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10
Christian Maidens, Turkish Ravishers:
The Sexualization of National Conflict
in the Late Ottoman Period
İrvin Cemil Schick
Nos vierges cette nuit, et nos têtes demain!
Victor Hugo, Les orientales
Writing critically about reports of wartime atrocities is always a perilous
undertaking. At best, one is liable to being labelled a revisionist; at worst, an
apologist. It is with this in mind that I begin the present essay by emphasizing
that it is not a work of historiography: my concern here is neither whether or not
horrific acts of sexual violence were perpetrated during the Balkan struggles for
independence from Ottoman rule, nor whether or not such acts were as systematic
and widespread as is often reported. Rather, this is a study in cultural theory and
textual analysis: it sets out to explore how accounts of violence against women
were produced, disseminated, and consumed within a pre-existing cultural matrix;
how they in turn both reproduced and reshaped that cultural matrix; and finally
how art and literature, and especially the non-ephemeral print medium, partook in
the codification and standardization of these accounts so that they could effectively
be used to political ends.
It is well enough known that Lord Byron, Victor Hugo, Eugène Delacroix,
and a host of other poets, writers, painters, and sculptors rallied to the cause of
philhellenism, investing it with fond hopes for the overthrow of centuries of
Turkish-“Asiatic” occupation and the restoration of a mythologized classical
European grandeur. That they are today part of the canon, however, does not
alter the fact that these distinguished artists were not above crass exploitation,
and that their works often had recourse to hackneyed clichés conflating “oriental
despotism” with “oriental sexuality.” Furthermore, the likes of Byron, Hugo, and
Delacroix are only the tip of the iceberg, and works of popular culture—including
some that combined politics and pornography in the most astonishing ways—
abounded, supporting not only the cause of Greek independence but of other
Ottoman Christians as well.
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Women in the ottoman Balkans
I focus here on a number of visual and literary artistic creations, some better
known than others, in the context of the production of a discourse within which the
geopolitical realities of the day could be encoded, and public opinion mobilized.
The point is not, of course, that acts of sexual violence did not occur before and
during national liberation struggles and imperial efforts to thwart them, but that
the trope of sexual violence provided a widely recognizable and politically useful
discursive tool by which these conflicts could be recast in a manner that made
excellent use of pre-existing ethnic, racial, gender, and sexual stereotypes.
Some of the material I use here would no doubt be classified as pornography.
My principal justification for using these works—which, it goes without saying,
only enjoyed limited circulation—is that to a dispassionate eye, there is no
qualitative difference between them and what might be considered “mainstream”
cultural products. Although books published “privately” and “for subscribers
only” could hardly be considered exemplars of mass media, I would argue that
any distinction between them and either “high” art or popular culture is first and
foremost a matter of degree, not of essence. Consider, for example, the three pairs
of images reproduced here (Figures 10.1–3), in each of which I have attempted
to juxtapose a mainstream item with an unabashedly erotic work. In at least one
case, Hiram Powers’ Greek Slave (1844) in Figure 10.2, the latter is evidently
derivative of the former; in the other two pairs, there is no evidence that one
work was directly inspired by the other, but it is clear that each pair was animated
by a common sentiment. Furthermore, to focus for a brief moment on Gottfried
Sieben’s Balkangreuel (1909) in Figure 10.1, it is noteworthy that although these
illustrations were originally published in a limited edition of 550, they were
subsequently pirated in English and Czech editions, not to mention reprinted as
widely available suites of postcards. In short, I would contend that the erotic
works discussed here can be considered distilled examples of a broader pattern
of sexualization of national conflict in the Ottoman Balkans—examples that,
precisely because they are taken to the logical extreme, are paradigmatic of the
mindset that I am setting out to explore.
War and the Sexualization of the Enemy
That there may well be a relationship between war (as the ultimate form of human
aggression) and sexuality (which is often prone to, or represented in terms of,
aggression) must have occurred to people throughout history. What is of greatest
interest to me here, however, is not the underlying mechanism—psychological or
sociological—that links war and sexuality, but rather the artistic representations
of that linkage, from the tale of Helen of Troy to the etchings of Jacques Callot
(1592–1635) and Francisco Goya (1746–1828).
Historically, the wartime acts said to have been committed by specific armies
were often explained in terms of the collective characteristics attributed to the
people constituting them—exemplifying, in the words of Dušan Bjelić and
Lucinda Cole, “the familiar tendency to respond to reports of war atrocities by
essentializing ethnic identity—who castrates, who buggers, who mutilates—and
schick, christian maidens, turkish ravishers
275
Figure 10.1. Top: Henri Charles Loeillot, “Jeune grecque sauvée de l’esclavage des Turcs.”
Lithograph. Combats pour l’indépendance grecque, No. 13. Bibliothèque nationale de
France. Bottom: Gottfried Sieben. Lithograph. Archibald Smith [pseud.], Balkangreuel
(Vienna: Gesellschaft �
�sterreichischer Bibliophilen [i.e. C.W. Stern], 1909).
276
Women in the ottoman Balkans
Figure 10.2. Left: Public viewing of Hiram Powers’ Greek Slave (1844). Engraving by
R. Thew. Cosmopolitan Art Journal, 1857. Right: Risqué photograph, c. 1925.
Private collection.
Figure 10.3. Left: “From Serbo-Turkish war scenes: Circassians caught abducting Bulgarian
maidens.” Leipziger illustrierte Zeitschrift, 1876. Right: “They advanced, their arms
shiveringly crossed over their chests, their back upright, their croup taut,” illustration by
Georges Topfer for a sado-masochistic setting of the Armenian deportations. B. Dagirian,
La troublante odyssée d’une caravane (Paris: Librairie Franco-Anglaise, [1930]).
schick, christian maidens, turkish ravishers
277
by countering one narrative with another.”1 Thus, for example, a book on the
Marquis de Sade published in 1901 by the well-known “sexologist” Iwan Bloch
(under the pseudonym Eugène Duehren) elicited an angry retort in 1918 from one
Louis Morin, who claimed that Bloch’s intention had been to provide “advance
justification” for the German crimes of World War I by accusing the French of
being congentially inclined towards sadism!2 It is into this context that the material
discussed in the pages that follow must be placed.
Although the subject of sexual violence in war gained great prominence during
and immediately after World War I,3 my topic here is the preceding century.4
Many scholars have commented on the important function that tales of sexual
violence have performed in demonizing the enemy and thus helping soldiers
overcome the conditioning of social sanctions against violence and the taking of
life. As a metaphor, however, sexual violence also provides a symbolically dense
representation of territorial appropriation and of the inability of men to defend
their territory and their manhood. As Jan Jindy Pettman writes,
[v]iolence against women thus becomes an assault on men’s and national
honour. There is a complex move here, from actual women’s bodies and the
dangers they face, to nationalist discourse using images of women’s bodies
to mark national or communal boundaries.5
This complex move is, in point of fact, highly problematical in that it tends to
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