The women arrive in Trabzon by ferry from across the Black Sea, sometimes dozens at a time. Whatever their real names, they are known in Turkey as Natashas, and often end up working as prostitutes in this country's growing sex trade, sometimes against their will.
Turkey, with its now booming economy and lax visa requirements, is becoming the world's largest market for Slavic women, one of the most visible exports of the former Soviet Union's struggling new states.
"Think of many rivers flowing into one sea," said Allan Freedman, who coordinates countertrafficking programs at the Ankara bureau of the International Organization for Migration, an independent body that works closely with the UN. "That sea is Turkey."
Most of the women come of their own free will but many end up as virtual slaves, sold from pimp to pimp through a loosely organized criminal network that stretches from Moscow to Istanbul and beyond.
Prostitution is legal in strictly secular Turkey where the government licenses brothels, known as "general houses," and issues prostitutes identity cards that give them rights to some free medical care and other social services. But women working in general houses -- there is usually one in each large city -- tend to be older, and the demand for young, slender women has outstripped supply as Turkey's economy has improved. Slavic women are meeting that need.
"Women are recruited at home with the promise of employment," Freedman said. "But once they are across the border their passports are taken away and they are beaten and raped and forced into prostitution."
The women are typically kept locked in an apartment except when they are taken out to customers.
The trade is not hard to find. Outside Istanbul's general house, a collection of tiny brothels in a warren of alleys behind a guarded metal gate, touts accost visitors with whispered promises of beautiful young Russian girls at not much more than the price of the older Turkish women waiting for customers inside.
"I can bring you any kind of girl you want," promised an eager man in a black shirt and pants with a gold-faced watch, saying that his girls were kept in a building downtown.
Part of the reason Turkey has become a magnet is that the more lucrative markets of Western Europe are protected by increasingly strict visa requirements that take weeks to work through, with only uncertain results. A young woman from Moldova can be in Istanbul in a day by paying just US$10 for a month-long visa at the border.
Turkey is also becoming a staging area for illegal migration elsewhere.
"This is one of the reasons why the EU is so worried about Turkey," Freedman said, referring to European resistance to Turkey's quest to join the bloc. "It's increasingly a migrant hub."
Turkey has been working in the past two years to stop the trafficking and get off the US government's blacklist. In 2003, the State Department listed Turkey in its report on trafficking as a "Tier 3" country, meaning that it had taken no significant action to eliminate the trade. The status jeopardized US financial aid to Turkey and helped spur it to act. On the State Department's most recent report, issued earlier this month, Turkey was moved up to "Tier 2," which means it is making significant efforts but still falls short of US government expectations.
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