Traveling and Trading been visiting the workshops here. It was spectacular, but visiting these
big factories and going on this long long trip have tired me. Most of the
trip is finished and it is finally time to return home.” Unlike his brother,
Osman spared no expense when he traveled, and the front of the postcard
depicts a very plush hotel salon in the Italian capital. Sabite would not
survive this childbirth, and Osman was to marry his brother’s widow; per-
haps he should have taken Sabite with him to Rome. Eleven years later,
Osman wrote a series of postcards in French to his and Sabite’s daughter,
Nevber. Father and daughter later spent much time in central Europe
and western Europe, although not always together. Nevber remained in
Vienna while Osman spent weeks at a time traveling. He sent her post-
cards from Brussels and Bad Gastein, Austria, an Alpine spa town—both
Osman and Nevber suffered from poor health, and he was seeking a cure
in the thermal springs. “My very beloved daughter,” he wrote, “You have
not told me in the letters that you sent whether you have practiced the
piano—if you do not practice, I fear you will forget everything you have
learned. I want to know right away of your practicing your previous les-
son. Write about your practicing the piano in your next postcard.” An
undated postcard sent from Vienna by Nevber’s cousin and stepbrother
Yusuf, the son of her father’s brother İbrahim and Osman’s Levirate sec-
ond wife, Aisha, also admonishes her to practice the piano.
Photographs provided by the descendant of another Kapancı family,
that of the Sarrafzade or Ehatzade, also illustrate the mixed Ottoman and
western European aspects of Dönme life. A photograph from 1910 depicts
nineteen members of the Ehat family standing before an immense foun-
tain in Baden-Baden, Germany, where they had gone to take the waters.
Most of the women wear stylish white dresses and broad-brimmed hats.
Some wear white gloves; others have bare arms and necks. The handlebar-
mustachioed men in dark, three-piece western European suits and ties are
either bareheaded or sport Panama hats or fezzes.
By the turn of the twentieth century, Duhani Hasan Akif, who had
made his fortune in the tobacco business in Salonika and Kavala, was
established in Germany, and in 1912 he moved with his family to Munich.
A photograph shows a fez-wearing Hasan Akif with a German business
partner and his wife and daughter in Munich. According to a descen-
dant, Hasan Akif was the son of Ramadan Efendi of Izmir, who had three
wives. The first was from Salonika; the second, from Izmir, site of one of
the Christians’ seven churches of the Apocalypse; the third, from Konya,