What is the best way to write about the sex industry in Turkey? I posed this question to a well-known Ottoman historian. He smiled at me on a warm Istanbul evening and said, “Did you ever visit Zurafa [Street]?”

Zurafa Street is in one of Istanbul's oldest and most notorious brothel areas, dating back to Ottoman times. However, over the years, the number of brothels has dwindled. Indeed, the brothels and the official tallies of the women working in them reveal only a small part of Turkey's sex industry.

Under Turkish law, government-supervised brothels are legal, but otherwise, prostitution is not. The Turkish penal code assumes prostitutes are exclusively female, and that if they agree to work in a brothel, then they are legitimate. So the brothels are registered in a location the municipality approves, pay taxes and agree to the city’s health code for sex workers. Indeed, for years in the early 1990s, Matild Manukyan, a businesswoman who owned 32 brothels, was the top taxpayer in the country.

The brothels are a double-edged sword for their workers. They provide a relative safety net compared with independent sex workers. But once workers are registered as brothel employees, their chances of finding other employment are rather slim. The stigma is official and permanent. The workers have to pay a hefty portion of their income to the brothel management, as well.