Modern harems

Last harem was closed in 1909 after the abdication of Abdul-Hamid II. Sultan expelled from the Topkapi Palace, which turned into a museum. In modern Turkey, the harems no. However, added, smiling, Turks, according to official data. In the countryside, in south-east of the country still exists about polygamy.
Owners of modern harem - rich people: the owners of carpet shops, successful farmers, factory owners, who can adequately contain multiple wives: all feed, clothe, shoes and give a roof over their heads. The girls still forcibly married off. Neglected dolls, hastily tied a national Turkish headscarf - a symbol of a married woman, twelve girls are sent to the home of an elderly husband.

Ayşe Kurnaz, who married at age 12, recalls: "I gave a child. My husband has already had one wife, who later died. He was never married longer. We were left alone. It was very difficult. I was very small, nothing not understand. But the mother had no choice. My father died. The house had six children, she could not feed all.

Modern Turkish law allows men to have only one wife. However, Islam allows polygamy. To observe the appearance of legality, the cunning of a man with his first wife are going to marry into the municipal office "Beled" - sort of our Russia's registrar, and the second commit "nicks" - an Islamic wedding ceremony.
Residents of big cities sometimes give birth to several wives. Thus, to take a second wife, must submit a notarized consent from the first to take a third - the consent of the previous two. Aysu Yildyrym - lawyer, legal owner of the private agency said that such cases in her practice was not: "However, I know similar history in Anatolia - central Turkey, where men often bring their wives by the hand - be notarized consent of the next marriage. Of course, women are reluctant to it. "

Most urban residents are opposed to the existence of the Turkish harems, considering them as a relic of the past. Modern Turkish women as men working in the major trading companies, trade and tourism, where many earn more than men. And not so long ago, one of Istanbul's entrepreneurs opened his own agency, where each of the women can be acquainted with a man on his own taste, and named him as revenge for the past - "Harem".