pay condolences. Coffee, tea, and other refreshments were served to the visitors, and fresh waves of grief had to be shared with each arrival. On the fortieth and fifty-second days following the death and also on the anniversary of the funeral, a professional chanter intoned verses from the Qur’an, and the women covered their heads, prayed, and sent the spirit of the departed away. The Mevlits (prayers of mourning) for women mostly took place at the home of the deceased in the afternoons and were followed by a big meal. The tombstones that still adorn the old Ottoman cities indicate whether the deceased was a man or a woman: women’s headstones had flower designs,
and men’s were shaped like turbans. Every Friday, which is the day of religious observance for the believer, a long line of veiled women accompanied by children wends its way along the cemetery road, like a row of reeds along a river. The women love the cemetery: for them it means temporary reprieve from the generally cloistered condition imposed on them by the laws of Islam; it represents a destination for an outing; and the tears they shed for the departed provide relief for their worries. Etienne Dinet, Tableaux de la vie arabe (1908)
WEST MEETS EAST
Oriental Dream
It is a world in which all the senses feast riotously upon sights and sounds and perfumes; upon fruit and flowers and jewels, upon wines and sweets, and upon yielding flesh, both male and female, whose beauty is incomparable. It is a world of heroic, amorous encounters.… Romance lurks behind every shuttered window; every veiled glance begets an intrigue; and in every servant’s hand nestles a scented note granting a speedy rendezvous.… It’s a world in which no aspiration is so mad as to be unrealizable, and no day proof of what the next day may be. A world in which apes may rival men, and a butcher may win the hand of a king’s daughter; a world in which palaces are made of diamonds, and thrones cut from single rubies. It’s a world in which all the distressingly ineluctable rules of daily living are gloriously suspended; from which individual responsibility is delightfully absent. It is the world of a legendary Damascus, a legendary Cairo, and a legendary Constantinpole.… In short, it is the world of eternal fairy-tale—and there is no resisting its enchantment.” —B. R. Redman, Introduction to The Arabian Nights Entertainments (1932) In German there is a beautiful word for the East, Morgenland, the land of the morning. The East, or the Orient, is where the sun comes from, and it encompasses Asia Minor, Persia, Egypt, Arabia, and India. The Orientalist painter David Roberts remarked that the light of Egypt “washed out colors, banishing vibrant tints to the shadows.” Orientalism is the Western version of the Orient, created by the Western imagination and expressed by Western art forms. It is the East of fantasy, of dreams. In fact, most Orientalist artists merely dreamed; they created their
visions of the Orient without ever leaving their home country. A few actually traveled to the East, daring to temper fantasy with fact. But even these adventurers could not resist the temptation to inflate their visions with a romantic breath, as Julia Pardoe observed as early as 1839: “The European mind has become so imbued with ideas of Oriental mysteriousness, mysticism and magnificence, and it has been so long accustomed to pillow its faith on the marvels and metaphors of tourists, that it is to be doubted whether it will willingly cast off its old associations and suffer itself to be undeceived.” ONE THOUSAND AND ONE NIGHTS During the early eighteenth century, the floodgate of romance was opened —not as a result of politics or commerce, but by a book of fairy tales. In 1704, a French scholar named Antoine Galland translated Alf Laila wa Laila, the One Thousand and One Nights, or Arabian Nights. These tales were set in the kingdom of the great caliph Harun al Rashid, inhabited by mysterious sultans, eunuchs, and slave women, as well as genies, giants, and pegasi (flying horses). When Sultan Shahriar discovers that his wife has been unfaithful to him, he executes her, declaring that all women are as evil as the sultana and the fewer women the world contained, the better. Every evening, he marries a new wife just to have her strangled the following morning. It is the job of the grand vizier to provide the sultan with these unfortunate girls from a terrorized kingdom. One day, the grand vizier’s daughter, Scheherazade, who clearly has a scheme, persuades her father to take her to the sultan as his new wife: When the usual hour arrived, the Grand Vizier accompanied Scheherazade to the palace and left her alone with the Sultan, who bade her raise her veil and was amazed at her beauty. But seeing her eyes full of tears, he asked what was the matter. “Sire,” replied Scheherazade, “I have a sister who loves me tenderly as I love her. Grant me the favor of allowing her to sleep this night in the same room, as it is the last we shall be together.” The Sultan consented to this petition and Dinarzade was sent for. An hour before the daybreak Dinarzade awoke, and exclaimed as she had
promised: “My dear sister, if you are not asleep, tell me I pray you, before the sun rises, one of your charming stories. It is the last time I shall have the pleasure of hearing you.” Scheherazade did not answer, but turned to the Sultan: “Will your highness permit me to do as my sister asks?” said she. “Willingly,” he answered. So Scheherazade began.… Sultan Shahriar is so captivated by Scheherazade’s tale that he spares her life on condition that she will tell him more. Thus, the beautiful sultana fills one thousand nights and a night with romance. Scheherazade spins one captivating story after another, one night after another, redeeming her life. The sultan’s attitude toward women is transformed, the kingdom is healed, and everyone lives happily ever after.
Edmund Dulac, Scheherazade. Original watercolor for frontispiece of The Thousand and One Nights, 1907, Watercolor on paper, 135⁄8 × 65⁄8 in., Jo Ann Reisler, Ltd., Vienna, Virginia
As folktales, these stories were singular to begin with, but, in time, evolved into a Chinese-box pattern of tales within tales within tales. They metamorphosed as they traveled from one kingdom to another, but never lost the element of dangerous exoticism, implications of hidden mysteries, and erotic nuances. Their plots are utterly convoluted mirrors within mirrors. One of Horace Walpole’s celebrated letters (to Mary Berry, August 30, 1789) suggests the appeal the tales held even for an eighteenth-century man of letters: “I do not think the Sultaness’s narratives very natural or very probable, but there is wildness in them that captivates.” A man enjoying himself with more than one woman was a compelling fantasy, and Galland was a gifted storyteller. The tales themselves being very seductive, they quickly became a sensational form of popular adult entertainment in Europe. They also partook of what nowadays we might call the “expansion of consciousness.” Bored with the already established contexts, many writers and artists found refuge in these Eastern labyrinths for their own tales, yet always sustaining elements from the original. WIND FROM THE EAST One Thousand and One Nights not only introduced to Europe a new art of storytelling beyond the linear narrative but also provided a theatrical arena for a flamboyant society. Eighteenth-century men and women loved to dress up in costumes and pretend, and with The Arabian Nights, their repertory grew, giving them a new set of exotic characters to impersonate. Prosperous Victorians, who were normally obliged to wear dark suits, wanted to put on flowing robes in all manner of colors and fashions. In Paris, then other European capitals, Turqueries became the rage, influencing everything, from theater, opera, painting, and romantic literature to costume and interior design. Harem pants, satin slippers, and turbans became faddish items of high fashion. Nobility dressed like pashas, odalisques, sultanas; they posed in Turkish costumes for portraits by the popular painters of the period. Many dabbled in imitations of Eastern poetry. Women indulged in telling stories à la Scheherazade.
Edouard Manet, Olympia, 1863, Oil on canvas, 51 × 733⁄4 in., Musée d’Orsay, Paris
Orientalia—nargilehs, low divans, and jeweled scimitars—gradually insinuated its way out of the chic houses and into more prosaic dwellings throughout Europe. The concept of keyf (fulfillment in sweet nothingness) —dolce far niente—spread as a popular philosophy among Europeans, who had begun to develop a penchant for quiet euphoria. Smoking opium and hashish became an aesthetic and spiritual pursuit used to expand the creative romantic mind. Poets and writers like Coleridge and De Quincey indulged in opiates to induce prophetic visions, giving voice to such sensuous masterpieces as “Kubla Khan,” which Coleridge wrote while under the influence. Gérard de Nerval, Eugène Fromentin, Théophile Gautier, and Charles Baudelaire gathered in the Hôtel Pimodan, where members of the Club des Haschichins held secret smoking salons. France was setting a trend for adapting Oriental tales into social satire. Voltaire wrote Zadig; Montesquieu, Persian Letters; and Racine, Bejazit, dramatizing a terrible struggle between two sultanas, modeled on the lives of Kösem and Turhan, and presenting in the process a metaphor for the
repression of desire in eighteenth-century Western society. A public who saw in it their own secret passions come to life enthusiastically received the play. Simultaneously, musical harems filled the palaces of Versailles and the Hapsburg court. Janissary music or marches had been popular in Europe since the siege of Vienna. Beethoven’s “Turkish March,” Haydn’s Military Symphony, and other Turkish marches followed. During the late eighteenth century, Mozart introduced visions of a salubrious Orient in The Magic Flute, whereas Abduction from the Seraglio had been smashingly exuberant in its exoticism and presentation of virtuous Oriental humanity—music and dance coming to the rescue of a beautiful odalisque in the Seraglio. Turkish music also appeared in works of Rameau, Rossini, and Spohr, as well as two operas by Gluck. Compositions such as Boieldieu’s Caliph of Baghdad, “Mameluke’s Waltz,” and ultimately Rimsky-Korsakoff’s Scheherazade continued the trend. Even Irving Berlin composed a song called “In My Harem.” “It was like a scene out of the Arabian Nights” became the cliché phrase used to describe any amazing, rich, or peculiar experience. Out of lassitude or otherwise, the well of Western culture seemed to be running dry, which made the pursuit of the exotic irresistible. Tourism to the East boomed. The Orient beckoned to many Westerners. As Rudyard Kipling said: “Once you have heard the call of the East, you will never hear anything else.” LADY MARY MONTAGU “The world here Romantic. Women differ from ours. Unaffected. Lazy life,” wrote Lady Mary Wortley Montagu to Alexander Pope from Istanbul. Between 1716 and 1718, she lived in Turkey as the wife of the British ambassador, Edward Wortley Montagu. One of the first great romantic women travelers to the Orient, she was full of self-discovery, incessantly writing her impressions and carrying on a fastidious correspondence with her European friends. Her Turkish Embassy Letters are perhaps the most authentic and direct experience of the East any gavur (infidel—also, foreigner) has articulated.
Lady Mary radiated all the eighteenth-century contradictions that Orientalism revealed. She was caught in the creative tension between passion and reason, love of romance and pragmatism, a spirit of adventure and a rage for order. She surrendered to the seduction of the East while maintaining her identity as a young English noblewoman. Her year in Constantinople where “luxury was the steward and treasure inexhaustible,” was exceptional. For the first time, we have a Western woman’s direct experience of the Ottoman women’s world. Her descriptions of women are beautiful, lush, and opulent: “On a sofa rais’d 3 steps and cover’d with fine Persian carpets sat the Kahya’s lady, leaning on cushions of white satin embroider’d, and at her feet sat 2 young Girls, the eldest about 12 years old, lovely as angels, dress’d perfectly rich and almost cover’d with Jewells.… I must own that I never saw any thing so gloriously Beautifull,” she wrote to her sister, Lady Mar, on April 18, 1717. She was the perfect voyeur; the sensuality of such scenes did not elude her. At the same time, she maintained her own culture’s sense of propriety. For example, when she was asked to join a few ladies in the baths and realized that they were all “stark naked,” she was able to demur through convenient dissembling: “I was at last forced to open my shirt and show them my stays, which satisfied them very well, for I saw they believed that I was locked up in that machine, and that it was not in my power to open it, which contrivance they attributed to my husband.” She carried on an intimate correspondence with the poet Alexander Pope, in which they dialogued on Oriental culture. Lady Mary actually experienced this world; Pope fantasized vicariously: “I heard the pretty name of Odalisque,” Pope wrote to Lady Mary on September 1, 1718. Like other men of this period, he went as far as to put in an order for a Circassian slave woman: “This is really what I wish from my soul, tho’ it would ruin the best project I ever lay’d, that of obtaining, thro’ your means, my fair Circassian Slave.” Lady Mary did not import a slave for the hunchbacked poet, but she did bring back other turqueries to England, including harem attire, which soon became a fashion statement. She inoculated her children with smallpox vaccine as she had seen done in Turkey, some seventy years before Dr.
Edward Jenner “introduced” the vaccination to England. Voltaire, who was familiar with Lady Mary’s practices, attributed the origins of this vaccine to the Circassian women in harems, who were keen to prevent smallpox in order to preserve their beauty from pockmarks. In the visual arts, harem scenes had, by the nineteenth century, become a convenient excuse for painting titillating nudes. The odalisque, who represented simply a female servant to the Turks, had become the symbol of exotic and erotic splendor to the Europeans. Ingres’s Grande Odalisque (1814) was utterly unoriental in its cool classicism, depicting an elongated, reclining woman, resembling an alabaster urn. A vessel herself, impenetrable. The artist had transformed a nude woman into a manneristic phantasm merely by adding a turban, a fan, and a nargileh. Paris was glutted with Orientalist paintings, the success of which finally led to the establishment of the Salon des Peintres Orientalistes Français in 1893. JOURNEY TO THE ORIENT For most nineteenth-century Westerners, everyday realism was too vulgar to be presented as art. In search of suitable subjects, then, many artists traveled to the East, which had remained virtually unchanged since biblical times. The gradual improvement in transportation and better accommodations made the lands of the East increasingly accessible, and by 1868 Thomas Cook had established tours up the Nile and into the Holy Land. The Suez Canal was opened in 1869, and Cairo received a face-lift, complete with luxury hotels and an opera house, which was opened with Verdi’s Aida. By the 1890s, Egypt had become as fashionable a resort as the Riviera, and in 1893 the Orient Express was carrying glamorous passengers between Paris and Constantinople. Painters Melling and Preziosi followed Liotard and Vanmour to Turkey; John Frederick Lewis, Flaubert, Nerval, Gérôme, and Florence Nightingale journeyed to Egypt; Delacroix to Algeria. Although he would never set foot inside a harem, Eugène Delacroix claimed that a man actually allowed him to peek into one. The result was the exquisite Women of Algiers in Their Room, which he painted in 1834. Ten years later he painted another version of the same scene.
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, La Grande Odalisque, 1814, Oil on canvas, 353⁄4 × 633⁄4 in., Musée du Louvre, Paris
JOHN FREDERICK LEWIS John Frederick Lewis, a talented dandy from London, made a leisurely four-year tour ending in Constantinople, before moving to Cairo, where he settled for a decade. From 1841 until 1851, he lived the life of a rich Turk, affecting native dress and customs of Cairo. Wearing a turban, a glittering scimitar dangling at his side, he rode through the streets on a gray horse. He adopted the posture of a languid lotus eater and lived what William Makepeace Thackeray described as the “dreamy, hazy, lazy, tobaccofied life” of a wealthy Moslem. Lewis made real the Orientalist’s ultimate dream of changing costume and address, and assuming a separate identity. At first, it was a romantic game, but gradually it consumed him, prompting graceful canvases. Lewis avoided the tourist attractions most other Europeans sought and mingled instead with the people of Cairo. His greatest pleasure was to spend long periods in the desert hinterland in his encampment under the starlit Egyptian nights. He worked restlessly, painting harems, bazaars, and street scenes as they were, without moralizing. Curator Charles Newton observed of Lewis’s watercolor Life in the Hareem Cairo that “the exquisite finish, the ambiguity of the narrative and the intimate nature of these interiors made Lewis the British equivalent of Vermeer and not just a decorative painter of Orientalist themes.” It was
anecdotal instead of erotic, with a domestic serenity that is indeed reminiscent of Vermeer’s interior scenes. In his Notes from a Journey (1844), Thackeray describes visiting Lewis in Cairo. Thackeray was escorted into the salon of a Mameluke-style mansion, with a carved, gilt ceiling, decorated with arabesques and prime samples of calligraphy. From the courtyard, he noticed two enormous, flirtatious black eyes peering through the lattices. Lewis pretended it was only the cook, but Thackeray was convinced she had to be la belle esclave. After all, wasn’t every man entitled to at least one odalisque? THE ROMANTICS Lord Byron considered himself a great Oriental traveler, but, for him, the Orient was limited to Constantinople, the Bosphorus, and the Hellespont. The romantic works of Byron, Coleridge, Victor Hugo, Gustave Flaubert, and Théophile Gautier stood in exotic contrast to the grimy rationality of the industrial revolution sweeping Europe. Victor Hugo’s Les Orientales, in its passionate depiction of captive souls, inspired canvases; Montesquieu’s Persian Letters prompted Lecomte du Nouy’s sensuous painting Koshru’s Dream. Gérard de Nerval traveled through the Orient carrying two Arabic words, tayeb (assent) and mafish (rejection). In his Voyage en Orient (1843–51), he laid bare the emotions behind his own pursuit of a slave woman named Zetnaybia: “There is something extremely captivating and irresistible in a woman from a faraway country; her costumes and habits are already singular enough to strike you, she speaks an unknown language and has, in short, none of those vulgar shortcomings to which we have become only too accustomed among the women in our own country.” But after attaining the slave woman, Nerval does not quite know how to integrate her into his life. What should he do with her now? In this wonderful encounter, we come face to face with a clash of cultures and are not certain who is the slave and who the master. Unsuccessful in civilizing Zetnaybia and unable to accept her “primitive” idiosyncracies, he frees her. In 1849, Gustave Flaubert, with his friend Maxime du Camp, set off for the Orient, which had long haunted his imagination. Like Nerval, Flaubert
glorified the seductions of Oriental women. He spent a year in Egypt and kept a diary full of erotic and sensuous detail: “Kuchuk shed her clothing as she danced. Finally she was naked except for a fichu which she held in her hands and behind which she pretended to hide, and at the end she threw down the fichu. That was the Bee.… Finally, after repeating for us the wonderful step she had danced in the afternoon, she sank down breathless on her divan, her body continuing to move slightly in rhythm.” This leads to an incredible night of passion with the alme (dancer) Kuchuk. Flaubert describes his experience in detail candid enough to have made his mistress, Louise Colet, extremely jealous. Oriental female dancers intrigued even Théophile Gautier: They stir strange nostalgias, dredge up infinite memories and conjure forth previous existences that come straying back in random array. Moorish dancing consists in perpetual undulations of the body: twisting of the lower back, swaying of the hips, movements of the arms, hands waving handkerchiefs, languid facial expressions, eyelids fluttering, eyes flashing or swooning, nostrils quivering, lips parted, bosoms heaving, necks bent like the throats of love sick doves … all these explicitly betoken the mysterious drama of voluptuousness. Such scenes fascinated both men and women. On watching the gyrations of a dancer’s breasts, Lady Duff Gordon opined, “They were just like pomegranates and gloriously independent of any support.” JEAN-LÉON GÉRÔME AND THE CAMERA The primitive technology of the camera and lengthy exposure times, as well as the often hostile resistance of the Moslem people to having their pictures taken, produced a vision of the Orient that was starkly at odds with the lavish one evoked by nineteenth-century writers and painters. The Orient the photographers captured was one of ruins and melancholic landscapes. As Charles Newton observed of a photograph of the fountain of Ahmed III in Constantinople, taken around 1860, the “monochrome image suggests an air of dereliction and decay, even when precisely and rapidly rendering the details of the architecture. There is no colour and life that a painter might
suggest, and the street vendors are shown only as part of a scene of poverty.” Occasional portrayals of whirling dervishes and Moroccan harem fantasias apart, what Orientalist artists mostly offered their clientele was a sedate, dignified, and cleaned-up Orient. When the people did allow themselves to be photographed, it was not in the crowded streets, but more often in a studio with Orientalist props and a fake landscape on the backcloth, or posed as anonymous figures next to an ancient ruin or a pyramid in order to give a sense of scale. The early photographers traveled with heavy and bulky equipment. Francis Frith’s wickerwork darkroom was mistaken by locals for his harem. The developing usually had to be done on the spot. In the heat, collodion was liable to evaporate or bubble over. It was not easy to get distilled water. Photographic studios such as Bonfils and Son and Sebah had been active in the East since the 1860s. In 1888, Kodak brought out a portable camera any tourist could operate. By the end of the nineteenth century, photography and photographers such as Frith had severely curtailed the growth of Orientalist painting. However, some painters, like Gérôme, who became one of the most influential voices on the nineteenth-century art scene, took advantage of the new invention, using it in the creation of their own paintings. Even before use of the camera became common, the licked finish of the academic painters’ canvases, in which individual brushstrokes were made to disappear, anticipated the texture of photographic images. In 1854, Gérôme, whose accuracy of detail no less a figure than Théophile Gautier praised, traveled to Turkey and later to Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Sinai, and North Africa. His photographs served as a convenient aidemémoire for re-creating Oriental scenes back home. The new technology also provided an additional source of income, as photographic studios could sell reproductions of his paintings. With the judicious use of props, Gérôme was able to re-create scenes with remarkable accuracy, in unsurpassed detail and with daring color schemes. Especially fascinated by the Turkish baths, he often went to men’s hamams with his sketchbooks to capture background material: “Stark naked perched on a stool, my box of paints across my knees, my palette in one hand … I felt slightly grotesque.”
Although Gérôme never did get inside a harem, his paintings can easily be perceived as visual counterparts of Lady Montagu’s or Julia Pardoe’s descriptions of bath scenes and other aspects of harem life. Revealed through a mist of steam, his women are always perfect and otherworldly. Gérôme’s marriage to the daughter of the influential art dealer Adolphe Goupil helped disseminate reproductions of his work, which became popular throughout the world, bringing harem scenes not only to the wealthy but, it seemed, to every bourgeois household as well. AMADEO COUNT PREZIOSI Unlike Gérôme’s oils, Amadeo Preziosi’s watercolors display a quality of immediacy and robust realism similar to Lewis’s work, although, in other respects, they are quite different in style. A Maltese count, Preziosi was born of a privileged family. When his father opposed his art career, he moved to Constantinople, where he lived for almost half a century, and where he died. He married a Greek woman and had four children, whose descendants still live in Turkey. During the last decade of his life, he became the court painter to Sultan Abdülhamid II. Preziosi was quick to become associated with the European diplomatic community and to develop a reputation within it. From the 1840s to the 1870s, he supplied images of the city’s life for travelers to take home. A connoisseur, Preziosi selected images of extremely colorful and interesting individuals, yet all of his subjects are clearly flesh and blood, not stylized clichés. The portrait of Adile Hanim, for example, shows a real person, somewhat exotic, but still exuding an emotional complexity that anyone can identify with. This approach was a radical attitude toward the East, which traditionally had been represented by one-dimensional harem girls, depicted in conformity with prevailing European notions of beauty. Preziosi’s Constantinople had the prosaic vitality of the city’s everyday life. Women picnic at the Sweet Waters of Asia, a Nubian slave attends an odalisque who smokes a chibouk and drinks coffee, women finger silk fabrics at the bazaar, a widow and her child visit a cemetery, an old water carrier leers at a young girl who coyly draws her veil. Victor Champier described him as “an artist whose eyes have been rinsed in the splendid
light of the Orient enabling him to capture the depth of its meaning and enjoy the happiness of sensing the strength and capacity of its spirit.” EMPRESS EUGÉNIE On her way to Egypt, to celebrate the opening of the Suez Canal, Empress Eugénie, wife of Napoleon III, stopped in Istanbul. Abdülaziz put a palace in Beylerbey at her disposal and decorated it in French rococo style with an Oriental accent. Eugénie slept in a Syrian bed, richly inlaid with mother-ofpearl, tortoiseshell, and silver, and she bathed in a sumptuous hamam. She was even given the privilege of visiting the ladies in the sultan’s harem. For the first time in history, a sultan bowed before a foreign woman. This visit began a chain of irreversible effects. The Turkish women living in harems suddenly acquired a taste for everything French. Francomania in Turkey equaled its French counterpart, Turquomania. Aristocratic Turkish ladies copied the empress’s appearance to the best of their ability, dividing their hair in the middle and spending endless hours making clusters of curls. High-heeled shoes replaced the curved-toed Turkish slippers. Skirts were suddenly favored over the shalwar (harem pants). Before the end of the century, the women were dressed by the French couture house of Worth, spoke several languages, and read Flaubert and Loti—yet some of them were still confined in harems. PIERRE LOTI In the hills of Eyub, overlooking the Golden Horn, is an open-air café called the Pierre Loti. The famous author once frequented it, under an assumed identity as a Turkish Bey. On some weekends, I went there with my friends. We sat under the century-old sycamores, sipping black tea served in samovars and digesting the view. What we saw were shipyards, paper factories, and enormous mountains of coal—no longer a “city of cut jasper,” no longer the Sweet Waters of Europe with myriad pleasure kayiks. But those images were superimposed on the real ones, because Loti had evoked them so well for us in his novels. Born into a Huguenot family in Rochefort as Julien Viaud, Loti joined the Navy as a young man. His voyages took him to exotic and distant places not yet known by many, such as Easter Island, Senegal, and Tahiti. His novels
were evocative and nostalgic; they spoke of melancholy, disenchantment, incurable solitude, separation, and death. No place, however, enthralled him so much as Istanbul. It was love at first sight. He had found his muse, and he formed a lifelong love affair with her, producing two gems of Orientalist literature, Aziyade (1877) and The Disenchanted (1906). “Behind those heavy iron bars, two large eyes were fixed on me. The eyebrows were drawn across, so that they met.… A white veil was wound tightly around the head, leaving only the brow, and those great eyes free. They were green—that sea-green which poets of the Orient once sang,” wrote Loti of Aziyade, a Circassian in the harem of a Bey, whose enigmatic and untouchable beauty enchanted him. Defying all danger, his servant Samuel arranged a nocturnal rendezvous. They met on a boat: Aziyade’s barque is filled with soft rugs, cushions and Turkish coverlets— all the refinements and nonchalance of the Orient—so that it seems a floating bed, rather than a barque.… All dangers surround this bed of ours, which drifts slowly out to sea: it is as if two beings are united there to taste the intoxicating pleasure of the impossible. When we are far enough from all else, she holds out her arms to me. I reach her side, trembling as I touch her. At this first contact I am filled with mortal languor: her veils are impregnated with all the perfumes of the Orient, her flesh is firm and cool. It may sound a bit over the top: The prose is purple, and the fantasy boundless. But Loti and Aziyade have many such nights of pleasure on her boat. Finally, Loti’s ship has to leave; the lovers part. He promises to return. But he does not, and Aziyade dies of a broken heart. When Loti returned to Istanbul twenty years later, it had become astonishingly Westernized. Though the harems still existed, a new breed of well-educated and outspoken young women were emerging. Envious of European women’s freedom, tired of wearing veils and being forced into marriages of not their choosing, they were acting up. Loti had received a letter from such a woman, named Djénane, who entreated him to come to Istanbul. Beginning to age, tempted to see
Aziyade’s land once again, he decided to return. Djénane and two accomplices arranged clandestine meetings with Loti in the most exotic and picturesque parts of Istanbul. They told him heartbreaking accounts of their miserable lives, in the hope of persuading Loti to write a novel about the oppression of harem women. The novelist was less interested in politics than in romance, so the women fabricated a fictional world of romance to inspire him, which came to an end when Djénane, like Aziyade, took her own life. Loti returned to Paris and wrote The Disenchanted. But the story does not end here. Soon after the writer’s departure, the women on whom the book was based also fled to Paris, where they became a cause célèbre, appearing at the most exclusive parties. They were written about, painted, and sculpted by the greatest artists of the era, among them Henri Rousseau and Auguste Rodin. Moreover, after Loti’s death, a French woman named Madame Lera, who wrote under the pseudonym Marc Helys, published Le Secret des désenchantées, which claimed that she herself had posed as Djénane with the help of her two Turkish friends; the three women had simply wanted to amuse themselves with Loti. Helys’s “revelation” was challenged, but the documents, letters, and journal entries she deposited at the Bibliothèque Français left no doubt as to the truth of her story.
Photograph of a 1905 drawing by Auguste Rodin, which depicts the heroines of Pierre Loti’s harem novel, The Disenchanted. Collection of the author
The story of The Disenchanted, which inspired my novel The Third Woman, is a great example of the fallacy of Orientalism. Loti was so caught up in the exotic woman of his imagination that the only way he could portray her was through a French woman playacting. It was also the greatest literary hoax of the twentieth century. EMANCIPATION OF THE EAST The publication of The Disenchanted not only stirred up scandal but was also one of the elements that brought the suffragettes to the rescue. Turkey was suddenly flooded with European women who were appalled at the situation of their sisters, still living under such male dominance. It was a great feminist cause to set out on a crusade to free these unfortunates. Their predecessor, Sir Richard Burton’s wife Isabelle, would deliberately appear in low-cut dresses during social gatherings to set a provocative example, and in Lebanon, at an embassy reception, she had had the wives sit in chairs and ordered their husbands to serve them tea and cakes. The movement to establish women’s rights so threatened the established order that in 1901 Sultan Abdülhamid II issued an edict prohibiting the employment of Christian teachers in harems, the education of Turkish children in foreign schools, and the appearance in public of Turkish women with foreign women. These restrictions only served to force the issue among women, who organized secret meetings. Messages were carried from harem to harem—protected by the certainty that Moslem women are never searched. At the same time, the Young Turks, faced with the stark reality of a diseased empire, shed their intellectual idealism and began mobilizing in Macedonia. In 1908, they established a constitutional monarchy and greatly curtailed the power of the sultan. It would take another decade for major changes actually to become effective in Turkish society, but by the 1920s women became fully integrated into public life. The revolutionary leader Kemal Atatürk challenged: “Is it possible that, while one half of a community stays chained to the ground, the other half can rise to the skies? There is no question—the steps of progress must be taken to accomplish the
various stages of the journey into the land of progress and renovation. If this is done, our revolution will be successful.” Veils came off. The massive layers of clothing were shed and, with them, the years of suppression and isolation. Harems were declared unlawful; polygamy abolished.
My maternal grandfather, Hamdi Bey, a “Young Turk,” ca. 1908
THE LAST PICTURE
One of the most touching and strange scenes took place at the Seraglio. Relatives of the harem women were summoned to Istanbul to claim their daughters and sisters. Circassian mountaineers and peasants came in droves, clad in the picturesque costume of country folk. They were formally ushered into a large hall of the Seraglio where the ex-sultan’s kadins, concubines, and odalisques came to greet them. The contrast between the elegantly dressed ladies of the palace and the rugged peasant men was dramatic. Everywhere people fell into the arms of their long-unseen loved ones, sobbing uncontrollably. But the most heartbreaking picture was the faces of the women for whom no one came. Kismet left them to the hollow echoes of a dead institution, which, even in their freedom, they could not escape. They remained at the Old Palace, relics of the past, trapped in their own liberation. Artists continued immortalizing these beauties with stories of perfumed handkerchiefs, roses, and poems dropped from behind latticed windows.
Survivals
TWENTIETH-CENTURY ORIENTALIST THREADS Meanwhile, in the West, the passion for the Orient was rekindled with a new translation of the One Thousand and One Nights (1899–1904) by Dr. Joseph-Charles Mardrus. Once again, the flame of Orientalism had been sparked, and it burned well into the thirties, inspiring dance, opera, architecture, and fashion, and the magical new medium: movies. Even circuses and vaudeville troupes used the glitter of the Orient in their own evocations. The photographer Cecil Beaton recalled Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes becoming the toast of Paris in 1910, the titillation of watching Karsavina dance with Nijinsky in Scheherazade: the one strutting as the golden slave, taking superhuman leaps, and the other leaping forward as the Odalisque in curly Persian slippers. The ballet expressed most obviously the Arabian Nights spirit that permeated Paris, turning the “city into a seraglio.” The plot of Diaghilev’s Scheherazade was audacious and risqué. Harem women, taking advantage of the sultan’s absence, indulge in an orgy with the eunuchs. Gore and blood abound when the sultan unexpectedly returns. “You must go and see the voluptuousness of the dances, the passionate frenzy of the gestures, attitudes and intertwinings,” exhorted Beaton. The Russian painter Leon Bakst designed the spectacular sets and costumes for Scheherazade in wild, orgiastic colors. A year later, the famous couturier Paul Poiret presented Paris society with a new harem look. Fabrics like Damascus silk, crêpe de Chine, crêpe de Maroc, and Ottoman and Smyrna brocade woven in rich, exotic colors replaced the soft, pale pastels of the preceding era. Poiret was a cunning promoter. In order to introduce his new line of couture, he threw an extravagant Persian Ball, the “Mille et deuxième nuit.” Dressed as a sultan, the rotund designer received
hundreds of guests amid exotic birds and monkeys, bare-breasted black women, Oriental rugs, and copper braziers in which attar of roses and sandalwood smoldered. Later, Poiret started an interior-design company to provide the appropriate decor for his fashions. Parisian salons were converted into colorful harems with rich draperies, Oriental rugs, and heaps of cushions. Poiret also launched a line of perfumes called Rosine, with names like Minaret, Nuit de Chine, Antinea, and Aladdin. By the twenties, innumerable women were dressing themselves as nineteenth-century odalisques. Liane de Pougy describes women lunching at the Lido in 1926, looking “as though they were acting in a fairy tale: Scheherazade, Salome, Salammbo—Oriental ladies from rich harems— sumptuous pajamas, brilliantly-colored and glittering.” “Women acted as if they were odalisques trying to fascinate a pasha, instead of respectable matrons tied up to British gentlemen whose minds were entirely fixed on guns, dogs and birds,” mused the duch*ess of Westminster. The Colonial Exhibitions of Marseilles in 1922 introduced another exotic marketing strategy. Posters with harem beauties advertised face creams, cosmetics, and scents with names like Jerusalem, Ambre de Nubie, or Secret de Sphinx. Packagers made use of the same voluptuaries to sell Turkish cigarettes with names like Fatima, Murad, and Sobranie. Merchants had discovered the enormous marketing power of Oriental sensuality. We still use perfumes named Opium, Naima, Shalimar, and Damascus. Haute couture still drapes on Western bodies lush fabrics that originated on the Silk Road. Designers like Yves Saint-Laurent, Lacroix, Rifat Ozbek, and Oscar de la Renta continue to be inspired by harem pants, fezzes, embroidered vests, and elegant bustiers.
A harem beauty promoting Murad Turkish cigarettes
The image of the Grand Odalisque used to promote ESB Speakers (November 1987; Mark Hess, illustrator; Wynn Medinger, designer)
During the first three decades of the twentieth century, the French in Algeria, obsessed by Algerian women, circulated postcards all over the world, much in the same line as the Orientalist paintings of the previous century. The photographs were of a seminaked woman—most likely a prostitute or a non-Moslem—including in the composition a few props, such as nargilehs, chibouks, coffee accoutrements, and an Oriental carpet as a backdrop.
A group of Algerian women arranged by a postcard photographer to evoke a harem scene, 1915
Throughout the twenties, Henri Matisse painted a series of odalisques. As with the earliest Orientalists, his artistic harem deviated from actuality. “Look closely at the Odalisques: the sun floods them with its triumphant brightness, taking hold of colors and forms. Now the Oriental decor of the interiors, the array of hangings and rugs, the rich costumes, the sensuality of heavy, drowsy bodies, the blissful torpor in the eyes lying in wait for pleasure, all this splendid display of siesta elevated to the maximum intensity of arabesque and color should not delude us,” Matisse asserted. MOVIES AND TELEVISION Meanwhile, a new visual and commercial art, film, was capitalizing on the public’s perpetual fascination with images Oriental. Now harem beauties could be seen actually shaking their hips and rattling their breasts.
Handsome sheiks ravaged these odalisques, reinforcing the myth of women’s need to be possessed. Throughout the twenties, Rudolph Valentino prospered on the Western world’s eternal need for escape. As journalist Anne Edwards commented: “When a sheik with passion burning in his eyes gallops up just as you are about to be forced to give your troth to one you don’t love, and sweeps you into a saddle and away to love in a tent in the desert—that’s film stuff, my child.”
Scene from Ali Baba Goes to Town, 1937, starring Eddie Cantor
Scene from Ali Baba Goes to Town, 1937, starring Eddie Cantor
Istanbul Express, Mask of Demitrios, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, Ali Baba Goes to Town, Aladdin, Thief of Bagdad, Kismet, and numerous other films continued into the sound era, glorifying the romance of the East. Even the Three Stooges found themselves dressed as harem girls in a bad guy’s harem. In the sixties and seventies, television matched an all-American boy (in a U.S. Air Force uniform) with an all-American girl (in diaphanous Oriental costume) in I Dream of Jeannie. Fellini’s Amarcord (1973) portrayed an outrageously flamboyant harem; and James Bond thrillers habitually surrounded 007 with a bevy of pretty, sparsely clad women.
James Bond (Roger Moore) and his harem in The Spy Who Loved Me, 1977
HAREMS TODAY
As harems slowly waned out of the Eastern consciousness, they carved a new niche in the Western mind. One of the most frequent questions people ask is, “Do harems still exist?” They do. Polygamy has been outlawed in Turkey and China, but is still a flourishing practice in parts of the Middle East and Africa. In parts of India, having multiple wives is illegal but practiced nonetheless among the Moslems. In Saudi Arabia, “rivals” still live in the same house and are veiled when they leave, albeit not in carriages but in Cadillacs—driven by chauffeurs, as women are not allowed drivers’ licenses. In Dubai, one man has fifteen wives and seventy-eight children. Eighty-seven percent of traditional African societies still practice polygamy. In Nigeria, men are allowed to take four wives. In 1952, the fon (chief of a settlement) was reputed to have six hundred wives. (In actuality, he had only a hundred or so.) Harems linger as part of the polygamous Arab tradition, and they are perhaps being reinforced by the fundamentalist wave. But what is even more astonishing is that harems exist in the Western world—although we may not always think of them as such. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints established polygamy in 1831. For many years the Mormons practiced “plural marriage” secretly, since it was (and is) illegal in the United States. In 1890 the church decided against polygamy, but devout fundamentalist Mormons have continued practicing it or started separate churches. In her insightful memoir, In My Father’s House (1984), Dorothy Allred Solomon chronicles growing up in her Mormon father’s harem with seven mothers and forty-eight brothers and sisters. In this household, a strong hierarchy existed, based on seniority among the women, and not all the wives were happy with their positions in the pecking order. Eventually, the threat of arrest forced Solomon’s father to set up separate homes for his wives and visit each secretly. In 2005, Edith Barlow, a mother of five in the polygamous community of Bountiful, British Columbia, was denied permanent residence and was asked to leave Canada, where polygamy is a criminal offense but prosecutions are rare.
In Big Love, a recent prime-time TV series, Bill Henrickson is a successful businessman, a devout Mormon, and a polygamist. That means three wives, three houses, and a lot of kids. Even after the depiction of hundreds of television families, that’s something new. The authorities have arrested Warren Jeff, the “prophet” of a fundamentalist Mormon sect, who is accused of pedophilia and forcing young women into a life of polygamy. Jeffs holds sway over several isolated, breakaway communities in the remotest parts of the United States, including Hildale, on the border of Utah and Arizona, a small town with huge homes, with an average of twenty family members occupying each. In certain spiritual communes, especially among those practicing religions that sanction polygamy, harems have flourished. Certain gurus have been accused of exercising as much control as a sultan. Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and Bubba Free John, for example, reputedly had “concubines.” More mediagenic enterprises include Hugh Hefner’s Playboy mansion, where live-in “bunnies” abound to cater to the master’s wishes. The James Bond movies represented the fantasy of being surrounded with a multitude of beautiful and adoring women—no better way to sell a product. Sociologist Joseph Scott believes that polygamous relationships are the best-kept secrets in America; 5 percent of the American population is estimated actually to practice some form of polygamy. We have not answered some of the fundamental questions, such as whether men are by nature polygamous. There is every indication that we act as if we believe this to be the case—until marriage, at which point we expect polygamous longings to dematerialize. The idea of a harem mythologizes whatever such longings men entertain. I have not yet met a man who fails to be titillated by the harem fantasy. And women: are they by nature polyandrous? If so, why do we have so few examples of this practice, historical or otherwise? Is it because the age of patriarchy has subjugated this natural impulse? The matriarchal era, preceding the ascent of Judeo-Christian religions, saw instances of powerful queens and priestesses—Semiramis, Ishtar, Cleopatra—having several mates. Female archetypes such as “la belle dame sans merci,” who bewitch,
seduce, and destroy innocent males, occur in early mythology and have evolved into such pop figures as the vamp, femme fatale, and black widow. However, all these phantasms involve serial, rather than simultaneous, possession of mates. In Tibet, the best-known cultural domain within which polyandry is practiced, the testimony of certain polyandrists themselves indicates that it is a difficult relationship to sustain. Islam and Judaism ban polyandry completely. In the ancient Hindu epic Mahabharata, Draupadi marries the five Pandava brothers. This ancient text remains largely neutral to the concept of polyandry, which does not seem to have become institutionalized in the manner of the harems. There is no doubt that the image of an odalisque occupies a significant part in the feminine unconscious. Through interviews, during which I asked women to list the female roles they would most like to play in a movie, I discovered that an odalisque—the image of total submission, stupor, and surrender—was among the most common. Nevertheless, not many of the women had the fantasy of being an inmate of a harem, and few admitted to a desire for such servitude and anonymity. For the majority, the word harem evoked a different response; sadness came over women’s eyes as they talked. I could sense that the pain of loss and jealousy was clouding their vision. Many, however, seemed to sway toward communalism, a tribal yearning to be with other women. No, not to share a lover, but to be together. Audrey B. Chapman, in Man Sharing (1986), relates interviews with two American women who have quietly chosen polygamy. Delores expressed her general insecurity about the traditional American marriage. She entered into a polygamous marriage because she believed polygamy created a more stable family life. Delores felt safe knowing where her husband was at all times: “He is either at work or with one of the wives whom I know very well. As head wife, I helped him select these other women, and we get along very well most of the time. I never feel the rejection I did in my first marriage, because we have a system where each wife has a specified time with our husband. We are all involved in scheduling the calendar with our
husband, so no one feels threatened by any rivalry.” What is unusual is that, in this harem, women have a voice and are not mere slaves. In another interview, we learn that Karen chose a polygamous marriage because she was tired of struggling with “all the feelings of ownership and possession. I don’t see my husband as a possession. We are a family unit and we make decisions that are best for everyone, and I like this.” Further discussion with Karen revealed that she and her co-wife did not compare notes concerning sex. Each had separate bedrooms, which the husband never entered. Instead, they visited him in his room—though this did not occur frequently, since their spiritual connection was much more important than their physical one. Again, unlike the women in a traditional harem, Karen exercised choice. Also, both women expressed their feeling of a strong sense of sisterhood with the other co-wives. Instead of rivalry, they shared support and understanding. I once saw an enormous outdoor tub surrounded by an oak grove. A dozen or so women were submerged in the water, rose petals floating on its surface. The women passed around tall glasses of cold fruit juices. Silence predominated, interrupted only occasionally by a wave of laughter and chatter, female murmuring, which suddenly died into utter silence. The women, with their breathing, were yielding to the hum of nature. Wet, tangled hair. Flushed cheeks. (A woman friend who takes erotic photographs of women once told me that she has her subjects take a hot bath first, so that the steam brings on a flushed appearance, adding mystery and desire to the face.) They climbed in and out of the tub, vapor forming clouds around their bodies, bodies of all kinds, fat and flabby, lean and taut, young and old. Then they regrouped in poses of abandon—kneeling, reclining, and sitting cross-legged. They seemed comfortable touching each other, massaging the kinks, rubbing in botanicals and sweet-smelling salts and oils. I watched them cover their faces with clay, their bodies with cornmeal and avocado, their hair with henna. They were plastering a mixture of lemon and caramel on their legs, and crying out as they pulled it off. They seemed utterly at ease, being together and knowing how to take care of one another.
This was not the re-creation of a scene from an Orientalist painting. Nor were the women Sapphic. I am recalling a contemporary women’s retreat. The signs and rituals utter a shared consciousness that supersedes history or social institutions. When women gather, I observe that something almost archetypal happens: overflowing and abundance, complicity and lack of censorship, lack of the posturing that inevitably dominates a mixed group. Primitive rituals evolve. The women synchronize with the moon’s phases. They have an instinct for the earth, the water, an affinity for the timeless activities of bathing and grooming, for growing things. This is not what happens when tribes of men come together. This is not the way men choose to act with one another. They seem to miss the closeness, the texture of the women’s world, a world they enter only through association with women. In this view, the harem is a re-creation of a nostalgic need, a return to childhood and to mothers. For a man, it is an attempt to own a world of his own, utterly egocentric, without the intrusion of other men. No wonder Valide—or mother—was the axis of the harem. The roots of slavery and isolation are in the womb. And the womb, like the harem, is sacrosanct. An adult male is not encouraged to admit to the desire for the womb, a state of isolated suspension. Real men don’t. He has gained consciousness, tasted food, sex, and death. Nevertheless, he yearns to return to the womb, bringing with him all his worldly acquisitions—his very own womb, protected by his mother, within her, his desires shielded from territoriality; his own world, where no other male can enter—except his sons, of course, and even those he admits reluctantly. To guard his place, he creates servants who have been neutralized. He brings his wife and all the other women he desires— perhaps all reflections of the Great Mother. This he calls paradise. Is polygamy—harem—less acceptable than a monogamous system in which such desires and inclinations are just as intense but privately experienced, in which one has the same hates and jealousies, endures the same struggle for survival, feels the same fear of open vulnerability,
undertakes, too, the same search for sisterhood and union, oneness with other beings? After all, the Mormon system of “sealing” women with their husbands—that is, uniting their souls after death—is an acknowledgment of togetherness not only in this life but also through eternity. Husband and wife are parts of the same soul, yearning to become one. (It seems, though, that some Mormons became excessively ambitious: “At the turn of the century when Mormons were still practicing polygamy, some church officials had themselves sealed [at the Mormon archives in Utah] with such famous women as Cleopatra and Queen Elizabeth with the idea that after death, they would be able to claim these women as their wives,” according to Rachel Wrege in a 1982 article.) We cannot look at history and expect our contemporary perceptions to apply. His-story is a male sport, the story of men, as told by men through the ages. Women figure in it simply to patch the silent phrases. But there is an uncanny resemblance between rituals of forgotten history and the reign of the feminine unconscious. Harem cannot be explained simply through the mirror of history. Harem is a unique archetype of the collective unconscious—matriarchy incubating in the cradle of patriarchy. It is an unsolved enigma, a haunting mystery, and undeniably a source of intuitive intelligence. It is a shadow world—full of halftones, large areas obscured or lost forever—which we are reluctant to own as our own creation. It belongs in the realm of dark secrets and fears we prefer not to remember. It is about forgetfulness. It requires returning to our subjective experience and splicing it together with imagination and intuition, to open the “sesame” of the one thousand and one chambers of our dreams. For me, it started at the Topkapi Palace, with a walk through the Grand Harem, now a museum—a graveyard of the past, barren and colorless, stripped of fantasies. But the walls seemed to whisper. The walls seemed to whisper. In the baths, the boudoirs, the courtyards of the harem women, we start with a tabula rasa—or, rather, with a mysterious text written in invisible ink. The walls whisper, the intricate labyrinths flow into blood memories.
The veil is still drawn, but it is diaphanous, in my mind now. A provocative assemblage.
Chronology of the Ottoman Sultans SULTANS
SULTANAS
1. Osman I
(1299–1326)
2. Orhan
(1326–60)
3. Murad I
(1360–89)
4. Beyazid I
(1389–1402)
Theodora
INTERREGNUM (1402–1430) 5. Mehmed I
(1431–21)
6. Murad II
(1421–40; 1445–51)
7. Mehmed II
(1440–45; 1451–81) Irene
8. Beyazid II
(1481–1512)
9. Selim I
(1520–66)
THE REIGN OF WOMEN (1541–1687) 10. Süleyman I
(1520–66)
11. Selim II
(1566–74)
12. Murad III
(1574–95)
Roxalena Baffa
13. Mehmed III (1595–1603) 14. Ahmed I
(1603–17)
15. Mustafa I
(1617; 1622–23)
16. Osman II
(1617–22; 1622–23)
17. Murad IV
(1623–40)
18. Ibrahim
(1640–48)
Kösem
Turhan
19. Mehmed IV
(1648–87)
20. Süleyman II
(1687–91)
21. Ahmed II
(1691–95)
22. Mustafa II
(1695–1703)
23. Ahmed III
(1703–30)
24. Mahmud I
(1730–54)
25. Osman III
(1754–57)
26. Mustafa III
(1757–74)
27. Abdülhamid I
(1774–89)
28. Selim III
(1789–1807)
29. Mustafa IV
(1807–8)
30. Mahmud II
(1808–39)
31. Abdülmecid
(1839–61)
32. Abdülaziz
(1861–76)
33. Murad V
(1876)
34. Abdülhamid II (1876–1909) 35. Mehmed V
(1909–18)
36. Mehmed VI
(1918–22)
Aimée de Rivery
Bibliography Alderson, A. D. Structure of the Ottoman Dynasty. Oxford, 1956. Alexandre, Arsene, ed. The Decorative Art of Leon Bakst. London, 1913. Alireza, Marianne. At the Drop of a Veil. Boston, 1971. Alloula, Malek. The Colonial Harem. Minneapolis, 1986. Amicis, Edmondo de. Constantinople. 2 vols. Philadelphia, 1896. Angiolello, Gio Maria. Historia Turchesa. 1480. Arzik, Nimet. Osmanli Saraylarinda Yabanci Kadin Sultanlar. Istanbul, 1969. Bassano da Zara, Luigi. I Costumi et i modi particolari de la vita de Turchi. Rome, 1545. Beckford, William. Vathek. London, 1786. Behr, Edward. The Last Emperor. New York, 1987. Birsel, Salah. Boğaziçi Şingir Mingir. Ankara, 1981. Blanch, Lesley. Pierre Loti. New York, 1983. . The Wilder Shores of Love. New York, 1954. Blunt, Lady Anne. Bedouin Tribes of the Euphrates. London, 1919. . A Pilgrimage to Nejd. London, 1881. Bon, Ottaviano. Seraglio of the Grand Signor (1608). Venice, 1865. Bowles, Paul. The Sheltering Sky. New York, 1949. Burckhardt, J. T. Travels in Arabia. London, 1822. Burton, Isabel. The Life of Captain Sir Richard F. Burton. London, 1893. Burton, Sir Richard F. Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Meccah. London, 1853. . The Thousand Nights and a Night. London, 1887. Busbecq, Ogier Ghiselin de. Life and Letters. 2 vols. London, 1881. Celal, Musahipzade. Eski Istanbul Yaşayişi. Istanbul, 1946. Chapman, Audrey B. Man Sharing. New York, 1986. Chelebi, Evliya. Seyahatname. Istanbul, 1834. Chelebi, Sinan. Saadabad. Istanbul, 1750. Chelkowski, Peter J. Mirror of the Invisible World. New York, 1975. Cowart, Jack, and Dominique Fourcade. Henri Matisse: The Early Years in Nice (1916–1930). Washington, D.C., 1986.
Croutier, Alev Aksoy. Ucuncu Kadin. Istanbul, 2006. Croutier, Alev Lytle. The Palace of Tears. New York, 2002. . Leyla: The Black Tulip. New York, 2003. Dallam, Thomas. Early Voyages and Travels in the Levant. London, 1893. Davey, Richard. The Sultan and His Subjects. 2 vols. New York, 1897. Davies, Kristian. Orientalists: Western Artists in Arabia, the Sahara, Persia and India. New York, 2006. Davis, Raphaela. Everyday Life in Ottoman Turkey. London, 1971. Dinet, Etienne. Tableaux de la vie Arabe. Paris, 1908. Du Camp, Maxime. Souvenirs et paysages d’Orient. Paris, 1849. Duff Gordon, Lady Lucie. Letters from Egypt. London, 1865. Durukan, Zeynep M. The Harem of Topkapi Palace. Istanbul, 1973. Edib, Halide. Memoirs of Halide Edib. London, 1926. Ekrem, Selma. Unveiled: The Autobiography of a Turkish Girl. New York, 1930. Ellison, Grace. Turkey Today. London, 1928. El Saadawi, Nawal. The Hidden Face of Eve. Boston, 1980. Enderuni, Fazil. Hübanname-Zenanname. Istanbul, 1793. Erdogan, Sema Nilgun. Sexual Life in Ottoman Society. Istanbul, 1996. Esin, Emel. Turkish Miniature Painting. New York, 1960. Ettinghausen, Richard, and Marie Lukens Swietochowski. Islamic Painting. New York, 1978. Fernea, Elizabeth Warnock. Guests of the Sheik. New York, 1965. Fitzgerald, Edward. Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. London, 1879. Flachat, Jean-Claude. Observations sur le commerce et sur les arts de l’Europe, de l’Asie, de l’Afrique, et même des Indes orientales. Lyons, 1746. Forster, Charles Thornton, and F. H. Blackburn Danniell. The Life and Letters of Ogier Ghiselen de Busbecq. 2 vols. London, 1881. Fromentin, Eugene. Une Année dans le Sahel, 1853. Paris, 1912. Galland, Antoine. Journal pendant son sejour à Constantinople (1672–1673). Paris, 1881. Gautier, Theophile. Constantinople. Paris, 1854. Gibbon, Edward. The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–88). Ed. J. B. Bury. 7 vols. London, 1896–1900. Gibbons, Herbert Adams. The Foundation of the Ottoman Empire. Oxford, 1916. Hanoum, Zeyneb. A Turkish Woman’s European Impressions. London, 1913. Harding, James. Artistes Pompiers. London, 1972.
Harvey, Mrs. Turkish Harems and Circassian Homes. London, 1871. Jacobs, Joseph. Tulips. New York, 1912. Jenkins, Hester Donaldson. Behind Turkish Lattices. London, 1911. Julian, Phillippe. Orientalist. Oxford, 1977. Kinross, Lord. The Ottoman Centuries. London, New York, 1977. Klunzinger, C. B. Upper Egypt: Its People and Its Products. London, 1878. Knipp, Christopher. “Types of Orientalism in Eighteenth-Century England.” Ph.D diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1974. Koçu, Reşad Ekrem. Topkapu Sarayi. Istanbul, 1960. Koseoğlu, Cengiz. Harem. Istanbul, 1979. Kritzeck, James. Anthology of Islamic Literature. New York, 1966. Lang, Andrew, ed. The Arabian Nights Entertainments. London, 1898. Lear, Edward. Journals. London, 1952. Levy, Michael. The World of Ottoman Art. New York, 1975. Lewis, John Frederick. Illustrations of Constantinople. London, 1835–36. Lewis, Raphaela. Everyday Life in Ottoman Turkey. London, New York, 1971. Lewis, Reina, and Sara Mills. Feminist Postcolonial Theory: A Reader. London, 2003. Llewellyn, Briony. “Eastern Light.” FMR, August 1984. Llewellyn, Briony, and Charles Newton, eds. The People and Places of Constantinople: Watercolors by Amadeo Count Preziosi, 1816–1882. London, 1985. Loti, Pierre. Aziyade. Paris, 1877. . The Disenchanted. New York, 1906. Maupassant, Guy de. Un Cas de divorce. Paris, 1886. Mehta, Rama. Inside the Haveli. Calcutta, 1977. Melling, Antoine Ignaz. Voyage pittoresque de Constantinople. Paris, 1807–24. Mernissi, Fatima. Scheherazade Goes West: Different Cultures, Different Harems. New York, 2002. Mikes, M. Turkiye Mektuplari. Ankara, 1944–45. Miller, Barnette. Beyond the Sublime Port. New Haven, 1931. Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley. The Complete Letters. London, 1708–1720. Morton, Benjamin A. The Veiled Empress. New York, 1923. Nerval, Gerard de. Journey to the Orient. New York, 1972. Newton, Charles. “People of Constantinople.” FMR, May 1985. Nicolai, Nicolo di. Le Navigationi et viaggi, fatti nella Turchia. Venice, 1580. Nightingale, Florence. Letters from Egypt, 1849–1850. New York, 1987.
d’Ohsson, Mouradja. Tableau general de l’empire Ottoman. Paris, 1788–1824. Pardoe, Julia. Beauties of the Bosphorus. London, 1840. . City of the Sultan. London, 1837. Pears, Edwin. Forty Years in Constantinople. London, 1916. Peirce, Leslie P. The Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire. New York, 1993. Peltre, Christine. Orientalism in Art. New York, 1998. Penzer, N. M. The Harem. London, 1936. Rasim, Ahmed. Resimli ve Haritali Osmanli Tarihi. Istanbul, 1910. Refik, Ahmet. Kadinlar Saltanati. Istanbul, 1923. . Kizlar Ağasi. Istanbul, 1926. Richards, John. Diary on a Journey. London, 1700. Rosedale, H. G. Queen Elizabeth and the Levant Company. London, 1904. Rycaut, Sir Paul. History of the Ottoman Empire from the Year 1623 to 1677. London, 1680. Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York, 1978. Saz, Leyla. Harem’in Içyüzü. Istanbul, 1974. Searight, Sarah. The British in the Middle East. London, 1969. Seydi, Ali Bey. Teşrifat ve Teşkilatimiz. Istanbul, 1921. Shaarawi, Huda. Harem Years. New York, 1986. Sherwood, Shirley. Venice Simplon Orient Express. London, 1985. Siyavuşgil, Sadri Esat. Karagöz. Istanbul, 1954. Solomon, Dorothy Allred. In My Father’s House. New York, 1984. Steegmuller, Francis. Flaubert in Egypt: Sensibility on Tour. New York, 1972. Taøkiran, Tezer. Women in Turkey. Istanbul, 1976. Thackeray, William Makepeace. Notes of a Journey. London, 1844. Thevenot, Jean. 1655–1656 da Turkiye. Istanbul, 1978. Thornton, Lynne. Women as Portrayed in Orientalist Painting. Paris, 1985. Tuğlaci, Pars. Osmanli Saray Kadinlari. Istanbul, 1985. Uluçay, Cağatay. Harem. Ankara, 1971. . Harem’den Mektuplar. Istanbul, 1956. Unuvar, Safiye. Saray Hatiralarim. Istanbul, 1964. Uşakligil, Halit Ziya. Saray ve Ötesi. 3 vols. Istanbul, 1940–42. Vaka, Demetra. Haremlik. Boston, 1909.
Van-Lennep, H. J. The Oriental Album. New York, 1862. Verrier, Michelle. The Orientalists. London, 1979. Walsh, Robert. Narrative of a Journey from Constantinople to England. London, 1828. Watney, John. Travels in Araby of Lady Hester Stanhope. London, 1975. Weissen-Szumlańska, Marcelle. Hors du Harem. Paris, 1908. White, Charles. Three Years in Constantinople. London, 1846. White, Palmer. Paul Poiret. London, 1973. Yeazell, Ruth Bernard. Harems of the Mind: Passages of Western Art and Literature. New Haven, 2000.
Acknowledgments
This book was a labor of love. Many people extended time, care, and generosity beyond belief. My father, Sadri, obsessively kept archives and precious family photographs. My mother, Yümniye, ingeniously excavated many of the original sources. Zehra and Meryem, women ancestors, made the world of harems very personal. At Abbeville Press, gifted people walked me through each step of bookmaking with special care. Thank you, Lisa Peyton, Amy Handy, Mark Magowan, Steven Pincus, Sharon Gallagher, Alexandra Chapman, Hope Koturo, Deborah Sloan, and Carol Volk. Renée Khatami, the book’s designer, created an inspired work of art. Alan Axelrod is a splendid editor who deserves a medal for his persistence. And Bob Abrams, my publisher, is a brilliant man with fine taste and intuition who made the book worthwhile. Special thanks to Warren Cook, my agent and one of the finest men I know. Many thanks also to Carol Tarlow, Suzanne Lipsett, Carol Costello, Katherine Martin, Jeanine Kagan, Christine Stockton, Barbara Dills, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, Stephen Huyler, Christopher Knipp, George Csicsery, David Wakely, Carol Pitts, Morgan Barnes, Cynthia Jurs Hotchkiss, and Sandra Wilson. I’ve been lucky with people. Finally: thank you, Robert Croutier, husband and best friend, for keeping the fire burning while I wrote. —Alev Lytle Croutier, 1989
Index Hyperlinks lead to the top of the page on which a reference occurs. Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations.
A Abduction from the Seraglio (Mozart), 177 Abdülaziz, 122, 209 Abdülhamid I, 63, 123, 209 Abdülhamid II, 9, 53, 140, 141, 185, 190, 209 Abdülmecid, 209 Abu’l-Atahiya, 41 accouchement, 110–11 Accouchement in the Harem, An (Enderuni), 111 Adam and Eve, 17, 18, 129 Ahmed I, 208 Ahmed II, 42–44, 104, 118, 209 Ahmed III, 66, 109, 110, 209 Aida (Verdi), 180 Aksoy, Aladdin (author’s uncle), 52 Aksoy, Sadri (author’s father), 11, 52 Aksoy, Yümniye (author’s mother), 11 Aladdin, 199 Algerian women, 154 Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, 199 Ali Baba Goes to Town, 198, 199, 199 Alireza, Marianne, 156 Allah, 41 Amacord (Fellini), 200 Amicis, Edmondo de, 84, 91, 125, 141, 162 Angiolello, Gio Maria, 33 Aquinas, Thomas, 20 Arabian Nights. See One Thousand and One Nights Arabian Nights Entertainments, The (Redman), 173 architecture, 24, 25, 43, 66, 82, 113, 116, 162–67, 182 art. See Orientalism; Romantics Artemis, 18, 129 Ayhan (author’s aunt), 10, 12, 70 Ayshe Humashah, Princess, 110, 118 Aziyade (Loti), 187–89
B
Baffa (Safiye Sultana), 106–7, 208 Baker, Samuel, 84 Bakst, Leon, 34, 35, 193 Balance of Truth, The (Chelebi), 97–98 Ballets Russes, 34, 35, 193 Barutçu, Zehra (author’s grandmother), 8, 9–11, 51, 52, 122 bash kadin (head wife), 103 Bassano da Zara, Luigi, 74–75, 76, 84, 91, 95, 115 baths (hamam), 47–49, 81–91, 86, 87, 89, 90, 149, 185 Baudelaire, Charles, 177 bazaars, 61, 141, 186 Beaton, Cecil, 193 Beauties of the Bosphorus (Pardoe), 81–83, 86–87 Behice Sultana, 36 Bejazit (Racine), 177 Benjamin-Constant, Jean-Joseph, 102 Berry, Mary, 175 Beyazid I, 208 Beyazid II, 208 Beyazit, 117, 118 Beylerbey Palace, 185 Bezmialem Sultana, 105 Big Love, 200–201 birth, 37, 105, 110–11, 151 birth chair, 111 Blanch, Lesley, 56 Bon, Ottaviano, 100, 138 Bonaparte, Josephine, 62 Bond, James, 200, 201 Bonfils Studio, 184 Bosphorus, 50, 62, 64 Bouchard, Paul-Louis, 90 Bowles, Paul, 156 Bragadino, Pietro, 114 Bride, The (Schafer), 146 brides. See marriage; weddings bundle women (peddlers), 62, 106, 167–68 Burton, Isabelle, 190 Burton, Sir Richard, 22, 131, 134 Busbecq, Ogier, 64 Byzantine Empire, 24, 26–27, 81, 103, 129
C Cairo, 21, 22, 130, 180–82 Caliph of Bagdad (Boieldieu), 177
Carné, Marcel, 57 Cas de Divorce, Un (Maupassant), 9 Çatalhöyük, 128 Catholic Church, 20, 129 Celal, Musahipzade, 81 Chapman, Audrey B., 203 Chelabi, Evliya, 93 Chelebi, Katib, 98 Chelebi, Sinan, 78 Children of Paradise (Carné), 57 China, 13, 129–30, 131, 132, 137, 200 Christianity, 18, 20, 42, 128, 130, 202 Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, 200–202, 205–6 Circassians, 30, 187, 191 Cleopatra, 100, 202, 206 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 177, 182 Colet, Louise, 145, 183 concubines, 13, 32–33, 37, 38, 103, 137, 191 Constantine I (Roman emperor), 24, 129 Constantinople, 24, 26, 77, 84, 103 Constantinople (de Amicis), 84, 125, 134, 141, 162 Constantinopoli e di Turchi, 83 Cook, Thomas, 180 cosmetics, 84 costume and accessories, 55–56, 63, 70, 71–79, 161, 168, 185, 195; Orientalist, 176–77, 179, 180– 81, 193, 195. See also jewelry “couching,” 104–5 Croutier, Alev Lytle, 9–13, 95, 98, 125–27, 147, 167–68, 187; photographs of, 51, 100, 126; family, photographs of, 8, 10, 11, 12, 70, 77, 126, 191 Cybele, 128, 129 Cyrus, King of Persia, 128
D Dallam, Thomas, 75 dance, 34, 35, 55–57, 63, 109, 132, 177, 182–83 Daughters of the Sheik (Kiesel), 49 death and burial, 38–39, 112, 118, 130, 168–69 DeBucq de Rivery, Aimée (Nakshedil Sultana), 62, 112, 121–23, 209 Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (Gibbon), 103 Delacroix, Eugène, 180 Demeter, 18 De Quincey, Thomas, 177 De Rivery, Aimée. See DeBucq de Rivery, Aimée Diaghilev, Sergei Pavlovich, 193. See also Ballets Russes Diaries (Richards), 137
Dicksee, Sir Francis, 160 Dinet, Alphonse-Etienne, 44 Disenchanted, The (Loti), 68, 187–90, 188 Disenchanted, The (Rodin), 188 Divan (chancery of state), 106, 107, 119 divorce, 20–21, 109, 135, 153, 167 Djinn’s Kapi (Genie’s Gate), 38 du Camp, Maxime, 21–22, 182 Duff Gordon, Lady Lucie, 30, 183 Dulac, Edmund, 23, 175 Dursun Bey, 41
E Early Voyages and Travels in the Levant (Dallam), 75 Edip, Halide, 67, 154 education: European, 188; of princesses, 108; Western, 68 Edwards, Anne, 198 Egypt, 17, 130 Elizabeth I (queen of England), 206 Ellison, Grace, 67 Enderuni, Husein Fazil, 86 England, 178–79 Ernst, Rudolph, 31 Eski Istanbul Yaşayisi (Celal), 81 Eugénie, Empress, 122, 185–86 eunuch(s), 13, 17, 33, 36–37, 118, 121, 125–41; castrati, 129; castration, 130–32; chief black, 33, 38, 48, 103, 106, 110, 135, 138–41; Chinese, 132; education, 132, 138; food, 126, 131, 132; hair, loss of, 132; history and origins, 127–29; hom*osexuality, 134–35; living quarters, 25, 28, 42, 137–38; marriage, 135, 137, 138–41; old age, 141; photographs, 139; political power, 140; sexual desire, 134–35, 137; suffering, 125, 134; types, 127–31; wealth, 138. See also kizlar ağasi Europe, 167, 175–77 Eve, 17, 18, 19, 129
F Faed, John, 22 Faik Pasha, 10 fairy tales, 50, 174–76 fashion. See costume and accessories Fatma, Princess, 109 Fellini, Federico, 200 feminism, 11, 155, 190, 205–6 feradge (tunic), 70, 76–77, 78 Fernea, Elizabeth Warnock, 94, 157 festivals and special days, 64–67, 140, 141 Fez, 84
fez, 195 film, 127, 193, 198–200 Flachat, Jean-Claude, 44, 90, 138 Flaubert, Gustave, 145, 180, 182 flowers, 52–53 food, 62, 93–101, 126, 132, 169 footwear, 78, 84–85 Forbidden City (Peking), 13, 129, 132, 137 fortune-tellers, 42, 168 France, 57, 110, 123, 186–87, 189–90 Frith, Francis, 183, 184 Fromentin, Eugène, 177 Fumée d’Ambre Gris (Sargent), 84 furnishings, 64, 86, 109, 110, 111, 163–64, 166, 177, 186–87
G Galland, Antoine, 174, 175 games, 46–48, 91 gardens, 25, 44–46 Gates of Felicity, 123, 137 Gautier, Théophile, 95, 177, 182, 183 gazebos, 162 gedikli (maids-in-waiting), 32 Genghiz (author’s cousin), 12 Gérôme, Jean-Léon, 48, 87, 183–85 Ghiyas-ud-din Khilji, sultan of Malwas, 13 Gibbon, Edward, 103, 129 Golden Cage, 29, 38, 39, 118–20 Golden Road, 28 Goodall, Frederick, 41 görücü (go-between), 145–47 Goupil, Adolphe, 184 governors, 28, 30 Grande Odalisque, La (Ingres), 179, 180 Grand Harem. See Harem, Grand Grand Seraglio. See Seraglio, Grand grand vizier, 36, 64, 106, 110, 116, 120, 138, 174 Great Bath at Bursa, The (Gérôme), 87 Great Marriage, The (play), 57 Greece, 17, 18, 30, 129 Guests of the Sheik (Fernea), 94–95, 157 Gülbahar Sultana, 114, 116 Gülbeyaz (Rosewhite), 35, 41, 105 Gülfem Kadin, 105, 112 Gülhane (Rose House), 93
Gülnush Sultana, 34, 105 gurus, 202
H hadim. See eunuchs hair, 73, 84, 87, 187; removal of, 11, 85 halberdiers (royal guards), 28 hamam. See baths Hamdi Bey, 191 handkerchief (mendil), 78–79 Hanim, Adile, portrait of, 185 Hanim, Zeynab, 68 Harem’den Mektuplar (collection of letters), 42 Harem, Grand, 11, 13, 24–36, 24, 43, 103–5, 140, 206; accounts of, 67–69, 72–73, 75, 91; beginning of, 116; daily life in, 41–69; disenchantment, 67; documentation, lack of, 30, 41; education in, 32, 42; isolation of, 17, 24, 28, 41, 50–51, 54–55; misconceptions about, 103, 105; murder in, 37, 42, 105, 118; nationalities of, 26, 30; plan of, 25; population of, 11, 28–29, 41–42; rank, rivalry, and politics in, 95, 103–4, 105–7, 114–18; religious rituals in, 42, 53–54; romance in, 42, 52–53, 62. See also harems; sultanas; sultans Harem, The (Penzer), 84 Harem Beauty, A (Bouchard), 90 Haremin Içyüzü (Saz), 64, 93, 100 Haremlik (Vaka), 83, 153 Harems (Tazi), 152 harems: beauty of women in, 185, 187; bundle women and merchants, 167; contemporary, 200–206; crime, punishment in, 140; death in, 168–69; definition, 17; husband-wife relationships in, 150–51; living quarters, 162–67; marriages, 145–47; odalisques, 159, 161; ordinary, 145–69; origins, 17–20; polygamy, 20–21, 152–53; upkeep, 158; romance in, 147–48; superstition and charms, 157–58; weddings, 149–50; wives, relationships among, 153–57. See also Harem, Grand Harem Scene at Court of Shah Jahan, frontispiece, 92 Harem Servant, The (Trouillebert), 96 Harun al Rashid, 174 Harvey, Mrs., 83 Haseki sultana, 33–34, 140 hashish, 53, 177 Hatibullah Sultana, 50 Hatice Sultana, 42, 110, 116 headdress, 71, 73. See also costume and accessories Hefner, Hugh, 202 Helen (Roman empress), 24 Helys, Marc (Madame Lera), 190 henna, 83–84, 148–49, 204 Herodotus, 128–29 Historia Turchesca (Angiolello), 33 Holland, 64–66
“House of Joy,” 17 House of Tears. See Old Palace Hugo, Victor, 182 Hunkar sofasi (Hall of the Sultan), 55–56, 58 Hürrem Sultana. See Roxalena
I Ibrahim (grand vizier), 114, 116, 117 Ibrahim (sultan), 38, 48–49, 105, 112, 118, 119–20, 208 I Costumi et i modi particolari de la vita de Turchi (da Zara), 74, 76 I Dream of Jeannie, 200 Idle Hours in the Harem (Ernst), 31 Ikbal (favorite), 33 ikinci kadin (second wife), 103 India, 13, 200 infanticide, female, 20 Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Dominique, 31, 89, 179, 180 inheritance laws, 29, 37 In My Father’s House, (Solomon), 200 Inquisition, 20 Inside the Haveli (Mehta), 77 insomnia, 50, 54, 132 Intercepted Correspondence, An (Lewis), 52 interior design, Orientalist, 166, 176–77, 193. See also furnishings In the Bey’s Garden (Lewis), 45 Irene (Goring), 112 Irene Sultana, 38–39, 112, 208 Ishtar, 18, 202 Isis, 18 Islam: conversion of harem women to, 32, 41, 112, 122; culture and customs, 24, 33–34, 77, 109, 129, 146, 169, 200; law, 20–21, 29, 33, 71, 103, 129, 130, 145, 152, 161 Istanbul, 24, 66–68, 78, 113, 114, 122, 186 Istanbul Express, 199 Italy, 129 Izmir (Turkey), 9, 10, 161
J jadis (witches), 157–58 Jahangir, Emperor, 13 Jahaz Mahal, 13 janissaries, 107, 118, 120 jewelry, 33, 38, 55, 64, 71–73, 110, 118, 157, 161. See also costume and accessories Jones, Sir William (Oriental), 27, 71 Judaism, 18, 42, 62, 128, 130, 202 Jung-shu, Dowager Empress, 106
Juvenal, 134
K kadi (judge), 20 kadin (sultan’s wife), 33, 93, 100, 103, 105, 123, 140, 191 Kafes. See Golden Cage Kalfa (mistress of the house), 33, 36, 105 Karagöz (shadow-puppet show), 57–61 Karsavina, 34, 193 kayik (rowboat), 48, 187 Kemal Atatürk, 13, 190 Kiesel, Conrad, 49 Kipling, Rudyard, 177 kismet (fate), 39, 191 Kismet (film), 199 kizlar ağasi (chief black eunuch), 33, 38, 48, 103, 106, 110, 135, 138–41 Kösem Sultana, 36, 106, 112, 118–21, 177, 208 Koshru’s Dream (Lecomte de Nouy), 182 “Kubla Khan” (Coleridge), 177 Kublai Khan, 13
L Lecomte de Nouy, Jean-Jules-Antoine, 41, 182 Leila (Dicksee), 160 Lello, Henry, 38 Lera, Madame, 190 Lewis, John Frederick, 27, 45, 52, 180–82 Leyla and Mejnun, 50 Liotard, Jean-Etienne, 180 literature: 50–51, 174–76, 177, 182–83, 187–90 Loti, Pierre, 68, 149, 187–90, 188 Luther, Martin, 20
M Madame Pompadour, 106 Magic Flute, The (Mozart), 177 Magnus, Albertus, 20 Mahidevran Sultana, 105 Mahmud I, 90–91, 209 Mahmud II, 50, 62, 94, 123, 209 Manet, Edouard, 176 Man Exchanging a Slave for Armor (Faed), 22 Man Sharing (Chapman), 203 Mardrus, Dr. Joseph-Charles, 193
marriage, 26, 103–5, 108–10, 114, 115, 145, 148–50, 155, 202; of eunuchs, 135–37. See also polygamy Mask of Demitrios, 199 Matisse, Henri, 196 matriarchy, 18, 127, 202, 206 Maupassant, Guy de, 9 mausoleums, 113 Mecca, 17, 52, 129, 130 Medici, Catherine de, 106 Mehmed I, 208 Mehmed II, 24, 27, 33, 37–39, 105, 112, 114, 208 Mehmed III, 37, 104, 106, 208 Mehmed IV, 35, 36, 38, 41, 48–49, 120, 209 Mehmed V, 209 Mehmed VI, 209 Mehta, Rama, 77 Melling, Anton Ignaz, 42, 43, 47, 180 mendil (handkerchief), 78–79 merchants, 21, 61–62, 71, 140, 167 Meryem (author’s great-aunt), 10 Mesopotamia, 127 midwives, 110 Mihrimah Sultana, 109, 110, 118, 123 Milton, John, 89 Mohammed, 20, 78, 152 Montagu, Edward Wortley, 178 Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley, 52–53, 71, 72, 87–89, 178–79, 183 Montesquieu, Baron de la Brède et de, 37, 134, 177, 182 Moonlight at Laghouat (Dinet), 44 Mormons, 200–202, 205–206 mosques, 22, 113, 117, 129 motherhood, 18, 33, 34–35, 39, 107, 205 movies, harem themes in, 198–200 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 177 Muazzez (author’s aunt), 10, 12, 13, 58 Mukaddes (author’s aunt), 10, 12, 13, 58 Muller, William James, 21 Murad I, 208 Murad II, 208 Murad III, 48, 64, 103, 118, 208 Murad IV, 38, 98, 106, 119, 208 Murad V, 209 music, 32, 33, 103, 109, 110, 132, 139, 177 Mustafa I, 36, 114, 116, 117, 118, 208 Mustafa II, 209
Mustafa III, 209 Mustafa IV, 209 Mustafa Pasha, 120
N Naime, 122 Nakshedil Sultana (Aimée DeBucq de Rivery), 62, 112, 121–23, 209. See also DeBucq de Rivery, Aimée Napoleon I, 123 Napoleon III, 186 nargileh (pipe), 177, 179 Narrative of Travels (Bon), 100 Nerval, Gérard de, 21, 79, 127, 152, 158, 163, 177, 180, 182 Nesime (author’s cousin), 12 New Light in the Harem (Goodall), 41 Nicolay, Nicolas de, 101 Nigeria, 200 Nightingale, Florence, 74–75, 180 Nijinsky, Vaslav, 34, 193 Notes From a Journey (Thackeray), 181–82 novices, 28, 138 Nükhet Seza, 123
O Observations sur le commerce et sur les arts de l’Europe, de l’Asie, de l’Afrique, et même des Indes orientales (Flachat), 44–46, 66–67, 138–39 oda. See odalisques Odalisque (Bakst), 34 Odalisque (Renoir), 156 Odalisque and Slave (Ingres), 31 odalisques, 19, 26, 28, 31, 34, 56, 134–35, 156, 159–61, 180, 191, 196; definition, 32; fantasy of being, 203; in Grand Harem, 30, 51–52, 57, 59, 83, 91, 103, 105; in ordinary harems, 145, 152, 161; training of, 30, 32–33, 94 d’Ohsson, Ignaze Mouradja, 82, 93 Old Palace (Palace of the Unwanted Ones; House of Tears), 36, 37, 105, 107, 110, 116, 118, 122, 191 Olympia (Manet), 176 One Thousand and One Nights (Arabian Nights), 9, 39, 55, 134, 137, 174–76, 177, 193 opera, 118, 127, 129, 177, 180, 193 opium, 53–55, 177 Orhan, 103, 208 Orient Express, 180 Orientales, Les (Hugo), 182 Orientalism, 21, 27, 141, 173–91; 20th century, 193–200 Osman I, 208 Osman II, 118, 208
Osman III, 209 Ottoman Empire, 11, 13, 24, 26, 29–30, 38, 41, 66–67, 95, 103, 105, 129, 137, 138, 140, 141, 145; map of, 29 outings and excursions, 9, 62–66, 141, 185
P Palace Guard (Gérôme), 104 “Palace of Fortune, The” (Jones), 27 Palace of Pleasure (Pointer), 112 Palace of the Unwanted Ones. See Old Palace palaces, 11, 100; plan of, 25 Pardoe, Julia, 81–82, 86, 173, 185 Paris, 176–77, 179 pasha(s), 9, 109, 114, 125, 138, 176 patriarchy, 17, 18 pattens (stilted shoes), 84–85 Peking. See Forbidden City Penzer, A. M., 84 perfumes, 83, 84, 87, 193 Persephone, 18 Persia, 13, 49, 64, 128 Persian Letters (Montesquieu), 37, 134, 177, 182 Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Meccah (Burton), 22 Poiret, Paul, 193 poetry, 32, 50–51, 114, 177, 182 politics, harem, 29, 38, 84–85, 95, 103–7, 108–9, 114–18, 138–41 polyandry, 20, 202 polygamy, 18, 20–21, 24, 153–55, 156, 157, 191, 200–3, 205–6 pools, 48–49. See also baths Pope, Alexander, 178–79 p*rnography, 202 prayer, 51–52, 110, 169 Preziosi, Amadeo Count, 62, 65, 180, 185–86 prince(s), 28, 29, 35–36, 37, 38, 48, 105, 117 princess sultanas, 48, 108–10 Promenade of the Harem (Passini), 46 puberty, 36, 77, 108, 109, 131, 132, 134, 146, 153 purdah, 13
Q Queen Elizabeth and the Levant Company (Rosedale), 37 Queen of Sheba, 127 Qur’an, 20, 33, 39, 50, 83, 109, 150, 152, 168, 169
R
Racine, 177 Reception, The (Lewis), 27 Redman, B. R., 173 Red Sultana, The (Bakst), 35 Reign of Women, 106–7, 116, 121, 140, 208 Richards, John, 137 Rimsky-Korsakoff, Nikolai Andreevich, 177 Risale-i Taberdariye fi Ahzal-i Ağa’yi Darüssade, 134 rituals, in Grand Harem, 84, 95, 97 Rodin, Auguste, 188, 190 Rogier, Camille, 100 romance, 147–48 Romantics, 182–83. See also Orientalism Rosedale, H. G., 37 Rousseau, Henri, 190 Roxalena Sultana (Hürrem Sultana), 28, 105, 112, 113–18, 208; portrait of, 113 Royal Harem. See Harem, Grand Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (Dulac), 22, 23, 144 Rüstem (author’s great-uncle), 151, 159 Rycaut, Sir Paul, 33, 132
S Saadabad (Chelebi), 78 Saqqaf, Attuya, 155 Sargent, John Singer, 84 Saudi Arabia, 200 Saz, Leyla, 64, 93, 100, 161 sazende (female musicians), 56, 59 Scheherazade (Diaghilev), 34, 35, 193 Scheherazade (Dulac), 175 Scheherazade (Rimsky-Korsakoff), 177 Scott, Joseph, 202 Second View of the Bosphorous (Melling), 47 Secret des desenchantées, Le (Helys), 190 Selâmlik, 36, 161, 162 Selim I, 103, 208 Selim II, 38, 106, 117, 118, 208 Selim III, 42, 56, 123, 209 Semiramis, 127, 202 Seraglio, Grand (Topkapi Palace), 11, 13, 24, 24, 27–29, 30, 39, 53, 83, 100–111, 116, 118, 137, 138, 139, 191, 206; plan of, 25 Seraglio of the Grand Signor (Bon), 138 Seraglio Point, 26–27, 28 Seven Fountains, The (Jones), 71 Sevim (author’s cousin), 12
Seyahatname (Chelebi), 93 Seydi Bey, Ali, 140 Shahriar, Sultan, 174 Sharaawi, Huda, 155 shopping, 61–62. See also outings and excursions Siemiradski, Henri, 61 Siyavuşgil, Sabri Esat, 57 slave markets, 21–22, 33, 128–29, 130 slaves: acquisition of, 30; female, 21–22, 33, 41, 48, 49, 50, 83, 178; origins of, 18 Solomon, Dorothy Allred, 200 “Song of Death, The” (Hatibullah), 50 Song of the Slave, The (Siemiradski), 61 songs, 55–57, 129, 132, 139 Souvenirs et paysages d’Orient (Du Camp), 22 spices, 54, 193 Stent, Carter, 131, 137 Structure du serail (Grosrichard), 105 Süleyman the Magnificent (Süleyman I), 103, 105, 106, 110, 112, 113–17, 208 Süleyman II, 38, 209 Süleymaniye (mosque of Süleyman I), 113, 114, 117 Sultan and His Subjects (Davey), 112 sultanas, 33–36, 41–42, 103–23, 138, 176 sultans, 11, 26, 33, 36, 39, 44–46, 47, 53, 54, 55, 56, 58, 103, 106, 107, 138, 140, 190, 193 superstition and charms, 157–58 Sweet Waters of Asia, 62, 64, 65, 66, 76, 185 Sweet Waters of Europe, 62, 64, 65, 66, 76 Sweet Waters of Europe, The (Preziosi), 65
T Tableau général de l’empire Ottoman (D’Ohsson), 93 Tableaux de la vie arabe (Dinet), 169 Tamba of Banaras, King, 13 Tazi, Nadia, 152 Terrace of the Seraglio (Gérôme), 48 Teşrifat ve Teşkilatimiz (Our Ceremony and Organization; Bey), 140 Thackeray, William Makepeace, 181 Theodora, 103, 208 Thevenot, Jean, 85 Thief of Bagdad, 199 Thousand and One Nights, The (Dulac), 175 Topkapi Palace, 11, 24, 27, 28, 32; plan of, 25. See also Seraglio travel. See Orientalism Travels (Harvey), 83 Travels into the Levant (Thevenot), 85 Trouillebert, Paul-Desiré, 96
Tulip Era, 110 tulipomania, 66 turban, 66, 169, 176 Turhan Sultana, 48–49, 106, 120, 121, 177, 208 Turkey, 9, 11, 13, 24, 95, 152, 153, 154, 185, 190, 200 Turkey Today (Ellison), 67–69, 153 Turkish Bath, The (Ingres), 89 turkish coffee, 97–98, 147 Turkish Embassy Letters (Montagu), 178
U uchuncu kadin (third wife), 103 United States, 11, 198–206
V Vaka, Demetra, 83, 153 Valide Sultana, 24, 28, 30, 33, 34–36, 55, 63, 81, 83, 93, 94, 100, 107, 110, 117, 140, 145 Vanmour, A. B., 179, 180 veil (yashmak), 9, 20, 67, 76, 185, 191, 206; significance of, 77–79 Venice, 106 Verdi, Guiseppe, 180 Versailles, 177 Viaud, Julien. See Loti, Pierre Views of Constantinople and the Bosphorous (Melling), 43, 47 Villeneuve, Marquis de, 110 virginity, 49, 53, 135, 150 Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet), 177, 179 von Moltke, Baron Helmut, 109 Voyage en Orient (Nerval), 21, 79, 127, 182
W walls, harem, 41–44 Walpole, Horace, 175 weddings, 9, 84, 103, 108–9, 115, 140, 149–50; dress, 70. See also marriage Western culture, influenced by East. See Orientalism White Slave, The (Lecomte de Nouy), 41 widows, 109, 110, 186 Wilder Shores of Love, The (Blanch), 56–57 witches (jadis), 157, 158 wives, 20, 21, 37, 53, 103, 105, 135, 137, 145, 149, 150, 152–57, 200–203, 205–6. See also polygamy women, roles of, 13, 18, 20, 28, 77, 78, 83, 84, 89–90, 109, 115, 128, 129, 145–47, 150–51, 153, 154, 178–79, 188–89, 200–206 Women in the Imperial Harem (Rogier), 100 Women of Algiers in Their Room (Delacroix), 180
Women’s Bath (Enderuni), 86 Women’s Public Baths (D’Ohsson), 82
X Xenophon, 128
Y yashmak (veil), 76–79, 77 Yellow Sultana (Bakst), 121 Yildiz Palace (Palace of the Stars), 53 Young, Sir George, 115
Z Zadig (Voltaire), 177 Zanan-Name (Levni), 37, 86, 111
Picture Credits The photographers and sources of photographic material other than those indicated in the captions are as follows: Aurora Art Publishers, Leningrad: pages 34, 35 © José Luiz, used under a Creation Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license: page 28 The Fine Art Society, London: pages 22, 31 (bottom), 102, 121 Kyburg Limited, London: page 65 (top) Portal Publications, Corte Madera, California: page 195 (left) © artorusrex, used under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license: page 58 (top) The University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis (reprinted from The Colonial Harem by Malek Alloula): page 154
Front cover: Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, La Grande Odalisque. For the original edition Editor: Alan Axelrod Designer: Renée Khatami Picture editor: Elizabeth Peyton Production editor: Amy Handy Production supervisor: Hope Koturo For the 25th Anniversary Edition Editor: David Fabricant Copy editor: Ashley Benning Cover design: Misha Beletsky Production manager: Louise Kurtz Composition: North Market Street Graphics Copyright © 1989, 2014 Alev Lytle Croutier. All rights reserved under international copyright conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Inquiries should be addressed to Abbeville Press, 137 Varick Street, New York, NY 10013 or e-mailed to [emailprotected]. First digital edition: November 2014 ISBN 978-0-7892-6054-3 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data for the print edition of this book is available upon request. For library sales or other inquiries, please call 1-800-ARTBOOK or e-mail [emailprotected]. Visit Abbeville Press online at www.abbeville.com. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter. To subscribe to our monthly e-newsletter, click here.
