missionary kidnapped by Macedonian revolutionaries in 1901.33 This kernel
of truth did not, however, prevent the author from taking amusing liberties in
recounting the story: we learn, for example, that Miss Marble eventually comes to
find rape at the hands of her captors more than tolerable, provided that her consent
is encouraged each time by a sound whipping! Another precedent, clearly fictional
this time, would seem to be the well-known anonymous classic The Lustful Turk
(1828), which ends with the castration of Ali, the Dey of Algiers, by an abducted
Greek maiden. (It is worth noting that The Lustful Turk was published at the
height of philhellenic passion.) If the symbolism behind the castration of “the
Turk” is obviously the emasculation of the Ottoman Empire, this simultaneously
recasts the political reality of Ottoman rule over the Balkans as a case of sexual
domination.
All in all, Œil pour œil is largely built upon long-standing sexualized
stereotypes of the Orient, as is made evident by the narrator’s statement that “In
Constantinople one wants pleasure just as in Rome one demands saintliness”
(p. 179). What makes this book of interest in the present context, however, is
precisely the imbrication of nationalism and sexuality that it harbors. Let me give
just a couple of examples; the first is a dialogue between the owner of the brothel
and Ali Pesheven:
— Do you not get bored during campaigns?
— Not at all! said the aga indifferently.
— There are beautiful girls in Macedonia, eh?
— But of course! Not bad!
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291
— I know something about that. There are here, in the house, ravishing
Bulgarians. But they arrive somewhat faded… What do you do with the
virgins whose fathers and brothers you have killed?
— What a question! laughed the soldier, We rape them!
— And then?
— What do you mean, and then? What the devil do you want us to do with
a girl who has just been raped, sometimes by ten guys who don’t much
stand on ceremony, so that the fourth or fifth finds nothing more than a
motionless, unconscious woman to assuage his mad hunger for love, and
sometimes even a dead one, for women often succumb to those successive
rapes. (pp. 170–1)
The second passage concerns Thodra’s reflections:
Sadists, she had seen a long time ago; without knowing the term, she knew
the thing. Those Albanians,33 those başıbozuk s, those damned Turks who
after massacring and pillaging would rush onto Macedonian virgins, whom
they forced to undergo infamous carresses among the roaring flames, in
the glow of the fire, experiencing joy only by the imposition of suffering,
arousing themselves by needless brutality, by violence, those people were
sadists. (p. 220)
In short, the point can be made, I think, that this book blurs the line between
politics and pornography. Some might argue that the political content consists of
nothing more than a backdrop whose opportunistic purpose is to make the story
more plausible and therefore sexually more exciting, but I think that would be
oversimplifying things. Besides, even if that were the author’s sole intent, the fact
remains that readers inevitably brought their own cultural and political baggage to
their readings of the text, and took from it lessons that they could not fail to put to
use the next time they picked up a newspaper or engaged in a casual conversation
on the state of the world.
A related work, this one visual, is an amazing portfolio of twelve large
lithographs entitled Balkangreuel (1909), printed by the well-known Viennese
publisher of erotica C.W. Stern. The name on the portfolio, Archibald Smith, is
once again a pseudonym—the prints were the work of the gifted book illustrator
Gottfried Sieben (1856–1918). Figure 10.1 features one of these prints, Figure
10.6 another. The latter contains a scene that many Europeans would have found
particularly odious: four Turkish soldiers raping four young maidens inside an
Orthodox church, as the priest is forced to watch. (Recall the prominence of
Haghia Sophia in the rape stories that accompanied the Ottoman conquest of
Constantinople.) As it happens, there is a chapter in Œil pour œil entitled L’orgie
cruelle dans l’église whose subject is fairly similar, except that some of the
victims in that case are boys. (Like many such books, Œil pour œil makes use
of homophobia to accrue political capital; Thodra is abducted by a Kurd who
mistakes her for a young man!) Villiot writes:
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Figure 10.6. Gottfried Sieben, lithograph. Archibald Smith [pseud.], Balkangreuel,
(Vienna: Gesellschaft österreichischer Bibliophilen [i.e. C.W. Stern], 1909).
Little boys too had been decapitated by the sword. Only a few, among the
most beautiful, had been spared. The soldiers had pushed them into the
church, where they were keeping the young girls under guard.
And it was there that the horde of savages, satiated with blood and pillage
and now coveting other joys, were making their way.
They deliberately entered the temple of the Lord… The captives,
their hands tied behind their backs, cried silently, but the little boys were
screaming.
The Kurds were strolling gravely. When they found a girl or a child to
their liking, they grabbed the victim at random, by the neck, a shoulder, an
arm, and pulled him or her toward themselves. (pp. 69–70)
Indeed, there are enough similarities between the two works to make it at least
likely that Sieben was inspired by Villiot—although to be perfectly frank, it would
not take too much imagination to choreograph those scenes on one’s own!
Balkangreuel is part of a well-established tradition of artistic depictions of
war atrocities, and can be compared to numerous works published both before
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293
and after it—Jacques Callot’s Les misères et les mal-heurs de la guerre (1633),
Francisco Goya’s Los desastres de la Guerra (etched 1810–20, first published
1863), J.G. Domergue’s Le livre rouge des atrocités allemandes (1916), Frans
Masereel’s Remember! (1946). What distinguishes it from the others, however,
is that while sexuality is present in them all, Balkangreuel is unique in rendering
sexual violence as the very essence of war cruelty in Macedonia; and there can
be no doubt that this is intimately related to the “oriental” setting of the conflict.
The lithographs are accompanied by an Introduction signed Herbert Stone,
quite possibly yet another pseudonym (used in at least one other C.W. Stern
publication): only five pages long, this text invokes the stereotype of the Balkans
as a chaotic and bloody place in which “Serbs, Bulgarians, Turks, Albanians,
Greeks are all colorfully and chaotically mixed together like the glass platelets
in a kaleidoscope, only with the difference that no matter how much one turns
it round and round, no organized picture emerges. But a primary color always
shines through there: Blood!”3
5 The supposed predilection of the various ethnic
and religious groups for violence is described in broad generalizations, and then
the stage is set for the artwork to follow:
The pencil of the artist was daring as he drew the following pages. It did
not paint sweet, sultry love scenes for you, but rather acts of violence in
which the man throws himself onto the defenseless woman just like an
animal. Scenes in which the woman feels not desire but only pain and fury.
As she writhes in the arms of her brutal rapist, she thinks of murder and
revenge. The artist masterfully used his daring pencil to subdue or restrain
his medium. Daring, cruel, and inexorable, like the men he painted.
Therefore observe seriously and with empathy these pages, and place
your women in your hands as if a carpet under the feet, for the sake of their
sisters down there in Macedonia. (p. 7)
It is noteworthy that neither the Introduction, nor the pictures themselves
single out Turks as the sole perpetrators of sexual violence. From their distinctive
attire, it is possible to identify not only Ottoman soldiers and irregulars, as well
as Albanians, but also many Macedonian revolutionaries. In pirated editions of
these pictures, however, the situation was very different. For example, although
the booklet Balkan Cruelties (1916) by the pseudonymous Ophillia Pratt
retained the original title as well as all the pictures, the text itself is all about
the persecution of Armenians, and the villains are incontrovertibly Turks (and
Kurds). Boasting a Preface by James, Viscount Bryce—paraphrased most likely
without his permission from his The Treatment of Armenians in the Ottoman
Empire (1916)37—this curious publication consists of photographic reproductions
of the Sieben lithographs and twelve remarkably crude poems to go with them.
One reads, in part, as follows:
Oh ravished beauty, what a scene,
Was ever like in woodland green?
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With back to ground, hands bound to trees,
What chance to keep him off with knees?
The lustful Turk is at his best,
With beauty helpless and undressed.
When he shoved in his wicked bone,
It felt as hard to her as stone,
She struggled ‘till her arms were sore,
It helped the Turk enjoy her more,
Each move she made gave greater joy,
To him, for he could “Ride-em-boy.” (Poem 7)38
Another, the poem that accompanies the lithograph in Figure 10.1, includes the
following stanzas:
The town was sacked and set in flames,
With shout and shot and curse,
A drunken-bloody Turk is bad,
A lustful one is worse.
Full many a beauty young and frail,
Helped feed a wild man’s lust,
And many a simple virgin flower,
Was trampled in the dust. (Poem 11)
Another pirated version of Sieben’s illustrations was Eunuch a jiné obrazy
z Balkánu (1932), privately published in Prague in an edition of 100, with
accompanying text by “J.S.” Here, an entire little story (set at the beginning of
the fifteenth century!) was written around each picture—the eunuch of the title,
for example, is the priest in Figure 10.6, who was supposedly castrated by the
merciless Turks. The book appeared at the height of postwar pan-Slavism in
Czechoslovakia, and it is at the service of this ideology that it whips up gratuitous
anti-Turkish sentiment in a country that, after all, had never been occupied by the
Ottomans:
The poll tax and the one-tenth tax levied on crops were commonplace. To
them was added violence that went unpunished—torture and the rape of
women of radiant beauty, the ravishing of daughters in front of their mothers
and fathers, and the abuse of wives whose husbands had died fighting. Every
atrocity ending in orgies of debauched passions, as for instance happened
in Old Serbia, where bestialities were made worse by the fact that all of
Europe was silent, lacking the will to intervene… Turkish cruelty in the
Balkans caused rivers of blood and horrible sufferings for Christians.39
Since the uniforms of the Macedonian revolutionaries would have presumably
been recognizable to Czech readers, scenes depicting rape by Christian Slavs are
not simply passed off as the work of Turks; instead, they are cleverly explained
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in the accompanying stories as instances of justified retaliation for cruelties
perpetrated by Turks on fellow-Slavs!
Between pirated editions, postcards,40 and photographic reproductions,
including several in books on erotic art and literature, it is clear that the influence
of Gottfried Sieben’s illustrations in Balkangreuel was not limited to the reach
of the portfolio itself. Here I might mention that there is also a mysterious series
of watercolor illustrations that have been widely reproduced and are generally
attributed to Gottfried Sieben.41 These depict incidents of flogging in Turkey
and the Balkans, and may have been created to accompany Die Prügelzucht in
der Türkei und im Orient [1908], published under the pseudonym “M. Sadow”42
(sic). However, the few copies of this work that I have managed to trace are
unillustrated, and despite all my efforts I have been unable to determine whether
or not that set of images was ever published in its entirety—and if so, where.
Conclusion
A political cartoon published in a Czech paper in 1897, during the Cretan crisis,
shows Crete and Macedonia as two women imprisoned in one of İstanbul’s
legendary waterfront mansions [ yalı]; young men clad in Greek and Bulgarian
national attire have maneuvered their rowboats in front of the windows of the
house, and are preparing to set the two women free (Figure 10.7). In many ways,
this cartoon epitomizes the phenomenon that I have attempted to highlight here:
independence struggles were gendered and sexualized, and Ottoman rule was
represented as the sexual domination and subordination of women by men, thus
making it possible to mobilize centuries-old gender and sexual stereotypes in the
service of nationalist politics.
One of the key ingredients of the inter-ethnic and inter-confessional sexual
relationships used to represent national conflict in the Ottoman Balkans was
suffering. As Arthur Kleinman, Veena Das, and Margaret Lock have perceptively
pointed out,
Cultural representations of suffering—images, prototypical tales, metaphors,
models—can be (and frequently are) appropriated in the popular culture or
by particular social institutions for political and moral purposes. For this
reason, suffering has social use.43
Focusing on the social uses to which suffering is put by those who were personally
the victims of wartime atrocities, Arthur and Jean Kleinman have argued that the
memories of their violation, and the trauma stories that voice those memories,
“become the currency, the symbolic capital, with which they enter exchanges
for physical resources and achieve the status of political refugees.”44 What the
fictional texts and i
mages discussed in this essay did in their time was analogous,
but since they were for the most part not first-person victim testimonies, their
actual function differed somewhat. Through the sexual violence they described,
and the collective memories of violation they induced, these works helped nations
accrue political capital with which they entered into—so to speak—a global
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marketplace of military power characterized by imperial rivalries and jockeying
for influence and territory. The stories of sexual violation told and retold in
myriad poems, novels, plays, paintings, prints, and sculpture elicited political
support for national independence movements by establishing victim status and
thus demonstrating entitlement.
The problem with instrumentalizing sexual violence and rape in the service of
politics is that metaphors are never innocent. As Pettman writes,
[t]he metaphor of rape to represent national or state humiliation… confuses
the rapes of actual women with the outrage of political attack or defeat, and
in the process women’s pain and rights are appropriated into a masculinist
power politics. Eroticising the nation/country as a loved woman’s body leads
to associating sexual danger with boundary transgressions and boundary
defence… [P]olicing the boundaries too easily becomes the policing of
women’s bodies and movements.45
In other words, the deployment of sexual violence as a political metaphor
bolsters the protection racket that is chivalry: men extort the right to control
women in exchange for protecting them from other men. In a compelling
study of the British response to the so-called “Sepoy Mutiny” of 1857, Jenny
Sharpe noted that “the representation of rape violently appropriates English
women as ‘the sex.’ This appropriation takes place through an objectification
of the women as eroticized and ravaged bodies.” It is not difficult to imagine
the social implications of such discursive strategies: stories of rape “violently
reproduce gender roles in the demonstration that women’s bodies can be sexually
appropriated. In this regard, the meaning of rape cannot be disassociated from
its discursive production.”46 Stories that recount the rape of Balkan maidens by
“barbarous” Turks not only bolster racism, but they also reproduce gender by
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