In European accounts of late 19th century Iran, the women’s quarter of Golestan Palace, where Nasser al-Din Shah’s many female relatives, wives, children, and differing classes of maids and servants resided is a popular trope. Within such accounts, much of the representation of this space, and the women that occupy it, has been seeped in orientalist language, which presented harems as idealized or barbaric domestic spaces, and as part of a timeless institution of Islamic culture. This paper counters such representations by examining the various forms of affective bonds and familial relationships which were a defining feature of the day-to-day lives of the residence of Nasser al-Din shah’s harem. This harem was structured around a set of extremely rigid social hierarchies, and the gender and familial norms that formed the social organization of this space are indeed associated with a pre-modernized Iran. This included the presence of four primary wives (as allowed in Shi’ite Islam), many “temporary wives” (referred to as sigehs in Shi’ite Islam), though many of these women were far from “temporary” inhabitants of this space, as well as other female relatives, children, teachers, cooks, maids, servants and so on. The rigid social hierarchy was however often undermined by the affective bonds, and in particular, homosocial ones, which cut across social and class lines and were rarely predicated on established hierarchies. While Nasser al-Din Shah’s close relationship to the young Malijak has often been touted in Iranian historiography as an exceptional relationship, a close examination of familial formations in the harem reveal that in fact, this form of affective bonding across social class was in no way an extraordinary occurrence in the harem. This paper uses primarily Persian narratives recounted by individuals who were a part of this institution (amongst them Taj Saltana, Forough Dowleh, Malijak), in order to examine the various forms of intimacies that defined the domestic lives of the harem’s residents.