The Russians are back. In the last few years, tall blond girls moved en masse from Petersburg and Moscow, of their own free will. "The Natashas have taken all our men," you hear over drinks, from one Istanbul beauty after another.

The Harem, with its stone passageways, tiled walls, arches, baths, and great painted rooms, housed the sultan's mother, his children, wives, concubines, the trainee concubines known as odalisques, slaves, and castrated men. The white eunuchs ran the bureaucracy and the palace school, and the far more powerful black eunuchs ran the women and orchestrated the intrigue. The white eunuchs were German, Slavonian, Hungarian. The black eunuchs were boys captured in Abyssinia, Darfur, or Chad. They were castrated in Egypt by Coptic Christians, according to Philip Mansel's book Constantinople, "since castration was forbidden by the Koran, and Muslims were ashamed to perform the deed." It sounded just like rendition. All the windows are barred; in one great room in the Harem, the window recesses have taps and metal basins on each side. "For cool during the summer," said the guide, as a breeze from the Sea of Marmara blew in. Maybe the taps allowed the women some privacy: In constant competition, surrounded by rivals, their secrets and their friendships intense, they could run water from the taps to drown out their conversations, just as people did in Moscow hotels in the Soviet era.

When the Ottoman empire was defeated in World War I, the Harem was abolished and the women dispersed. Travelers' accounts of what happened behind the forbidden Harem walls are unreliable; I've fried my eyes reading eighteenth- and nineteenth-century accounts of tea and sweetmeats (called loukoums), served on brass trays. Once they entered the gates of Topkapi, the girls either got the sultan jackpot, grew into favorites, mothers, wives, or were poisoned or tied into sacks and thrown off the rocks of Seraglio Point into the Sea of Marmara. The sultans had stallion duties to perform. In this dynasty, each ruler was the son of a foreign slave, reinforcing the diversity of the Ottoman culture, and because of a thousand plots, the sultan had to engender as many males as possible. And then some more.

Which is probably why most of the delicacies in the Spice Bazaar are shaped like penises. It's part of the permanent subtext about potency. Potions and sweets are called "sultan's strength in bed," "sultan's paste." The dried figs stuffed with nuts are billed as "sultan's Viagra," pistachios in molasses and pectin rise into towers, and a company called Gülluüoglu sells, in plastic sheaths, a "raisin sausage with walnut" that looks exactly like a dildo, and comes with the unnecessary tag "aphrodisiac." Sausages hang next to çemen, dried meats covered in herbs. Everything is phallic. In the States, where the obsession is more with the breast of the nurturing mother than the phallus of the inseminating father, we get round doughnuts with holes.