horrors of slavery. Nor does he talk about the beauty of gaining freedom. We can assume that he still suffered from the stain of slavery even after gaining his freedom. In his narrative, it is hard to discern any conscious appreciation on his part concerning the contrast between slavery and freedom. Freedom seems to have brought him only another form of obscurity after his enslavement. Being a eunuch and black, the integration of Nadir Agha as a freed slave into the community could not be taken for granted. According to Madeline Zilfi, 'black eunuchs, who presided over the gender-segregated security of the imperial harem and of the palace's upper-class imitators, saw little advantage in emancipation' (2010, p. 129). In one of the interviews, titled What does Nadir Agha, Abdülhamid's closest man, have to say about his former master? (Çapanoğlu, 1934, p. 29), the interviewer uses Nadir Agha's past as a eunuch to fashion a derogatory style for his piece, making jokes about castration and slavery. In the same interview, when the interviewer asks him his age, Nadir Agha answers that he did not pay the road tax that year, which means that he was 65 years old in 1934. He passed away in 1957 at the age of 88 . According to Jane Hathaway, 'a eunuch who survived the castration operation had a good chance of living into his eighties or even nineties' (2005, p. 21). During his long life, he experienced terrible events including, to name but a few, losing his father in one of the raids, falling into the hands of slave traders and undergoing castration, which were all part of the evils of slavery. It is hard to understand his real feeling about the institution, which he does not mention during his narration and interviews. Nevertheless, he survived slavery and won the affection of the Sultan Abdülhamid by impressing the latter with his knowledge. With the dispersal of the imperial harem, all eunuchs found themselves 'free' all of a sudden and many faced a difficult predicament, as newspapers of the period indicate (Kandemir, 1936, pp. 66-70; 1950, pp. 432-433