Until the late 19th century, around 16,000-18,000 African slaves were taken every year by Ottoman traders from Eritrea, Sudan and Egypt. They were put on to boats and often ‘sorted’ in the holding port of Alexandria on Egypt’s northern coast before being shipped to Istanbul, Izmir, the Aegean islands and Cyprus. Black eunuchs wielded great power in the sultan’s haremlik, especially from the 18th century onwards, and black slave children were occasionally presented as imperial gifts. The Russian writer Alexander Pushkin’s great-grandfather, Abram Petrovich Gannibal, was kidnapped as a child from the shores of Lake Chad and taken to serve in the court of Sultan Ahmet III. In 1704, aged just six, he was sent to St Petersburg as a gift for Peter the Great, who brought him up as his godson and propelled him to great fame as a military engineer. The vast, anonymous majority of African slaves, however, had no such illustrious royal transfer or career. They worked menial tasks and have disappeared almost without trace from the history books.

In the 1880s, the Ottoman government chose the Aegean region near Izmir to relocate African slaves taken off ships in Istanbul in an effort to stop the slave trade; there were already many of them in the area because it was the nexus of multiple trade routes. The present-day Afro Turk community are the descendants of these slaves, and remain relatively unknown outside of the Aegean area. Even here, they are only accepted as part of the community in the villages where they live, but attract immediate attention in big cities, where they are mistaken for Eritrean or Somalian refugees trying to cross to Greece, or street hawkers. Many of them still struggle in the poorest bracket of society, working in tough agricultural jobs and subject to severe discrimination – One of my interviewees told me that in 2006, another young woman from the Afro Turk community in Mugla was refused a kindergarten teaching position because ‘she might scare the children’ (she later went to court, won her case, and qualified as a teacher).

— Ottoman Odyssey by Alev Scott