In 1923, the first issue of Bin Bir Buse was published in Istanbul. This magazine advertised itself as containing the “most dazzling stories of all of Eastern and Western literature: the most lively, the most seductive, and the most sultry”. Inside we find a mix of flirtatious short stories, bawdy jokes, and voyeuristic cartoons that attempt to document the sex life of Istanbul in the early 1920s. The stories make claims to realism, they ground themselves in details of the city, of urban life, and together they say that these “most lively, most seductive, most sultry” things are happening all the time, all around Istanbul. In this paper, I argue that these stories produce urban space as full of sexual possibility. The stories delight in showing the immoral or illicit behaviours lurking behind even the most upstanding men and women of the city, and in doing so destabilise new norms of gender and sexuality that were at the heart of Turkish modernity. Moreover, in this production of sexual possibility, the stories, with their frequent references to alafranga behaviour, European norms, and colonial penetration, highlight the non-sovereignty of the new Turkish Republic over urban space. Bin Bir Buse was censored by the new Turkish Republic in 1924 after 16 issues. In documenting the sexual life of Istanbul, Bin Bir Buse also worked to produce it, against the programmatic measures taken by the Republican state to control sexuality. Scholars have documented these measures and the repressive effects on the visibility of homosexuality, the regulation of sex work, and the rigid containment of female sexuality but so far little attention has been paid to the productive effects of such attempts at control on sexual imagination. The stories of Bin Bir Buse function through such imagination, they often describe women as “unimaginably beautiful”, leave scenes trailing off with an ellipsis, or describe, in detail, what is running through a man’s mind when he thinks of a woman. I argue that this terrain of imagination is directly shaped by the recent colonial occupation and the programme of Republican sexuality, that even in its excessive, disruptive power, sexual fantasy is constructed in relation to the state and to international political developments. In my reading of Bin Bir Buse, I work to map the nested interactions of sexuality and the state, pushing Michel Foucault’s arguments further into the realm of the imaginary.