Sex in the City: Istanbul 1923

A cheerful collection of Turkish erotica, translated by Burcu Karahan, offers insights into early 20th-century sexuality in Istanbul.

By Kaya GençFebruary 17, 2026

• Gender & Sexuality

• Fiction

ON NOVEMBER 17, 1922, Mehmed VI Vahideddin, the last sultan of the Ottoman Empire, boarded the British battleship HMS Malaya and fled Istanbul in the early morning hours, for good. That fall, the Turkish National Assembly declared that “the Ottoman Empire, with its autocratic system, has altogether collapsed.” The Islamic caliphate and the sultanate were abolished. In October 1923, a new republican parliament, led by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, established the Republic of Turkey and formed a secular government. Around the same time, in 1923, Amedi, a small publishing house in Istanbul, began issuing One Thousand and One Kisses, a stylish weekly magazine of erotica.

Every Monday, readers in Istanbul, shocked by the latest developments in their city, could seek refuge in these tales about fancy shoes, small penises, low-cut dresses, and cuckolded men. In each of the magazine’s lavishly produced issues, between three and five stories were spread over 24 pages. Risqué cartoons accompanied suggestive texts. Both the stories and the cartoons remained anonymous.

Now available in English for the first time, this cheerful collection of erotica offers insights into early 20th-century sexuality in Istanbul. This lighthearted series, according to the compendium’s preface by translator Burcu Karahan, “invited readers, especially women readers, to imagine alternative ways of being, not dictated by patriarchy or propriety but shaped by pleasure, humor, and freedom.” The book’s subtitle embodies their charm: “The Most Joyous and Flirtatious Stories.”

“How Can You Tell?”—the second story in the volume—depicts the adventures of Canan Hanım, who, “like all married women,” looks for love and pleasure outside her marriage. Canan rendezvouses with her lover initially in public spaces; gradually, however, she begins meeting him at home. “This change was driven not by debauchery, but rather her laziness.” Strolls to the lover’s house are delightful in the spring when “warm, sensual air envelopes one in blissful languor”; in winter, it’s a different story. Home delivery makes casual sex so much easier.

As in this tale, many of the 65 stories in One Thousand and One Kisses offer the points of view of women who seek maximum satisfaction with minimal labor and without the burden of traditional obligations. Canan doesn’t want to return home in the night rain, but nor does she want to give up on love. She is also afraid to make her husband, “an extremely strong and exceptionally jealous gentleman,” suspicious. But one day, as her lover removes his suspenders in haste, a button falls on the ground. Later, the husband picks it up, noticing the name of a tailor he doesn’t recognize. Canan’s solution is to throw the responsibility onto Anjel, her maid. “Yes, Monsieur, my fiancé visited yesterday,” Anjel dutifully reports. “He must have dropped it.” In another instance, the husband finds a cigarette holder, and Anjel, heeding the warning, rescues her mistress again: “Yes, my fiancé must have left it.” When Canan Hanım’s belly begins to swell, however, the situation becomes more complicated.

Stories continue in this manner, detailing how women in early 20th-century Istanbul led lives devoted to pleasure and fulfillment despite societal pressures. The anonymous author(s) refrain from scolding women, most of whom live in apartments in Pera (today’s Beyoğlu), in Istanbul’s European quarter, for doing whatever they please. Residing in Pera allows these women—students, wives, dreamy daughters—to meet men at parties, train stations, and shoe stores. They have no problem articulating their sexual desires, and they enter into seduction scenarios freely.

Take Seher, a woman suddenly widowed by a tram accident. The narrator’s tone in “What Happened to Poor Seher” is conversational, asking the reader, “Isn’t that a terrible thing?” But the reader can guess how widowhood might boost Seher’s sexual gratification. The question is whether she can find a capable partner. Among the candidates is a doctor who examines her heart. As the doctor lays his head against Seher’s breast—“pressing against the vibrant, fiery spheres of her chest, listening to her heart, each beat a cry of love and lust”—she feels frantic tremors throughout her body and nearly faints. Sadly, the doctor claims impotence. “I have tested myself, especially now, as I listened to your heart, with your exquisite smell and the touch of your warm body. […] Yet I feel not a single stir within myself,” he mumbles. Had they only met five years ago …

Men continually disappoint sexually active, demanding, restless women in these tales: they’re emotionally unavailable, hopelessly immature, and laughably listless. “The Thirty-Fourth” introduces Senai Bey, a “magnificent cuckold” who looks at his wife, Şadiye, and thinks: “Only I have sniffed these breasts, only I have kissed these feet, only I have entered this temple of love.” This belief crumbles after his best friend, Asaf Şevki, sleeps with her. To exact revenge, Senai decides to “strike him with the same blow” and finds a third man to sleep with his wife: a young officer acquainted with both Senai and Şevki Beys. Afterward, Senai “eagerly and joyfully” runs to Şevki’s house to deliver the news. Şevki lashes out in anger, but since the officer has also tasted Şadiye’s lips, Senai Bey’s jealousy fails to diminish. He needs a fourth man to exact a fresh revenge. A poet, a merchant, an actor, a naval officer, a policeman, and more continue his cycle of cuckoldry.

“The Mother-in-Law’s Sacrifice,” the most hilarious of these tales, concerns a man’s troubled relationship with his wife’s mother. As the man and his wife return from the movies, their cab collides with a tram, shattering the windows and scarring the wife’s face. A doctor proposes a solution: “If skin is taken from one part of the body and grafted there, it’s possible for your cheeks to return to their former state.” Where will they take the skin from? If they take it from the arm or back, she won’t be able to wear low-cut dresses. The buttocks then? The mother rejects the idea: “No, my daughter! At your age, that part of your body is still necessary.” But at her own age, the mother says, it doesn’t matter, and she asks the doctor to cut the skin from her body to graft onto her daughter’s cheeks. This serves another purpose for the matriarch, who fights her son-in-law throughout the tale: “I did this so that every time you kiss your wife, it will be as if you’re kissing my ass …”

These vivid glimpses of 1920s Istanbul are invaluable not only to historians but also to all curious readers, depicting the mores and fashions of a bygone age, much as Sex and the City (1998–2004) did with turn-of-the-millennium New York City. There is pleasure in watching a gentleman take his wife to Lake Çekmece for an outing so that she can make out with another guy. I was also intrigued by Feridun, a young playboy in “Female Geography,” who amuses crowds at parties by drawing silly parallels between female bodies and geographical formations. A huge bullshitter, Feridun manages to create “waves of rapture” in his female audience when he considers a beautiful woman’s head: “Envision her reclining, exhaling cigarette smoke towards the ceiling. […] Does it not bear resemblance to the country of France?” That woman’s nose, he claims, represents the cape of Finistère, “the lines, shapes, proportions, symmetry—remarkably similar.” The sleazy man goes on to describe “the capes, the peninsulas, the deltas and the harbors of a woman’s body,” reaching “the most esteemed treasure of the female form, those little spheres like twin volcanic peaks …”

One story about a certain Hasip Bey concerns the man’s embarrassingly small endowment. Semra, the girl Hasip chases, “look[s] at the young man’s naked body with a compassionate gaze and, enunciating every single syllable in a tone of sorrow, murmured, ‘Oh my God, what a disappointment, what a disappointment!’” Another tale centers on Hüseyin Hüsnü, who is trailing Münevver, a flirtatious, spirited blonde. Hüseyin asks a popular fortune teller to tailor Münevver’s fortune according to his wishes. The fortune teller claims to see a “young man with dark eyebrows and dark eyes, and a mole on his right cheek,” who will do her a great favor. When the man impregnates the girl and vanishes, she revisits the fortune teller. Hadn’t she claimed that the girl’s life would “expand” if she slept with him? The fortune teller points to Münevver’s belly and says, “See, you have expanded, my dear girl. What more do you want?”

In her preface, Karahan applauds the joyous and flirtatious nature of these stories, with their “witty one-liners, subtle sensual puns, flirtatious lovers, and titillating plot twists.” The book’s title nods to One Thousand and One Nights, translated into Ottoman Turkish by the poet Abdi in 1429 and “woven into the literary imagination of the masses.”

Originally printed in the Perso-Arabic script in 1923–24, these flirty stories were little read in the decades that followed their publication. One culprit was the new republic’s “alphabet revolution” in 1928, which replaced the Ottoman script with the Latin alphabet. This made the series vanish from circulation and become inaccessible to new readers. “It was quietly omitted from library catalogs and pushed into forgotten corners, perhaps deliberately, obscured by a lingering discomfort over its perceived obscenity,” Karahan notes.

But as Turkophiles will know, Turkish literature has rich reserves of homoeroticism and transgressive sexual content. Just look at the famed Ottoman divan poems in which poets, under vivid pseudonyms, chase male beauties in gardens imbued with sexual symbolism. The best book on this subject, Walter G. Andrews and Mehmet Kalpaklı’s The Age of Beloveds: Love and the Beloved in Early-Modern Ottoman and European Culture and Society (2005), explores this fine lyric tradition that bloomed in the 16th century. But in the 19th century, with the emergence of print culture, heteronormativity took hold of Ottoman culture, dictating “a near-Victorian moral code.” Heterosexual sex within marriage became the socially acceptable norm.

Female behavior, meanwhile, was reduced to a binary: virtuous and chaste or seductive and manipulative. The trope of the “loose woman” appeared in Ahmet Mithat Efendi’s Felâtun Bey and Râkim Efendi (1875) and Halit Ziya Uşaklıgil’s Aşk-ı Memnu (“Forbidden Love,” 1900), among other classics that are taught in Turkish schools today. Karahan points to Mehmet Rauf’s anonymously published The Story of a Lily (1910) as a foundational text for a different type of Ottoman erotica. Rauf’s novel, writes Karahan, “not only pioneered the genre but also defined its aesthetic boundaries, setting both the moral and, more significantly, legal limits for those who followed.” Rauf was sentenced to nine months in prison and dismissed from the military for writing The Story of a Lily. (Had he lived in Erdoğan’s Turkey, a similar fate would’ve probably ensued.) Yet The Story of a Lily left a fruitful legacy and led to a renaissance of Ottoman erotica between 1910 and 1920, with titles such as “Horny,” “Pregnancy of a Virgin,” “Wedding Night: The Lovemaking of a Eunuch,” “My Husband’s Husband,” and “The Woman with Two Husbands” amusing readers in Istanbul.

By and large, One Thousand and One Kisses shares the cruelty of works like The Decameron, The Canterbury Tales, and One Thousand and One Nights. In these stories, human beings are egotistic, worship pleasure, and deceive each other when necessary. Yet we also feel for these poor men and women. Take Recep, a “useless fool” who can’t even be unfaithful to his wife Şekibe. Climbing the hill toward Pera to prove he can, he shivers and coughs in the bitter cold, failing to find “even a shadow of a woman.” Still, he tells Şekibe that he has cheated. “Oh, come on, you fool! Stop talking nonsense and just come to bed already,” she shouts. Recep undresses and gets into bed, whereupon Şekibe asks him to demonstrate how he cheated on her. Seeing his erection, she triumphantly boasts, “Would you be like this if you had really cheated?”

The sex worker in “Income Tax Declaration” ponders how much income she should declare on the form. “Half a dozen of her lovers had given her around 7,200 lira in total, roughly a hundred per month each. But was that profit, or income?” Another story, set in “a Şişli salon, during a five o’clock tea,” offers us a Whartonesque tableau: “The salon was half-shrouded in the pale darkness typical of winter evenings, and the guests were clustered in small groups, engaged in lively conversation, laughing and exchanging juicy morsels of gossip.”

One Thousand and One Kisses reminds us how women in Istanbul, at least those belonging to certain social classes, weren’t repressed, subjugated figures, as the Orientalist imaginary portrayed them. Nor were they “liberated” by modernity or Westernizing reforms. They had agency; they were autonomous. In Erdoğan’s Turkey, women’s sexual rights are “curtailed” and “turned into political battlegrounds,” as Karahan notes, and a “work that openly and joyfully centers female pleasure, agency, and autonomy feels especially relevant.” Pushing the boundaries of gender within the heteronormative framework of Turkish society, these stories from a century ago remind us of the heterodox legacy of Turkish culture, and an independent, rebellious, self-sufficient spirit that continues to scare the men who helm Turkey’s repressive regime.