The names of the Beyoğlu shops owned by the Ottoman Jewish
citizen Avram in 1903 Istanbul were likely not “Indecent Photographs” or
“Extremely Lewd Pictures” for two reasons. First, Avram probably lacked the Ottoman bureaucrat’s vast
lexicon of euphemisms for pornography. Second, advertising in this form – even on Zürafa Sokak, an area
notorious then and now for catering to Istanbul’s coarser needs – would have
aroused interest of an undesirable and unprofitable kind.
Whatever the name of Avram’s business establishments, his commercial
intercourse caught the attention of the Ottoman Interior Ministry in February
of that year for peddling images “disturbing of decency” (muhill-i adab) according to a report by the Domestic Publications Director (matbuat-ı dahiliye müdürü). With
the goal of preventing the sale of what they called “pictures contrary to decency”
(mugayir-i adab resimler),
investigators searched his properties and turned up up “close to 400 different
types of very crude and indecent photographs” (dört yüze karib muhtelif şekillerde gayet müstehcen ve muhill-i adab fotoğraflar).
Upon interrogation, Avram snitched. He gave the investigators the names of
his suppliers and before long, the team found itself headed to two Greek-owned
photography shops, one in Fener associated with a man called Yorgi and the other
on Galata Pier connected to a certain Sofyanos. They also paid a visit to a warehouse of Yorgi’s in Tatavla,
formerly home (as Küçük Atina or Little Athens) to the heart of Istanbul’s Greek community,
now home (as Kurtuluş) to a polyglot mix of Turks, Kurds, Armenians, Nigerians,
Senegalese, Roma, Iraqis, Syrians, American graduate students, and the most
lonely Atatürk statue you’ve ever seen.
 |
| Postcard of Greek Soldiers, click for source |
In a reminder of the at once contentious and accommodating
relations between the state and foreigners and minorities in the late Ottoman
period, an official with the Rum community accompanied the investigators for
part of the trip. But all of the
places yielded limited opportunities for the bureaucratic euphemistic pyrotechnics. As far as connections to the Beyoğlu
obscenity scene, the Ottoman vice squad seems to have found nothing in Tatavla,
a few photographs in Fener, and all of two photographs in Galata.
They did, however, discover other materials disturbing in a
different and perhaps more subversive way than Avram’s Zürafa Sokak smut. Investigators noted that both Yorgi and
Sofyanos possessed photographs of the Evzones, a group of elite Greek soldiers
known today for their ceremonial skirts. Moreover Sofyanos also had “two big Turkish-language protest
documents” as well as French-language materials. All were confiscated.
The path from porn to protest does not lack for irony. The images of the Greek soldiers stood
as a separatist symbol for the late Ottoman Interior Ministry, an image of the
Greek forces that had severed ties with Istanbul. But at the same time the presence of these photos that could plausibly stoke the separatist imagination in Istanbul entirely relied on real
commercial links between members of the Rum community and Ottoman citizens,
even if they were of an indecent kind.
Source: BOA, DH-MKT 652/24 (14 Za 1320)
No comments:
Post a Comment