During a layover in Istanbul, I decided to take a walk around the city, but I accidentally wandered into the wrong neighborhood. There were women on the street dressed in very revealing outfits. There was no mistaking what they were offering. Just a dozen meters away, police officers were standing there casually chatting with each other, completely ignoring what was happening around them. And all this was right next to Taksim, one of the city's main squares.

So I started googling. Turns out, prostitution in Turkey has been legalized for about a hundred years (!)

Technically, during the Ottoman Empire, sexual relations with concubines were considered permissible even from a religious perspective if a man owned the woman. But I wouldn't call that regulation in the modern sense. And once slavery was abolished, the practice faded away.

Official permits for such work are issued only to adult unmarried women and come with a ton of restrictions on their future lives. Together with legal brothels, this doesn't sit well with the Turkish government's recent direction. That said, issuing new permits has been on hold for years, and the last brothel in Istanbul never reopened after COVID. Now they've decided to turn it into an art installation instead. Which, of course, didn't really affect the market size. More women just ended up in the gray zone. Technically, street work is forbidden, but police turn a blind eye to it. Just like they apparently do to missing permits when it's convenient for them.

Fun fact: in the 1990s, the largest taxpayer in Istanbul for five years straight was Matilda Manukyan, who owned several brothels. The tax service even awarded her for this achievement.