“They attacked my veiled sister because of her headscarf,” Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has said innumerable times with reference to the so-called Kabataş attack during the Gezi Park protests of 2013. Erdoğan to this day politically mobilizes a disproven incident in which approximately a hundred shirtless male protestors with bandanas over their heads allegedly harassed a woman with a six-month-old baby. Erdoğan’s sensational account of female victimization startlingly echoes Halide Edip Adıvar’s 1926 novella Vurun Kahpeye (Strike the Whore). Set in a small Anatolian village during the War of Turkish Independence, this work recounts the lynching of Aliye, a recently-appointed teacher working undercover for the nationalist struggle. Incensed by the town’s imam, who slanders her as a whore, the villagers publically beat Aliye to death. The parallelism between these two scenes vividly captures the literary lineages of political rhetoric in Turkey today. What we note here, I argue, is the rhetorical deployment of a narrative of victimhood belonging to the aesthetics of melodrama. Identifying melodrama as a transmedial affective mode of address, I assess its political transvaluation by explicating the instrumentality of narratives of victimhood with an emphasis on Erdoğan’s continuous adaptation of sensational imagery and narrative details from Vurun Kahpeye. I propose Vurun Kahpeye – through an examination of the impact of its successive cinematic adaptations in 1949, 1964, and 1973 – as a seminal text in the melodramatic formation of the modern Turkish subject as one organized around affects. As a pedagogical melodrama for a literate bourgeois audience, Vurun Kahpeye prescriptively pits the good, secular moderns against the evil, backward populace through the mutilated female body. If the literary domain is a key agent through which the public affectively experiences the modernizing project of the Republic in its third year, Erdoğan adopts the same narrative structure to evoke sympathy and outrage through its melodramatic identification of victims and perpetrators eighty-seven years later. Inverting the political ideologies of the villain and the hero, Erdoğan now promotes the pious subject who is brutally targeted by the hysterically secularist moderns as a victim of the Republic of Turkey. Erdoğan’s subversive deployment of Vurun Kahpeye allows us to reconsider the temporality of melodrama in relation to politics. Melodramatic aesthetics precedes, reframes, and puts into place a politics to come around victimhood, one at which the traditionally opposed camps of secularism and Islamism intersect.