The History of Sex: Istanbul -- How to Make a Eunuch -- (Chap. II, Pt. 6)

Obviously, part of the problem is that the seraglio has seen better centuries.

A labyrinth of more than four hundred rooms, less than a tenth of the chambers have been restored and opened to the public.

And as undeniably beautiful as they are, even these are faded and often shabby, with a musty smell that makes you wonder if the Harem was actually seedy rather than sexy.

To be fair, no one knows exactly what it was like to live behind the closed doors of the Harem: by definition, the word means 'private' or 'forbidden.'

However, key events are known—you're just not going to find out about them on the tour.

THE DEMISE OF SELIM THE SOT

For example, although the sultan's bath is impressive, it would be even more interesting to hear about Selim II (aka 'The Sot'), who died after slipping while chasing girls around his hamam.

Like virtually all the Ottoman rulers, Selim was the son of a concubine himself.

His mother was a redheaded Slav who'd out-schemed the competition to convince Suleiman the Magnificent—the longest-ruling sultan—to break with tradition and marry her around 1520, at the peak of Ottoman power.

Roxelana clawed her way up from being a common concubine

Up until then, the Ottomans had considered the sultan to be so exalted that no woman was worthy of being his wife.

However, Hürrem—known in the West as Roxelana—established the so-called 'Reign of Women' with its powerbase here in the Harem of the newly completed Topkapi Palace.

Her power grab also marked the slow beginning of the end for the Ottoman Empire.

Now, if you're a man, you may be thinking: typical—put a woman in charge, and all hell breaks loose.

But that wouldn't be fair: plenty of other factors brought down the sultans. As a hothouse of lust, greed, murder and corruption, though, the Harem was the empire's epicenter of dysfunction.

Consider who ran the place: castrated slaves who came in two colors—black and white—and three mutilated varieties. As nouveau-riche nomads, the Ottomans had picked up a lot of bad habits from the Christian Byzantines, including a fondness for eunuchs, who were outsourced from a Coptic monastery in Egypt.

MOLTEN CHEESE

For full-frontal castration, a slave boy would be bound to a chair, his penis and testicles tied with a cord and then razored off.

The wound was subsequently cauterized with a hot iron, boiling oil or melted wax (The Arabian Nights also mentions molten cheese), and the castrator would stick a nail in the boy's urethra to make sure it didn't get clogged up.

In some cases, the boys were buried standing up in sand and deprived of water until they stopped bleeding.

Not surprisingly, only a third survived this ordeal, and most of them suffered from incontinence for the rest of their lives: inside their fine robes, Ottoman eunuchs carried silver quills that served as catheters.

Wotchyou lookin' at?
The Guard of the Harem by Jean-Leon Gerome