Secrets of the Harem

Ottoman sultans ruled an empire from Baghdad to Vienna for most of four centuries, but their personal lives back home in Constantinople's Great Harem of Topkapi were mainly a matter of bed and bored. One 17th-century sultan, aptly called Ibrahim the Mad, became so bored that he spent much of his time tossing gold coins to the fish in the Bosporus alongside the Topkapi Palace. One day, harem-scare-em Ibrahim ordered his 1,001 concubines trussed, weighted and tossed into the sea-and, of course, replaced. But between fits of madness, Ibrahim and the 24 other sultans who occupied Topkapi until the 1850s turned the palace into a gem of art and architecture.

This week, after 32 years of restoration, a third of the 400 rooms of the Great Harem, which in the past were rarely seen by any but sultans, concubines and eunuchs, are to be opened as a tourist attraction. The restoration, a labor of love that also serves the political purpose of showing modern Turks the decadence of the old regime, is to continue indefinitely.

In the Eye. The palace houses the famed Topkapi jewels, long a must for tourists in present-day Istanbul, but the principal sight will be the intricate maze of grandly decorated apartments. They include the gilded, rococo Hall of the Sultan, where reigning monarchs reclined on a brocaded couch to watch dancing girls perform. Near by are the royal baths, which featured marble floors, golden faucets and slave girls to assist the sultan in his bath. Then there are the gilded and inlaid bedchambers.

The sultans were understandably fin, icky about their companions. Concubines to whom they tossed a preliminary handkerchief of approval were known as gozde, literally "in the eye." The handful of gdzde who reached the canopied royal bed by way of secret passages became ikbal, or "bedded."

In the seraglio, however, sex was sometimes secondary to intrigue, and the queen mothers and chief eunuchs often ruled the roost as much as the rooster. Too much ikbal resulted in too many male heirs eligible to succeed as sultan. Aggressive siblings-or their mothers-cut down the rival candidates neatly. As soon as he was named sultan in 1595, for example, Mohammed III murdered 19 half brothers and, to be certain of obliterating all possible competition, also killed seven of his father's concubines who happened to be pregnant at the moment. This was extreme even by Topkapi ground rules.

Mohammed's successor, Ahmed I, added a new network of rooms. These became known as the Apartments of the Princes or, familiarly, the Cage. There, behind fences, male children were able to grow to manhood and even old age safe from almost any danger-or knowledge of the outside world. On occasion, an aggressive mother still managed to send an executioner-traditionally a deaf-mute eunuch-into the Cage to strangle her son's rivals.

The Great Harem was abandoned in 1909 when one of the last of the Ottoman sultans, Abdul Hamid, was exiled to Salonika with a few of his favorites; 370 concubines, old or second-rate by the Sultan's standards, and 127 eunuchs were set free. Now the Turkish Ministry of Culture is planning to make Topkapi Palace the focus of a "cultural revolution" featuring concerts, poetry recitals, ballet and re-enactments by the National Theater of the tragedy of Ibrahim the Mad.

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