Squealing Bachelors

Gone from Turkey is the harem of the late Sultan Abdul Hamid ("The Damned") with its thousand wives and its scores of eunuchs. The blackamoors whom the Turks brought from Abyssinia and emasculated to stand dispassionate guard over their women, remain. Some have found jobs in Istanbul's national museum. Others work as doormen, waiters, handymen, servants. The rich and successful eunuchs who once held vast power in Turkey, help to maintain clubs near the great oldtime palaces, where the destitute members of their lost calling gather, dress up, observe the old etiquet, gossip, intrigue and try to keep back their tears. They love platonically and when disappointed, sometimes lose their appetite, develop consumption and die.

Brutally last week Dictator Kemal snubbed the useless loyalty of Turkey's eunuchs. An admirer of Italian Fascism, he had borrowed Mussolini's bachelor tax idea. But when he set out to test it in the district of Smyrna, he chose to forget about Turkey's unique variety of bachelor, unknown in Italy. To the Turkish tax collectors, the eunuchs were neither women nor married men; hence, they were bachelors liable to the tax. Other men could escape the levy by means of a hasty marriage to one of Turkey's still ample supply of women. But the poverty-stricken eunuchs could neither marry nor pay. Clustering in their squalid club rooms last week, they squealed in outraged impotence.

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