In contrast to simple, cultural explanations of honor crimes in Turkey and the Turkish/Kurdish diaspora, my research offers an historical perspective for understanding the existence and meaning of honor crimes in Turkish popular culture and the perpetuation of honor-related gendered violence. I argue that in order to dispute claims of human rights violations in Turkey, particularly honor crimes, popular culture reflects the effects of the twentieth-century modernization and Turkish national identity formation processes by describing the persistence of honor-related gendered violence as an “eastern,” “rural,” or “Kurdish” problem, in order to maintain the secular, modern characterization of Kemalist and now liberal Islamist Turkey. Nationalists, modernists, the popular press, and mainstream culture in Turkey emphasize the “backwardness” of Kurdish culture, and, according to this discourse, religious fanaticism and medieval tribalism explain the presence of honor killing in the eastern and southern parts of Turkey. This method of defending the nation against being characterized as anti-modern and thus anti-“western” remains a sharp contrast to the Kemalist policy of denying Kurdish identity. In the case of honor-related violence Turkish media and the state affirm Kurdishness in their terms. Kurds have been systematically denied the means of producing their own version of Kurdish identity in the form of popular media; therefore, this imbalanced discourse goes on in Turkey without a counter-narrative. To demonstrate these processes I focus my analysis on a very popular 2006 television drama produced and aired in Turkey and broadcast to the diaspora via YouTube, Sila. The story revolves around a downtrodden Kurdish family that must give their young daughter away to be raised in Istanbul. Now an urban, “modern” Turkish woman, she is forced to return to her Kurdish tribe and marry a neighboring tribal lord to restore her family honor. She is raped and physically abused by her new husband. Sila producers and viewers are not alone in their thirst for reaffirmation of Turkish “modern,” secular identity vis-à-vis the rural Kurdish other. I draw from other examples in the popular press and Turkish television to support my thesis.