The men have watched the industry grow. Hotels acting as illegal brothels have sprung up along the Black Sea coast controlled, they said, by organized crime networks.
"We've also heard about women brought here by force," Yilmaz said.
The hotels are periodically raided and closed but quickly reopen under new names. East of Trabzon, the former Zirve Hotel has been renamed the Elegante. A young Slavic woman sat in the dim lobby of the hotel one afternoon this month staring at mottled goldfish turning circles in an aquarium while half a dozen middle-aged Turkish men waited in armchairs across the room. One eventually got up and gave his identity card to a clerk at the front desk. After a curt nod from a man who appeared to be the boss, the woman rose and followed the man into an elevator.
Despite the apparent transaction just witnessed, the clerk denied to a reporter there were any Russian women there.
"You've been misinformed," he said.
Elena, a bottle blonde with frosted blue nails drinking pale pink cherry-flavored water in a cafe next to the rundown Ural Hotel in town, said she had also heard of women who had been beaten and forced to work as prostitutes.
She counted herself lucky because, she said, she had a boyfriend. Given the availability of women, the practice of keeping paid mistresses has blossomed anew.
But most of the women lead more desperate lives. At the Dilek Cafe, a small storefront room decorated with strings of colored lights in an area of Trabzon known as the Russian Bazaar, a half-dozen garishly made-up women sat beckoning passers-by.
One woman in 10cm platform shoes agreed to talk to a reporter, but her smile froze when asked about trafficked women.
A Turkish man approached, shooed her back to her spot by the door and told the reporter to leave.
RSS