Turcica, German collections of stories about Turks, include fantastic tales of perverse sexual behaviors and other disturbing stories of Ottoman life. The Turcica often focus on behaviors known as sodomia, a collection of acts that referred to any sexual act deviating from “normal” Christian practices. Stories narrated in these collections detail the victimization of innocents, including children, females, and dead Christians. In one story, Turkish soldiers have sex with corpses—Christians killed in the fall of Constantinople. Another tale claims that Muslims “have it off with those fish that possess sexual organs.”

XREF: Connects to Orientalist discourse and how colonizing/competing powers construct dehumanizing narratives about enemies. FICTION: The grotesque trope of enemies violating corpses could seed dark historical fiction or horror about propaganda and atrocity storytelling.

Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imag…, loc. 274