Eyes in the Dark: Nightlife and Visual Regimes in Late

Ottoman Istanbul

Avner Wishnitzer

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37, Number 2, August 2017, pp. 245-261 (Article)

Published by Duke University Press

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 H I S T O R I E S o f t h e N I G H T

Eyes in the Dark

Nightlife and Visual Regimes in Late Ottoman Istanbul

Avner Wishnitzer

I
n one of the scenes of Nabizade Nazım’s novel Zehra (1896), Subhi Bey, a married young merchant,
takes his mistress Ürani, a high-­end prostitute, to a Friday night show at the Handehane-­y i Osmani
theater in Şehzadebaşı, Istanbul.1 It is almost three hours after sunset, and the two take their seats
in one of the cabins. The main gallery below them is already full. The stage is illuminated, and the set
features the shores of the Bosporus at night, with the Ahırkapı lighthouse and a crescent moon placed
against a dark background. Darkness outside, limelight on stage, and it is show time.
While the author provides us with a synopsis of the action on stage, the real drama takes place away
from it. Ürani enjoys the play and laughs aloud, which turns many heads. Even more than she enjoys the
play, she enjoys the attention. At first Subhi is proud, as this attractive woman, this “beauty incarnated”
(sabahat-­ı mücesseme), is “his.” But soon he gets nervous. He wants Ürani to be “entirely his, in body and
mind, heart and soul.” He wants her to be indifferent to the admiration outside, to the looks coming from
the outside (hariçteki meftuniyetlere; hariçteki enzar-­ı mütemenniyaneye). It was he who wanted to go out with
her in the first place, but now he wants to keep her in the cabin — in the dark, so to speak.2
Set in a space designed to optimize visibility, this scene quite literally sheds light on gazing and
being gazed at. Theater here is not limited to the stage. With limelight spilling out into the hall, specta-
tors turn into actors. The unregulated visibility produced by intensive illumination, alongside Ürani’s
ability to use the setting to attract attention, undermines Subhi’s sense of control, thereby arousing in
him anxiety and an urge to veil her, to reestablish authority.3
This little drama is an appropriate starting point, then, to an exploration of the changing interrela-
tions between nightlife, visibility, and control in late Ottoman Istanbul. I argue that the nightlife scene

This work was first presented at “Dark Histories,” a workshop held at the
British Institute in Ankara, and later at the “Ottomans and Entertain-
ment” workshop organized by the Skilliter Centre for Ottoman Studies
at the University of Cambridge. I thank the organizers and participants
of both workshops for the wonderful opportunity and the constructive
feedback. I would also like to thank Zeynep Zeviner and Hay Eytan Cohen
Yanarocak for their assistance and Nurçin İleri for some valuable leads
and comments. Special thanks to my friends On Barak and Liat Kozma
for their insights.
1. The theater was originally established under the name Gülünçhane
Tiyatrosu in Direklerarası and later changed its name and moved to
Şehzadebaşı. See Çavaş, “Abdürrezzak Efendi.” On the early history of
theater in Istanbul, see And, A History, 65–74, and Mestyan, “A Garden,”
100–115. On female acting, theatergoing, and norms regarding women’s
visibility, see Skylstad, “Acting the Nation,” 44– 53, as well as the discus-
sion below.
2. Nabizade Nazım, Zehra, 123–24.
3. As Richard Crary notes, spectacular culture is about attracting, ma-
nipulating, and suspending attention, rather than mere vision. See Crary,
Suspensions of Perception.

Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 245
Vol. 37, No. 2, 2017 • doi 10.1215/1089201x-4132881 • © 2017 by Duke University Press
246 Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East • 37:2 • 2017

of the late nineteenth century did not develop lin-
early from darkened to illuminated nightlife, but
rather that the two modes of nocturnal leisure co-
existed. Likewise, the new ways of seeing through
darkness that were devised by the state developed
alongside (rather than instead of) well-­established
patterns of communal gaze.
The latter codevelopment is particularly evi-
dent in contemporary novels — especially in their
treatment of Beyoğlu. Much like a theater, Beyoğlu
was an illuminated space of unregulated visibility,
which raised concerns about the deterioration of
the moral order. Contemporary novelists therefore
subjected Beyoğlu nightlife to a literary “neigh-
borhood gaze,” exposing and shaming those who
violated public morality. In this way, they warned
against what they perceived to be the perils of the
new night and advised their readers how to navi-
gate it — how to be in the modern night without
jeopardizing the morality, productivity, and integ-
rity of the individual and of the Ottoman nation
as a whole.
Modern Lighting and Surveillance
Since Michel Foucault’s famous discussion of the
panopticon, street lighting has often been associ-
ated with the constant, penetrating, and suppos-
edly all-­seeing gaze of the modern state.4 Jeremy
Bentham’s original model was supposed to allow
the subjugation of numerous inmates to the invis-
ible eye of the “inspector” sitting in the central
watchtower. Space was to be flooded with light to
facilitate total visibility and, hence, total control.5
Foucault generalized Bentham’s original model,
arguing that panopticism — namely, subjection to
a penetrating, constant gaze — was being applied
in different domains, from education to industrial
production, allowing unprecedented levels of sur-
veillance and control.6
Chris Otter noted that since Foucault, the
notion of panopticism has been used to refer to
so many different things that it has been emptied
of meaning, and it is now used to describe “any
configuration of vision and power.” In fact, Otter
argued, very few panopticons were actually built.
Even as an “ideal-­t ype model,” panopticism has
little to offer the attempt to explain how vision,
lighting, and power shaped one another in the
nineteenth century. The panopticon gaze was
dependent entirely on a completely engineered
space, detached from society and built especially
to allow it. It is highly questionable whether panop-
ticism could exist without a material environment
to facilitate it. According to Otter, the nineteenth
century indeed witnessed the rise of “visual re-
gimes” that were “asymmetrical and coercive,” but
none of these regimes was panoptic.7
Street lighting has been associated with the
centralizing gaze and power of the modern state
in the Ottoman context as well, and with good rea-
son. The installation and expansion of the gaslight
network paralleled the development of centralized
urban policing and new measures of direct state
control through registration and enforcement of
temporal and spatial limitations on the opera-
tion of businesses at night.8 Since new state organs
installed this new technology, street lighting was
implicitly or explicitly associated with a new visual
regime, whether panoptic or merely “asymmetrical
and coercive.”
Yet, older modes of gaze may have been
equally important. In the Ottoman context, the
neighborhood structure and its particular mode
of control remained an important facet of urban
order, alongside those centralizing state mecha-
nisms.9 Thus, rather than assuming some natural
association between street lighting and the direct,
top-­down gaze of the modern state, we should con-
sider how gas lighting and the particular forms of
state-­and neighborhood-­based visual regimes in-
teracted in shaping late Ottoman nightlife.
I explore this issue by investigating archival
sources, nonfictional works such as travel accounts,
and contemporary novels. The archival documents

4. Bentham, Panopticon, 5 – 33. For Foucault’s
discussion of the panopticon, see Foucault,
“The Eye of Power,” and Foucault, Discipline
and Punish, 201–8.
5. Bentham, Panopticon, 5–33.
6. See Foucault, “The Eye of Power,” and Fou-
cault, Discipline and Punish, 201–8.
7. Otter, The Victorian Eye, 3–5.
8. See İleri, “A Nocturnal History,” 143 – 48, and
Wishnitzer, Reading Clocks, 143 – 48. See also
Hanssen, “Public Morality,” and Zandi-­Sayek,
Ottoman Izmir, 87–88. In all these cases, it was
pressure from below that yielded state and/or
municipal action.
9. See, for example, Behar, A Neighborhood in
Ottoman Istanbul; Lévy, “Une Institution”; and
Toledano, State and Society, esp. 222–25.
 Avner Wishnitzer • Eyes in the Dark: Nightlife and Visual Regimes in Late Ottoman Istanbul 2 47

enable the reconstruction of modern state organs’
direct interventions in the night, but they say lit-
tle about the wider world of images, allures, and
anxieties that contemporaries associated with the
night. Novels mirror something of that world; yet,
they cannot be considered its innocent reflectors.
Rather, they were instrumental in shaping it.
The novels examined below evade easy cat-
egorization. Their authors wrote them over the
course of more than three decades (between the
mid-­1870s and the early 1900s), developing dif-
ferent themes and applying various literary tech-
niques. Yet these novels do share a few common
features. First, most of the novels examined feature
upper-­and upper-­middle-­class male protagonists,
and it is mostly their excursions into the night that
the plots examine and compare to the nights of
these protagonists’ “others”: namely, female and
lower-­class characters.10 Second, almost all of the
novels discussed below were meant by their authors
to serve, among other purposes, as moral guides.
While Şeyda Başlı’s recent call for a multilayered
reading of late Ottoman novels is certainly in
place, there is no denying their pronounced didac-
tic nature; it is this angle that I examine here.11
Reading the novels alongside archival docu-
ments and other nonfictional accounts enables a
multi-­angled reconstruction of past nocturnal re-
ality and expands the question of how the state
“sees” at night to other, nonstate actors. A joint
examination of these sources reveals that the mod-
ern Ottoman night was not a brand-­new reality run
by the state in the bright light of its gas lanterns.
Rather, it comprised a partially illuminated, new
temporal territory shaped by old and new mecha-
nisms of control — a territory in which different vi-
sual regimes coexisted and interacted.12
Out of Sight: Darkened Modes of Nightlife
Until the nineteenth century, urban order in Otto-
man Istanbul depended to a large extent on neigh-
borhood (mahalle) communities. Neighborhoods
were responsible collectively for public order and
morality, and this arrangement encouraged resi-
dents to keep a watchful eye over the personal con-
duct of their neighbors at all times.13 Şerif Mardin
notes that the pressure applied on the individual
to conform to the group’s norms relied on the con-
stant gaze of the community, which he called “eye
pressure” (göz baskısı).14
Even darkness could not relieve this pressure.
As the late Ottoman author Ahmed Rasim wrote,
it was difficult to move about at night “among so
many watching eyes” without being detected.15 By
the standards of the mahalle, late night socializa-
tion was a violation of what one might call “a re-
spectable routine,” which ideally began with the
morning prayer and ended with the night prayer
(yatsı). After the latter prayer, no respectable man
had business being outside his neighborhood.16
Rumors of immoral activities that jeopardized
the reputation of the neighborhood could lead to
“neighborhood raids” (sing. mahalle baskını) on
those involved. The raiding party, mostly compris-
ing male residents and night guards, would encircle
the suspected house with their lanterns, making a
great deal of noise. With the permission of the local
imam they would sometimes break into the house,
dragging the culprits out into the light and publicly
shaming them in front of the community.17

10. There are exceptions to this rule; for exam-
ple, Ahmet Midhat’s Dürdane Hanım or Fatma
Aliye’s Muhaddarat.
11. Başlı, Osmanlı Romanının Imkânları. On the
didactic nature of these novels, see Evin, Ori-
gins and Development, 11, and Parla, Babalar
ve Oğullar, 13 – 17. My reading of these novels
is clearly of a historical persuasion, which dif-
fers from that of a literary critic. As Sarah Maza
notes, the latter always seeks first, and then
second and third, readings, noting how texts
subvert themselves. The historian, by contrast,
wants the text to serve a bigger picture, like a
piece in a puzzle that can only fit if placed in a
certain way. Maza, “Stephen Greenblatt.”
12. I am inspired here by Peter Baldwin’s argu-
ment regarding the emergence of the modern
night in East Coast US cities. See Baldwin, In the
Watches, 13.
13. Boyar and Fleet, A Social History, 121–28.
14. Mardin and Çakır, “Mahalle Baskısı.” On
Mardin’s notion and the discussion it created,
see Çetin, “Bir Kavramın Kısa Tarihi.” The dis-
cussion fueled a new wave of research that
examines specific aspects of “community
pressure” in contemporary Turkey. See, for ex-
ample, Toprak et al., Türkiye’de Farklı Olmak.
15. Cited in Boyar and Fleet, A Social History, 126.
16. The evening therefore stretched until one or
one and a half hours after sunset. See, for ex-
ample, D’Ohsson, Tableau Général, 4:241. This
differentiation remained relevant through the
end of the nineteenth century. Bars were to be
closed around this time (see discussion below)
and so was the Galata Bridge. See Boyar and
Fleet, A Social History, 316. An official order is-
sued in 1873 stipulated that the night begins
one hour after sunset. See İleri, “A Nocturnal
History,” 65. Military manuals from the second
quarter of the nineteenth century use the term
yatsı nöbeti, lit., “the night prayer shift.” See,
for example, Hizmet-­i Dahiliye ve Nizam ve In-
tizam-­ı Askeriye.
17. Boyar and Fleet, A Social History, 122–28.
248 Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East
The early modern Ottoman state did have
central mechanisms of law enforcement, yet much
of the surveillance and policing remained on the
communal level. In sharp contrast to panoptic
models, thus, the Ottoman state “saw” through the
eyes of its subjects and enforced order with their
arms. A somewhat similar way of shaming was ap-
plied to punish individuals who were caught walk-
ing the streets without a lantern, in violation of the
law. Such people were made to work in the furnace
of one of the many public baths; by the time they
were released in the morning, they were all cov-
ered with soot, branded and shamed in the eyes of
the people.18
Far-­reaching transformations set in motion
in the late 1830s began to change the nocturnal
landscape of Istanbul and the mechanisms that
organized it. In a nutshell, the new landscape
was shaped by the Ottoman reform project, the
assimilation of the empire within the European-­
dominated world economy, and the semicolonial
context in which these processes took place.19
One of the most important effects of the
economic changes and the wars of the long nine-
teenth century was rapid urbanization.20 The 1838
British-­Ottoman commercial treaties seem to have
been of particular importance here. The treaties
led to a dramatic increase in the volume of mari-
time commerce and attracted scores of poor work-­
seekers to Istanbul. Furthermore, under the free-­
trade treaties, the British did not recognize the
monopoly of the Ottoman guild of tavern owners
on selling spirits by the glass and sheltered Brit-
ish nationals who entered the lucrative business of
alcohol retail. Under these conditions, drunken
brawls and crime were on the rise, especially in
the areas around the harbor in Galata. Prostitu-
tion also increased dramatically. According to an
18. Osman Nuri Ergin, Mecelle-­i Umûr-­i Beledi-
yye, 1:914n70.
19. On European power and urban reform in Is-
tanbul, see Rosenthal, Politics, and Brummett,
Image and Imperialism, esp. 149–88, 289–316.
20. Shaw, “The Population of Istanbul.”
21. Rosenthal, Politics, 3 – 7, 15, 107 – 15. On crime
and the nocturnal city, see also İleri, “A Noctur-
nal History,” 61–125.
• 37:2 • 2017
estimate from 1860, some 2,000 prostitutes worked
in the Galata district alone.21
The treaties and their effects coincided with
and related to the promulgation of the gülhane de-
cree, which energized the efforts of the ruling elite
to reassert central authority. Partly responding to
pressures from below and always concerned about
the Ottoman image, the ruling elite of the tanzimat
period sought new measures to better control cit-
ies by subjugating urban spaces and daily routines
to new procedures of regularization, documenta-
tion, and regulation.22 These efforts applied to the
nighttime as well.
As Nurçin İleri notes, tension existed be-
tween interests in cultivating and in controlling
nightlife. On the one hand, the elite associated
nightlife with urban modernity, and the state col-
lected high revenues in the hubs of nocturnal lei-
sure. On the other hand, the expanding nightlife
scene posed a threat to urban order. Rather than
eliminating nightlife altogether, then, the state
sought to control the scene by employing various
security measures, including centralized policing,
night curfews, the closing of the Galata Bridge
at nights, and, finally, street lighting (discussed
below).23
One of the measures adopted in order to con-
trol the expanding drinking scene involved plac-
ing limitations on the operating hours of alcohol-­
selling businesses. A set of petitions presented by
alcohol retailers in reaction to these measures in
the 1880s demonstrates the scope and nature of
the nightlife scene that had emerged beyond the
illuminated centers, the state’s efforts to control it,
and the difficulties the state faced in doing so.24
In late 1882, the guild of tavern owners pe-
titioned the authorities, requesting permission to
keep their businesses operating until five hours
22. See Çelik, The Remaking, 49 – 81; Çelik, Em- 24. Prime Ministry Ottoman Archives, Istan-
pire, Architecture, 6 – 7, 71 – 115, 146 – 53; Hans- bul (Başabakanlık Osmanlı Arşivleri, hereafter
sen, Fin de Siècle, 193 – 202, 214 – 21, 243 – 47; BOA), DH.MKT 1341/77, 12.Za.1300 (September
Wishnitzer, Reading Clocks, 124–50; and Zandi-­ 14, 1883); BOA, ZB. 13/113, 25 Eylül 1299 (No-
Sayek, Ottoman Izmir, esp. 98–111. vember 7, 1883); BOA ŞD 2912/63, 28 Teşrin-­i
Evvel 1300 (September 9, 1884); BOA, DH.MKT
23. İleri, “A Nocturnal History,” 270. On mea-
1615/120, 12.Ş.1306 (April 13, 1889).
sures of policing and nocturnal order, see also
Lévy, “Une institution”; Wishnitzer, Reading
Clocks, 143 – 48; and Boyar and Fleet, A Social
History, 316.
 Avner Wishnitzer • Eyes in the Dark: Nightlife and Visual Regimes in Late Ottoman Istanbul 249

after sunset. The very request indicates that there
was money to be made deep into the dark hours,
and that clients’ traffic was heavy in the evenings,
which is corroborated also by other sources.25 Yet
the government prioritized its security consider-
ations over the interests of the bar owners (and
their clients) and decreed that all alcohol-­selling
institutions would shut down one and a half hours
after sunset. 26 In other words, the authorities
wanted the bars closed before the “official” begin-
ning of the night.27
The government later differentiated be-
tween authorized and unauthorized (gediksiz, or
“without permit”) businesses, allowing the former
to remain open until two and a half hours after
sunset. Now the business owners who operated
without permits outside the guild petitioned the
authorities, protesting what they perceived as dis-
crimination against the mass majority of alcohol
retailers.28 According to the petition, in the fish
market (balık pazarı) in Galata, there were three
taverns with gediks, twenty-­one businesses titled as
limoncu (appraently selling spirited-­lemonade), in
addition to between eighty and ninety taverns and
other alcohol-­selling institutions without a gedik.
In Kumkapı, there were forty-­five taverns, out of
which only five had a gedik. Of the sixty-­seven bars
and taverns in Langa, only seven had gediks. In
Samatya, in the Fatih district, there were ninety
taverns, out of which only twelve had gediks. Exact
figures were not provided for Balat, Üsküdar, and
neighborhoods along the Bosporus, but the peti-
tioners noted that in each of these places, out of
every ten establishments, maybe one had a gedik.29
However, this petition was also rejected, as were
subsequent ones,30 although one of these petitions
was apparently signed by between 600 and 700 un-
authorized liquor retailers operating under differ-
ent titles.31
The government justified the differentiation
in closing hours by explaining that taverns with
permits were located in safe places and therefore
could not be compared to small unauthorized
alcohol vendors (koltuks).32 The reasoning seems
plausible. The sheer numbers of koltuks, their
geographical spread, and the darkness that per-
sisted throughout most areas of Istanbul in these
years made them harder to monitor.33 Moreover,
koltuk owners actively tried to evade government
oversight by hiding activity behind curtains or by
bribing police officers (“görme beni/bizi” ücreti, lit.
“don’t see me/us” fee).34 Shutting the koltuks down
as soon as night fell seemed like the easier way to
reduce trouble.
Yet, the same darkness that turned the night
into a security challenge made it an invaluable
interval for seekers of illegitimate pleasures. In a
book devoted to the bars and taverns of Ottoman
Istanbul, the Turkish historian and writer Reşat
Ekrem Koçu says that whereas authorized tav-
erns opened in the afternoon, the koltuks (which
as shown above were much greater in numbers)
operated only after dark. These koltuks attracted
“respectable” people who did not want to drink at
home and did not want to be seen drinking out-
side. In these places, “hidden from everybody’s

25. BOA, DH.MKT 1615/120, 12.Ş.1306 (April 13,
1889). See also Ali Rıza, Eski Zamanlarda, 181,
and Ahmet Midhat, Dürdane Hanım, 5.
26. The sources use the Ottoman hours system
(alaturka saat), counted from sunset to sunset
the following day. See BOA, DH.MKT 1615/120,
12.Ş.1306 (April 13, 1889). This 1889 document
summarizes previous correspondence and re-
affirms the 1882 decree.
27. The “official” beginning of the night was as-
sumed to be around an hour after sunset. See
footnote 16, above.
28. BOA, DH.MKT 1341/77, 12.Za.1300 (Septem-
ber 14, 1883). The meaning of the term gedik,
literally, a slot, changed over time. By the mid-­
nineteenth century, to have a gedik was to be
recognized as a senior member of a guild who
has the right to open his own shop. See Akarlı,
“Gedik.”
29. BOA, DH.MKT 1341/77, 12.Za. 1300 (Septem-
ber 14, 1883). On the “geography of drinking”
in Istanbul, see İleri, “A Nocturnal History,”
228–30.
30. BOA, DH.MKT 1615/120, 12.Ş.1306 (April 13,
1889).
31. The petition and its number of signatories
is mentioned in a later petition. See BOA, ZB.
13/113, 25 Eylül 1299 (November 7, 1883). I could
not locate the original petition.
32. BOA, DH.MKT 1341/77, 12.Za.1300 (Septem-
ber 14, 1883).
33. For comments by contemporaries on dark-
ness in Istanbul, see De Amicis, Constantinople,
130, and Kitchen, The Night Side, 146–47.
34. For a scholarly discussion of illumination
and darkness during the same period, see İleri,
“A Nocturnal History,” esp. 143–71. For bar own-
ers protesting policemen closing down their
bars even before the legal drinking time is over,
see BOA ŞD 2912/63, 28 Teşrin-­i Evvel 1300 (Sep-
tember 9, 1884). See also Ortaylı, İstanbul’dan
Sayfalar, 201. For bribes and “don’t see us” fees,
see Koçu, Eski İstanbul’da Meyhaneler, 16, 36.
250 Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East
eyes, they would drink their two or three cups of
rakı, one or two glasses of wine, wipe their mouths
and then head home.”35
In short, in the dark, illicit and immoral ac-
tivity could take place, as if it did not. It was this
out-­of-­sightness that allowed this coveted nightlife
scene to flourish for centuries.36 As noted above,
the expansion of this scene along with new no-
tions of urban order prompted the authorities to
seek new means to control it; street lighting was
one of these means.37 Notably, however, this mode
of nightlife did not depend on lighting, but rather
was subjected to it. Both retailers and patrons
probably preferred the dark, under-­regulated en-
vironment of the past, where they could be “hid-
den from everybody’s eyes.” By contrast, in the
new mode of nightlife that developed in the boule-
vards, restaurants, and theaters of Beyoğlu, artifi-
cial light was indispensable.
In the Light
The first gas lines in Istanbul, installed in 1856,
stretched out from the Dolmabahçe Gasworks to
the Yüksek Kaldırım in Galata and the Cadde-­y i
Kebir in Beyoğlu, apparently replacing oil lamps
that had been placed there starting in 1847.38 The
location was not incidental. The Sixth District —
which consisted of Galata, Pera, and Tophane —
was the hub of the foreigner community in the
city. According to the 1885 census, 47 percent of
the 237,293 residents of the district held foreign na-
tionality, another third was made of non-­Muslim
Ottomans, and the rest were Muslims. The more
aff luent among the foreigners and Levantines
35. Koçu, Eski İstanbul’da Meyhaneler, 15 – 16.
Clearly, despite the growing visibility of alco-
hol consumption (see Fuhrmann, “Beer,” 89,
and Georgeon, “Ottomans and Drinkers”),
many still preferred the old, darkened mode
of drinking.
36. Wishnitzer, “Into the Dark,” 518–19, 523–24.
37. Parts of Galata and Tophane, for example,
were illuminated by the early 1870s. See İleri,
“A Nocturnal History,” 152.
38. BOA, A.MKT 97/5, 23.L.1263 (October 3, 1847).
See also BOA, A.MKT 98/65, 3.Za.1263 (October
12, 1847); BOA, A.MKT 152/55, 5.Za.1263 (October
14, 1847); and BOA, A.MKT 97/5, 23.L.1263 (Oc-
tober 3, 1847). On the wider context of urban
reform in Istanbul during those years, see
Rosenthal, Politics, 3 – 28, 41 – 42, and Gül, The
• 37:2 • 2017
lived up the hill from Galata, in the area known
as Pera or Beyoğlu, and it was these people who
initially pressed for the installation of public il-
lumination.39 The system expanded gradually; by
the early 1860s, lamps were installed on the main
street of Beşiktaş, in Pangaltı Yolu (in the Har-
biye area), along the Tophane Boulevard, and in a
number of other places.40
Gas lighting facilitated the expansion of
new sites of nocturnal leisure such as restaurants,
balls, theater, and opera — modes that had begun
to develop in Beyoğlu around midcentury.41 While
in the late 1840s even the main boulevard was
still mostly dark, by the mid-­1870s, a whole range
of cafes and beer houses had developed around
Taksim.42 Unlike the drinking dens of Galata and
Kumkapı, the illuminated areas of Beyoğlu catered
to the moneyed classes, attracting men and women
of different religious persuasions.43
Best illuminated, tightly regulated, and
closely monitored by the police, Beyoğlu was to the
“eye of power” the most visible and legible area of
Istanbul.44 Yet with its huge foreign community, it
lay outside the neighborhood control structure,
comprising an almost extraterritorial zone of
possibilities — especially at night.45 Illuminated
nightlife, I contend, contrasted sharply with the vi-
sual regime of the mahalle and lay beyond its reach.
The growing visibility (quite literally) of nocturnal
socialization and the growing participation of the
privileged classes in this scene contributed to the
rather intensive treatment of nocturnal occur-
rences in contemporary fictional writing.46 While
(as discussed above) darkened nightlife prevailed
Emergence, 44–46. 43. On moneyed women’s evening outings to
Beyoğlu, see Kitchen, The Night Side, 147, and
39. Kayserilioğlu et al., Osmanlı’dan Günümüze,
Yumul, “A Prostitute,” 61–62.
50.
44. On the concern Beyoğlu nightlife raised
40. For a comprehensive discussion of the in-
in government circles and the measures em-
stallation of street lighting in Istanbul, see
ployed to control it, see İleri, “A Nocturnal His-
İleri, “A Nocturnal History,” 143 – 63. See also
tory,” 208 – 10. In characterizing nightlife as
Kayserilioğlu et al., Osmanlı’dan Günümüze,
“legible,” I am paraphrasing Woodall, “Deca-
49–51.
dent Nights,” 22–25.
41. Cezar, XIX. Yüzyıl Beyoğlusu, 451 – 57; Yumul,
45. See, for example, the description in Rıza,
“A Prostitute,” 57 – 72; and Akın, 19. Yüzyılın,
Eski Zamanlarda, 101. More on the extraterri-
51–62. On parallel trends in contemporary Bei-
toriality of Beyoğlu is below.
rut, see Hanssen, Fin de Siècle, 198–202. In fact,
it may very well be that owners of such busi- 46. For examples, see Mehmet Rauf, Eylül,
nesses pushed for the installation of lighting, 328 – 29; Namık Kemal, İntibah, 161 – 63; Halid
but this is yet to be established. Ziya Uşaklıgil, Mai ve Siyah, 151 – 68; Fatma
Aliye, Muhadarat, 189, 202; Şemsettin Sami,
42. For the late 1840s, see MacFarlane, Turkey
and Its Destiny, 187.
 Avner Wishnitzer • Eyes in the Dark: Nightlife and Visual Regimes in Late Ottoman Istanbul 251

throughout the city, Ottoman novelists’ attention
was drawn almost exclusively to the nightlife in
Beyoğlu.
Novel Nights
G. Carole Woodall has shown that in the 1920s,
concerns about the nightlife scene in Beyoğlu
and the supposed damage it inflicted on national
morals gave rise to a didactic genre of stories pub-
lished in the popular press. In these stories, young
men of elite backgrounds ventured into Beyoğlu
at night and were tempted into drug abuse and
contact with (mostly foreign) prostitutes, bringing
about their ruin.47 The analysis below shows that
the basic contours of this repeating plot and the
nighttime anxieties that it reflected were already
well established in the late nineteenth century. To
be more specific, in Ottoman novels, late night lei-
sure is associated with the blurring of boundaries
between moral and immoral; between hard work
and indolence; between male and female; and fi-
nally, between Self and Other. Using the literary
types of the dandy (züppe) and the foreign courte-
san, the authors sought to draw lines discursively
and resubject Beyoğlu nightlife to patriarchal and
communal authority.
Earlier scholarship about Ottoman novels
grounded the ridicule of the dandy types in the
“traditional,” mainly in the mahalle and the bazaar.
According to this interpretation, the critique of
the züppe represented the more conservative mem-
bers of the lower middle class who felt threatened
by the market economy and sought to reign in the
individuality of the upper classes and subject them
to communal values.48 More recently, scholars have
noted that it was not merely this figure’s superficial
Europeanism that attracted criticism, but rather
his parasitic and wasteful lifestyle, which ran con-
trary to the values of productivity and hard work
contemporary writers were trying to promote. In
other words, the critique of the dandy reflected
not the traditional mahalle but rather very mod-
ern concerns about time, thriftiness, and material
progress.49 The two interpretations are not mutu-
ally exclusive, of course. The narration of dandies’
nocturnal exploits presents the wasting of time
and money in nocturnal leisure as immoral, and
nightly immoral pursuits as economically ruinous.
Limelights of Beyoğlu
Illuminated nightlife raised concerns because
it was so visible, so attractive. Pitched against its
completely dark surrounding, Beyoğlu and its
nightlife emerged as a true spectacle. Already in
the 1870s, the Italian novelist and journalist Ed-
mondo de Amicis wrote that “every Sunday eve-
ning, there passes a long procession of carriages
and foot passengers, all the fashionable world of
Pera, that comes to pass its evenings in the cafes
and beer-­g ardens of the Barrack [in Taksim].”50
While traveling through Istanbul in 1914, the New
York author and columnist Karl Kitchen likened
illuminated Beyoğlu to Broadway, and Scutari,
which was “plunged in inky blackness,” to “the Jer-
sey City of Constantinople.”51 If living in the ma-
halle was like living on the karagöz screen,52 Beyoğlu
was more like an “open air theatre” in which every-
one is a spectator and an actor at once.53 As shown
below, this was not a mere metaphor. Illuminated,
gender-­mixed, and ostentatious, theater became
the emblem of the new mode of public nightlife
that began to develop in Beyoğlu.
Theater and other stage arts that were gain-
ing popularity in Istanbul in the same period were
for centuries mostly nocturnal performances that
relied on artificial lighting. Historian Craig Ko-
slofsky even suggested taking the development of
the artificially illuminated stage of the European

Taaşuk, 42; Nabizade Nazım, Zehra, 118 – 21;
Hüseyin Rahmi Gürpınar, Şıpsevdi, 161 – 62,
174 – 94; Ahmet Midhat, Dürdane Hanım, 1 – 7;
Ahmet Midhat, Felatun Bey, 105; Ahmet Mid-
hat, Henüz 17 Yaşında; and Hüseyin Rahmi
Gürpınar, Şık.
47. Woodall, “Decadent Nights,” 28–30.
48. See Mardin, “Super Weternization”; Evin,
Origins and Development, esp. 76 – 78; and
Tanpınar, XIX, Asır, 445–64.
49. See Başlı, Osmanlı Romanının Imkânları, 52. Ortaylı, Osmanlı Toplumunda Aile, 22.
200 – 202, 206 – 8; Hafez, “The Lazy,” esp.
53. Yumul, “A Prostitute,” 61 – 62. The literary
155 – 86; and Wishnitzer, Reading Clocks,
corpus on social performance and the intricate
160–65.
relations between drama and real life is sub-
50. De Amicis, Constantinople, 55. See also Loti, stantial. For a useful introduction, see Burke,
“Constantinople,” 137. “The Performative Turn.”
51. Kitchen traveled through different European
capitals and then to Istanbul and Cairo. He de-
scribed the nightlife in these cities in Kitchen,
The Night Side, 146–47.
252 Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East • 37:2 • 2017

Baroque as an index of “nocturnalization”; that is,
the “increase in scope and legitimacy of everyday
nocturnal activity.”54 In Istanbul, the number of
theaters rose in rough correlation with the devel-
opment of street lighting. Adam Mestyan counted
twenty-­one theaters established in Istanbul be-
tween 1838 and 1892; two-­t hirds of these were
founded in the 1870s and 1880s, the majority in
Beyoğlu.55
One may argue that like European theater,
karagöz too was a nocturnal performance. Yet the
Ottoman shadow theater was typically performed
during religious or dynastic festivals and was char-
acteristic of their inverted routines, of their being
a carnival-­like time-­out-­of-­t ime.56 Theater, by con-
trast, was a feature of the new routine, of modern
every-­night life. Therefore, it is possible to see the-
ater’s advent in the Ottoman Empire, somewhat
similar to Europe, as an index of nocturnalization
among the upper classes, demonstrating the grow-
ing respectability and visibility of nightlife in these
circles.
A hmet Midhat (d. 1912), the most pro -
lific writer of the Hamidan period, opens his
novel Only Seventeen Years Old (Henüz 17 Yaşında,
1882 – 83) with a night scene in a mid-­r ange res-
taurant in Beyoğlu. Two friends meet there to
eat before going to the theater. Whereas Hulusi
Efendi is a rich and superficial dandy, his friend,
Ahmed Bey, is his opposite. The latter is a serious,
educated man who has been involved in various
trades, including railway building and commerce.
In essence, he represents a productive individ-
ual who contributes to the progress of Ottoman
society — an idealized Ottoman gentleman. While
Hulusi Efendi goes to the theater merely to look at
the actresses, for Ahmed Bey, a theater actress (or
actor) is an “artist who literally embodies a writer’s
sublime feelings on stage (saha-­ı temaşa).” Ahmed
Bey warns his friend that if he only comes to see
women, he might be disappointed. To this, Hulusi
Efendi replies that he would then look for women
“in the theatre cabins.”57
This answer is supposed to present Hulusi
Efendi as superficial; but in a sense, he is actu-
ally a good theatergoer. Many theater halls in the
nineteenth century were designed to satisfy similar
desires by allowing spectators a good view of the
stage as well as the gallery. The audience too was
considered part of the spectacle. At least one the-
ater in Istanbul, the Naum Theatre, was built ac-
cording to this conception.58 We can imagine Hu-
lusi gazing at Nabizade Nazım’s Ürani, laughing
in her cabin. In both scenes, it is the unregulated
visibility made possible by the specially designed
space and artificial light that raises concerns, and
the authors use the bad example of the dandy to
educate their readers about where they should
focus their attention.
One of the main characteristics of the dandy
is his obsession with appearance — or rather, with
putting on appearances. In contrast to the collec-
tive ethos of the mahalle, the dandy wished to act
out his individuality and self-­conscious modernity,
to attract attention to himself, to be noticed. 59
Beyoğlu was his stage, and the illuminated night
provided a special setting. Unlike darkened night-
life, public nightlife relied on light and visibility;
indeed, it celebrated them. Here, light was impor-
tant not merely for security, but also for ensuring
that the social functioning of this new mode of
nightlife would be fulfilled.
Historian Edhem Eldem has warned against
overemphasizing the contrast between poor Galata
and the rich areas of Pera, ignoring the silent ma-
jority that lived in between.60 Indeed, urban reality
was beyond doubt much messier and more ambig-
uous than such bipolar constructions made them
out to be. The same complex reality holds regard-
ing light and darkness and modes of nightlife as
well. Streets or districts in modern cities are not
simply fully illuminated or completely dark, but

54. Koslofsky, “Princes of Darkness,” 236; see
also 251 – 58. Koslofsky’s definition of the term
nocturnalization applies also to the use of the
night for political spectacles.
55. Mestyan, “A Garden,” 85, 100 – 101. As more
Turkish-­speaking Ottomans moved into the
area, the number of plays performed in Turk-
ish increased in conjunction.
56. See Kafadar, “How Dark,” 261, and Baba­ 58. Mestyan, “A Garden,” 27–28, 111.
doğan, “Understanding the Transformations
59. For examples, see Ahmet Midhat, Fela-
of Karagöz,” 62. On karagöz in the context of
tun Bey, 119 – 29; Namık Kemal, İntibah, 35; Re-
a carnival-­like inversion, see Georgeon, “Le
caizade Mahmud Ekrem, Araba Sevdası, 7; and
Ramadan,” 65 – 68, and Georgeon, “Presenta-
Hüseyin Rahmi Gürpınar, Şıpsevdi, 11–12.
tion,” 29.
60. Eldem, “Ottoman Galata and Pera,” 25.
57. Ahmet Midhat, Henüz 17 Yaşında, 5–7.
 Avner Wishnitzer • Eyes in the Dark: Nightlife and Visual Regimes in Late Ottoman Istanbul
rather illuminated (or dark) to different degrees.
Yet, discourse often turns difference into contrast.
Illuminated nightlife in Beyoğlu became the dis-
cursive opposite of the still largely dark, sleeping
world of the mahalle and the darkened forms of
nightlife associated with the lower classes.61
Şöhret Bey (Mr. Fame), the ridiculous dandy
in Hüseyin Rahmi Gürpınar’s novel Şık (Chic,
1889), may serve as an example. Şöhret Bey is lowly
enough to steal his mother’s earrings in order to
finance his nights out in Beyoğlu with his beloved
Madame Potiş, a French prostitute. Almost the en-
tire plot of Şık unfolds within one night, in what
appears to be a fast-­forward play of deterioration,
as the European prostitute leads the culturally
and morally disoriented dandy to his ruin.62 The
night begins in preparations for an ostentatious
stroll down the illuminated streets of Beyoğlu.
The two dress up and put on makeup as if going
on stage themselves, and Şöhret Bey tells his be-
loved that strolling in the evening with a beautiful
woman like her would make him proud vis-­a-­v is all
the other men who go out with their women. He
resolves that he needs a little elegant dog to com-
plete his European look.63
The night out, however, ends on the dark
side. In one scene, Şöhret Bey goes looking for
his beloved in her rented room, having lost track
of her earlier on. He knocks on the door but the
owner, an elderly woman, reproaches him for wak-
ing her up in the middle of the night and tells him
to get lost. Şöhret Bey argues that it is still early,
exposing once again the gap between Beyoğlu and
the neighborhood routine.64 Since he has nowhere
to stay, he asks the owner to be allowed to spend
the night there, but the woman, maddened by his
nerve, opens the window and spills something over
his head. Checking himself in the light of a nearby
lantern, Şöhret Bey realizes he was covered with
ashes, having been branded in much the same way
suspicious nightwalkers were branded in earlier
periods.
61. See, for example, Ahmet Midhat, Dürdane
Hanım, 4 – 5, 15 – 16; İbrahim Şinasi, Şair Evlen-
mesi, 43; “Çaylak, Geceleri Ne Yaparsın?”; and
Hüseyin Rahmi Gürpınar, Şık, 54–55.
62. On the foreign prostitutes of Beyoğlu in Ot-
toman novels, see Yıldız, “Limits of the Imag-
inable,” 533–34. See also the discussion below.
253
Şöhret Bey, therefore, cannot go back to his
regular beer house in Beyoğlu. All dirty now, he
does not want to be noticed. Instead, he finds one
of those koltuks discussed above, a place that is half
grocer shop, half tavern. He sits there in the dark,
so as not to be seen.65 Before the night is over, the
protagonist shames himself on a number of addi-
tional occasions and finally steals once again to fi-
nance his next night out with his beloved. In short,
as in other contemporary novels,66 wandering away
from respectable routine deeper into the night is
indicative of deterioration into a life of sin and
moral depravity.
The next evening Şöhret Bey is arrested, but
only after shaming himself publicly once again
by falling into a water pool in the partly illumi-
nated Tepebaşı garden, again in Beyoğlu. He is
interrogated by the police and, upon confessing
to his acts of theft, is thrown into prison. It may
appear that the state’s eye — aided by its gas light-
ing — had spotted the offender and apprehended
him with its official arm, the police. Yet the final
verdict in the book is that of the community; this
voice is expressed through an afterword written by
the publisher, Ahmet Midhat, which makes sure the
lesson from this public shaming is not lost on the
readers. In this short text, Ahmet Midhat says that
while Şöhret Bey is fictional, there are many like
him in real life. Şöhret Bey’s ultimate incarcera-
tion, he continues, actually spared him the harsher
fate that awaits his real parallels. In “the dark” of
prison, at least Şöhret Bey does not have to face
the “damning gazes” of people. In contrast, his
real-­world parallels are seen by all as they drag on
through their lives hungry and destitute.67
Jale Parla has argued that early Ottoman
novelists associated the cultural disorientation of
many of their protagonists, so many of whom were
orphans, with the lack of patriarchal authority.
The novelists, she argued, took upon themselves
the role of a father, educating and guiding their
readers about good and bad.68 Patriarchal over-
63. Hüseyin Rahmi Gürpınar, Şık, 13–20. 66. For other examples, see Namık Kemal,
İntibah; Nabizade Nazım, Zehra; and Ahmet
64. For a similar reference, see İbrahim Şinasi,
Midhat, Felatun Bey.
Şair Evlenmesi, 43.
67. Ahmet Midhat in Hüseyin Rahmi Gürpınar,
65. Hüseyin Rahmi Gürpınar, Şık, 53–60.
Şık, 109.
68. Parla, Babalar ve Oğullar, 13–17.
254 Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East • 37:2 • 2017

sight, however, is accompanied in these novels by
the visual regime of the mahalle, which even dark-
ness cannot curtail. Both modes of surveillance
combine in omniscient narrators who consider
it their role not only to expose the immoral noc-
turnal behaviors of their protagonists, but also
to shame and chaste them. As Ahmed Evin wrote
(about Namık Kemal’s novel İntibah), “There is no
privacy allowed to the individual who is under con-
stant surveillance.”69 This applies at night, too. By
relaying the nocturnal adventures of the züppe, the
omniscient narrator resubjects such individuals to
the visual regime of the neighborhood, notifying
all regarding where they hang out, who they really
are, and dragging them out into the light in front
of the community.
Night as a Foreign Land
Illuminated nightlife was certainly not considered
wholly negative; in fact, it could bear various mean-
ings, at times even to the same individual. Writers
like İbrahim Şinasi, Ahmet Midhat, and Namık
Kemal were impressed by gaslight in Europe, and
they clearly associated it with the material advance-
ment they sought for their homeland.70 Theater
too, which was so closely associated with night-
time, was for many of these same writers a marker
of progress.71 However, under the semicolonial
condition of late Ottoman Istanbul, illuminated
nightlife became associated with a sense of threat
to Ottoman sovereignty and identity; therefore, au-
thors were concerned with proscribing a “correct”
usage of the night.
The actual nightlife scene in Beyoğlu was
indeed populated by many foreigners — from per-
formers and leisure-­business owners to prostitutes
and pimps.72 Discourse about nighttime Beyoğlu
further emphasized the foreignness of Beyoğlu
nights and associated it with danger. This is the
role played by Şöhret Bey’s French beloved who
strips him of all he has during the nights they
spend together and by Felatun Bey’s foreign be-
loved Polini (in Ahmet Midhat’s Felatun Bey and
Rakim Efendi, 1875), who presses him to spend
every night and all his money in the casino.73 It is
readily understood that in the novels, nighttime
was not only foreign land but also wasteland; as
such, it was injurious to the “progress through
productivity” agenda that many of these writers
sought to promote.74
In contrast to Felatun Bey, Ahmet Midhat’s
idealized Ottoman gentleman, Rakım Efendi,
wastes neither money nor time on unproductive
pursuits. Moreover, he is a morning type. He wakes
up early not only to work and study but even to
enjoy a day in the park. When Rakım Efendi goes
on a picnic with his household and the European
piano player Madame Yozefino, he insists that they
all wake up and leave very early. As the household
members are leisurely drinking their coffee and
tea, Madame Yozefino watches in admiration “that
morning pleasure of the Ottomans” (Osmanlıların
şu sabah sefasını) and praises the “Turkish” way of
life. In the long nights of winter, Yozefino adds,
the Europeans do not go to bed before midnight,
and by the time they wake up it is already late in
the day. Therefore, they are deprived of the beauty
and pleasures of the morning.75
Ahmed Haşim’s “Müslüman Saati” (“Muslim
Time”) is even more explicit in associating night-
life with that which is foreign. The piece was writ-
ten in May 1921, during the allied occupation of
Istanbul, when the nightlife scene was dominated
by thousands of foreign soldiers.76 The text laments
the dying of the alaturka hour system, which ac-
cording to Haşim underpinned a Muslim way of
life with a unique outlook, rhythms, and manners.
Late-­night leisure, on the other hand, is identified
with the foreign ways of life that have taken over
the country and thrown it off course.

69. Evin, Origins and Development, 77.
70. See Ahmet Midhat, Avrupa’da Bir Cevelan;
Namık Kemal, “Progress”; and İbrahim Şinasi,
“İstanbul Sokaklarının Tenviri.”
71. Mestyan, “A Garden,” 24.
72. Fuhrmann, “Down and Out.”
73. Ahmet Midhat, Felatun Bey, 105. See also
Ebüziyya Tevfik’s translation of Benjamin
Franklin, emphasizing that “early to bed and
early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and
wise”: Ebüziyya Tevfik, “Tarik-­i maaş – vaktin
kiymeti ve tenbelliğin pahalılığı,” Mecmua-­ı
Ebüziyya 8 (1 Muharrem 1298/December 3,
1880): 241 – 46; continued in Mecmua-­ı Ebüzi-
yya 9 (15 Muharrem 1298/December 17, 1880):
260–67.
74. On early Ottoman novels and the con-
temporary discourse of productivity, see
Başlı, Osmanlı Romanının Imkânları, 200 – 202,
206 – 8; Hafez, “The Lazy”; Wishnitzer, Read-
ing Clocks, 160 – 69; and Kılınçoğlu, “Protestan
Ahlak.”
75. Midhat, Felatun Bey, 212–22.
76. On nightlife during the occupation,
s e e M ac ar thur-­S eal, “ Intoxic atio n and
Imperialism.”
 Avner Wishnitzer • Eyes in the Dark: Nightlife and Visual Regimes in Late Ottoman Istanbul 255

The new time . . . deprived us of the world at
dawn. . . . For the Muslim the hour of dawn signi-
fied the end of a dreamless sleep, and the start
of ablutions, worship, good cheer and hope. . . .
Now, alas, the dusk and dawn have disappeared
together with that former time. . . . We have aban-
doned the dawn to the sulky, proud roosters in
our chicken runs. Now the clocks in the houses of
Muslims seem to show the times of another world,
where the hours which are night for us are day,
and those which are day take on the colour of the
night. Like wayfarers who have lost their way in
the desert, we are lost in time.77
This piece is clearly about much more than the
hour system. It is a requiem to the times long gone
in which, supposedly, clear-­cut boundaries existed
between day and night, between good and bad.78
Above all, the text conveys a sense of disorienta-
tion and lack of control in the face of chaos, in
which even the day and the night are confused.
Late Ottoman novels reflected similar concerns
about gender boundaries.
Nights Out, Nights In
Even during the daytime, women’s access to urban
space was (and still is) far from universal or taken
for granted.79 At night, urban space was much
more heavily gendered. Although more work is
needed on the early modern period, there is evi-
dence to suggest that at least in some circles, being
outside at night was considered a serious threat
to the honor (ırz, namus) of a woman and that of
her family. Women’s movements and actions were
closely monitored by members of the household
and by the community.80 Madeline Zilfi notes
that women too were “watchdogs of their sisters’
morality” and served as the “eyes and ears of the
neighborhood.”81 If prevailing norms regarded the
time between sunset and the night prayer as the
twilight — a frontier between the socially respect-
able and the immoral — for women who wanted to
maintain their respectability, sunset represented a
borderline that was better not crossed.82
These norms involved public transportation
as well. According to Article 18 of the 1865 tram-
way terms of contract (şartname), men’s wagons
were to be operated from sunrise to midnight, but
women’s wagons were to cease operating at sun-
set.83 Although these conventions were changing,
for many women (especially from the elite), the
dark hours were still off-­limits. For example, the
highly educated Zeyneb Hanım, daughter of
the Ottoman foreign minister, wrote in August
1907 that the nights of Ramadan were the only
nights “Turkish women” of elite background could
go out. Women of lower classes, she argued, suf-
fered no such limitations.84
Just as gaslight and related forms of socia-
bility focused attention on questions of identity
and productivity, they also heightened concerns
about gender boundaries. As noted above, (mostly
foreign, non-­Muslim) women began to appear in
the nightlife hubs of the city. This blending of the
sexes was tied to wider concerns about women’s vis-
ibility in public and the blurring of gender bound-
aries, fueling a domestication discourse that aimed
to restrict upper-­and middle-­class women to the
home.85
Novels were part of this discourse. Hülya
Yıldız noted that in late Ottoman novels, prosti-
tutes, especially in Beyoğlu, inhibit a foreign dan-
ger zone associated with pollution and disease,
in which class and ethnoreligious boundaries
dissolve. This unregulated sexuality is contrasted
in the novels with the Muslim household and its
restrained, domesticated sexuality, which works
to reinforce Ottoman Muslim identity and public
confidence in its values.86

77. Ahmed Haşim, “Müslüman Saati,” originally 80. See Peirce, Morality Tales, 166 – 79, 187, 193, 83. BOA, İ.MMS 30/1265, 19.Z. 1281 (April 15,
published in Dergah, May 16, 1921. English trans- and Başaran, “Remaking,” 237n77. See also 1865).
lation taken from Özdemir, Ottoman Clocks, Kozma, “Wandering About.”
84. Zeyneb Hanım, A Turkish Woman’s Euro-
149–52.
81. Zilfi, Women and Slavery, 74. pean Impressions, 171–72.
78. For a similar association of nightlife with
82. Lewis, Everyday Life, 115. These norms are 85. See Frierson, “Mirrors Out”; Türesay, “An Al-
that which is foreign and with moral deprav-
still very much in place in many contemporary manac,” 229; and Yıldız, “Limits of the Imagin-
ity from the same period, see Rıza, Eski Zaman-
Anatolian towns. See Toprak et al., Türkiye’de able,” 547, 555.
larda, 191.
Farklı Olmak, 39–41, 89.
86. See Yıldız, “Limits of the Imaginable,” 547, 555.
79. See Maksudyan, “Introduction,” 3 – 4, and
Zilfi, Women and Slavery, 74.
256 Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East
Nighttime was strongly associated with this
sense of insecurity; in an effort to overcome it, late
Ottoman novels clung to the gendered division of
urban time and space and sought to perpetuate
it. In the literary night, the only women seen out-
side after dark are promiscuous, and usually non-­
Muslim, implying that a good Muslim woman acts
differently. For example, in depicting the picnic
day the role model Rakım Efendi enjoys with his
household, Ahmet Midhat is careful to note that
they returned home “exactly a quarter of an hour
after the evening call for prayer.”87 In contrast,
Felatun’s French lover, Polini, spends the nights
out with him in Beyoğlu. Interestingly, Polini is a
theater actress, which, as shown above, was often
identified with the moral depravity of the deep
night. Hüseyin Rahmi Gürpınar discloses a similar
approach when he says about Adel, the hardwork-
ing and honest beloved of the hardworking and
honest Maşuk in the novel Şık, that she is “neither
a theatre actress nor a scarlet woman of leisure
places.”88 In other words, a morally sound woman
stays home at night.
In this case as well, the theater served as a
focal point of nocturnal attraction and danger. It
was here that leisure and concerns about women’s
visibility and morality met. Unlike in contemporary
Europe, the main critique raised against women in
the theater was not about what they might see, but
rather about their being seen. To be the object of
male gazing was long considered a threat to one’s
honor (namus); notably, this problem was not lim-
ited to the stage. Conservatives opposed the pres-
ence of women in the audience as well, and debates
about the issue in the press continued through the
demise of the empire. Until then, actresses were
almost exclusively Armenian, and so were the ma-
jority of women in the audience.89
The theater scene described at the begin-
ning of this article contrasts the visibility and
promiscuity of the non-­Muslim woman with the
respectability and domesticity of the Muslim wife.
87. Ahmet Midhat, Felatun Bey, 129. they would be exposed to strangers’ eyes. See
ibid., 44–45.
88. Hüseyin Rahmi Gürpınar, Şık, 68.
91. Nabizade Nazım, Zehra, 55, 86–87, 106–10.
89. Skylstad, “Acting the Nation,” 43–45.
92. Şemsettin Sami, Taaşuk, 42.
90. As noted above, the main obstacle to wom-
en’s attending the theater was the fear that
• 37:2 • 2017
Subhi Bey does not even consider taking his wife,
Zehra, to the theater. Even the visibility (and
hence, the implied availability) of his (probably
Greek) courtesan Ürani in the theater makes him
nervous.90 Zehra is described as she waits in the
long, cold winter nights for her husband to return
from Beyoğlu early on in the plot. Waiting for him,
jealous for him, she sometimes sits at the top of the
stairs until midnight. Subhi inflicts similar help-
less waits on Sırrıcemal, his second wife.91 While
for Subhi the night is time out, for his wives it is
time in.
In some novels, male characters actively de-
prive women of their household of access to the
night. Haci Baba, father of Fitnat in Şemseddin
Sami’s The Love of Tal‘at and Fitnat (1872), locks
his daughter inside the house every evening when
he goes to the neighborhood coffeehouse.92 Haci
Baba is described as being of a lower-­middle-­class
background, firmly grounded in the neighbor-
hood environment and abiding by its norms of
public morality. Most of the figures that populated
late Ottoman novels were of higher social standing
and usually either genuinely or superficially more
reform oriented.93 Yet, none of the novels exam-
ined here challenged the fundamental notion that
after dark, women should be inside.
Meftun (lit., captivated), the dandy pro-
tagonist of Hüseyin Rahmi Gürpinar’s Şıpsevdi
(Susceptible, first serialized in 1901), expresses pro-
gressive positions about women’s rights and educa-
tion. Yet when he learns that his sister’s love affair
progressed from a letter exchange to instances
of “isolated nocturnal rendezvous,” he considers
it excessive even by French standards, which he
claims to value more than the local ones. “Now,”
he resolves, “I shall go and grab my sister by her
collar and using ‘oriental’ force, lock her in a room
[aloriyantal bir cebr ve şiddetle bir odaya kilitleyim].”94
Meftun, then, is only superficially different from
Haci Baba. When it comes to his sister out at night,
he too is looking for the house keys.
93. Finn, The Early Turkish Novel, 163, 170. Some
of these figures, such as Midhat’s Rakım Efendi
or Mizanci Murad’s Mansur Bey, were truly re-
form minded, whereas others were more su-
perficially interested in European ways.
94. Hüseyin Rahmi Gürpınar, Şıpsevdi, 176–79.
 Avner Wishnitzer • Eyes in the Dark: Nightlife and Visual Regimes in Late Ottoman Istanbul
In sum, modern nightlife as it emerges in
late Ottoman novels represented a fourfold threat:
with its theatrical dimension, it contrasted sharply
with neighborhood norms; it encouraged a waste
of funds and time and hindered daytime produc-
tivity; it was associated with foreign notions and
foreigners — alluring yet dangerous to indigenous
identity; and it threatened gender boundaries,
a threat that in itself was identified with foreign-
ness. The emerging night, in short, raised fears of
individual and collective disorientation, of losing
oneself in the other.
Yet Ottoman novelists did not forbid the
night altogether; rather, they aimed to set new lim-
its within it. This they did by planting role-­model
figures alongside the bad examples. Thus, after
the dandy Hulusi Efendi and the engineer Ahmed
Bey in Ahmet Midhat’s Only Seventeen Years Old
leave the theater, they realize that bad weather
prevents them from returning home. Having no-
where to stay for the night, Hulusi Efendi suggests
that they rent a room in a brothel — a proposition
that Ahmed Bey immediately rejects. However, as
it is already after midnight and hotel rooms cannot
be found, Ahmed is forced to accept, under the
condition that he would sleep alone.95 Thus, their
journey into the dark world of prostitution begins.
The night here is once again a frontier ter-
ritory, in which young, inexperienced dandies
who are bent on appearance and fun are likely
to get lost. By contrast, Ahmed — who clearly rep-
resents a father figure, experienced and morally
sound — has already internalized boundaries.96
Thus, he can distinguish between serious theater
and empty spectacles; he can drink moderately or
refuse the bottle altogether as he pleases. He can
be in the company of prostitutes without taking ad-
vantage of them. In other words, he can navigate
the deep night and return home safely, with his re-
spectability, productivity, and identity intact.97
Conclusion
The analysis offered above demonstrates that the
history of late Ottoman nights cannot be reduced
95. Ahmet Midhat, Henüz 17 Yaşında, 13–18.
96. Yıldız, “Limits of the Imaginable,” 554.
257
to a “then there was light” story. Not only was the
actual illumination of the city a piecemeal, incre-
mental process that had different effects in vari-
ous parts of the city, but also, changes in social
conventions associated with nighttime were slow,
gradual, and varied. Moreover, this colonization
of the night, which may have helped the city’s in-
habitants cope with problems of nocturnal crime
and violence, in itself had an unsettling effect. The
allure of illuminated nightlife prompted intellec-
tuals to draw moral maps of the new night — maps
that would instruct readers about where and when
to go at night, when the time to go home has come,
and which areas and activities should be avoided.
In these efforts, local intellectuals applied a
literary version of the neighborhood visual regime
that both authors and their readers were so famil-
iar with. The situations their protagonists coped
with probably reflect not only the literary night but
also the actual reality in the neighborhoods of the
city. In the gaslight, nightlife is exposed not only
to the eye of power but also to the eye of the neigh-
borhood, which may have been more powerful in
shaping people’s behaviors. In fact, these two vi-
sual regimes were often hard to distinguish, as one
served the other. The state continued to rely on
the community to ensure urban and moral order,
and communities often turned to the state to de-
mand intervention in the night, including the in-
stallation of street lighting.98
Some insights that arise from this analysis
may prove relevant still today — or rather, tonight.
Despite hyperillumination, night has not simply
transformed into day. Nighttime remains distinct
from daytime in what it allows (and forbids); it still
involves both light and darkness, and it is still or-
ganized by laws and mechanisms of state surveil-
lance as well as by values and morals. In tightly knit
communities, what neighbors can see is still more
important than what can be seen by the state.
97. Gürpınar’s Maşuk in Şık is similar in this way. 98. İleri, “A Nocturnal History,” 17.
On the paternalist tone of Hamidian discourse
about “dangerous” or “confused” youth, see
Yalçınkaya, Learned Patriots, esp. 180–206.
258 Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East
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