Burials of females in the garden debuted in 1797 and concluded in 1863, and consist largely of the kalfas, hazinedars, and ustas who managed the Imperial Harem and the households of married princesses around town. Harem staff in other positions are here too, including secretaries, wet-nurses, nannies, and one Mistress of the Coffee Service.

In addition, seven ladies interred here were Imperial Consorts (kadın): four of Abdülhamid I and three of Mustafa IV. No concubines of the next monarch, Mahmud II, are here because he preferred to bury his late concubines at the tomb of his mother, Nakşıdil, while those who died after his reign were interred at his mausoleum.

As with the men buried in the garden, we shall consider in detail only those women who pique our interest because of their tombstone, or because their ‘job’ allows us to shed light onto the workings of the Ottoman palace in their day.

Imperial Consorts

In Chapter 3, we explored the overall workings of the concubinage system. Let us consider now the lives of the Imperial Consorts (no concubines below that rank are buried here).

By the late eighteenth century, most Imperial Harem ladies, whether concubine or staff, came from the Caucasus (or their families originated there), primarily Circassians and Georgians. At an age typically between four and ten, they were sold into slavery and eventually purchased by the palace or presented as gifts to the court, to join the corps of 500–600 women estimated to be in palace service as of the 1780s.

Once in palace service, novice slave girls received new names that were almost always Persian or Arabo-Persian in origin, which differentiated these servants from princesses, whose names were nearly always Arabic in origin. Her palace name might express some real or desired feature about her, for example, Nakşıdil, ‘Adornment of the heart’, Çeşmiferah, ‘Wide-eyed’, Kamertab, ‘Moon lustre’, Binnaz, ‘A thousand coquetries’. Occasionally the novice received a name that made no real sense, or that in her Circassian or Georgian accent morphed into something unique to her, not found in Persian vocabulary. We know that by the later nineteenth century, and probably in earlier centuries too, harem staff occasionally called one another by their birth name instead of their palace ‘stage name’.