The Sultan's Harem: Life was not glamorous at all

The harem in Topkapi Palace holds a special place in the popular imagination, bringing to mind images of a secret world filled with wanton excess. I think what we tend to think of is sort of things that are informed by 19th century artists who kind of dreamt of what life might be like in the harem and they came back with these ideas of, you know, lascivious women reclining, odalisques reclining by the pool and naked women and so on, all this kind of, you know, crazy, fantastic, sort of sexy place. But the truth about the harem is anything but sexy. It's actually quite a severe environment and, you know, I often compare it to, it's like a kind of really tough girls' boarding school. That was all incredibly hierarchical and it was all graded and they moved up the, you know, up the sort of hierarchy and ultimately the women he slept with were chosen for him by his mother. And obviously they'd be brought in, they would convert to Islam and then they would be brought up as Ottoman gentlewomen and they would go through a whole process of education, you know, deportment, how to speak properly. They would have simple tasks, they'd have jobs to do, they might look after the sherbet kit or they might look after the coffee utensils the sultan might use. They might fold his underwear, you know, it was that kind of thing. They might wash his clothes. So they got these jobs, then they learned how to speak, they learned how to carry themselves, at which point they might either be chosen to sleep with the sultan or more likely and far more likely they might never even see the sultan. And of course, even if later on in life they left the palace and they left it either to marry Apache or when the sultan died, the women who survived him would leave this palace and go off to something called the old palace. And that was a pretty grim fate too, because after that there was nothing that's going to happen to them, nothing fun.