Between Empire and Nation-State
Dönme played a significant role in turn-of-the-century Ottoman poli-
tics and an important founding and supporting role in the revolutionary
movement. In 1899 , the Dönme Mazlum Hakkı and the Jew Albert Fua,
an important early CUP ideologue, began to publish a political journal
in Paris.^80 According to Nahum Slousch, writing in 1908 , the Dönme re-
ligion and exceptional social position allowed them to become important
intermediaries of the revolution.^81 Soon after the revolution, the Journal
de Salonique published the names of renowned individuals and businesses
in Salonika that had provided financial assistance to the CUP. Perhaps
surprisingly, the banker, textile merchant, director of one of the largest
banking and commercial houses in the city, and head of the Chamber of
Commerce Mehmet Kapancı used his wealth to fund the organization.^82
We must not assume that wealth equals conservatism. Wealthy merchants
such as Mehmet Kapancı supported the revolution because they were Free-
masons and believed that the sultan was stifling society with his despotism.
These were men who supported progressive schools that promoted critical
thinking. In one recent writer’s opinion, the Terakki school that Mehmet
Kapancı and others founded “was one of the centers of the revolution. All
secret journals and manifestos were secretly distributed at school.”^83
Some Dönme became so committed to political ideas discussed be-
hind closed doors at the city’s ubiquitous French, Italian, and Ottoman
Masonic lodges in clandestine CUP meetings that they were considered
the revolutionary vanguard.^84 Meşveret noted how crucial the Dönme role
was when it proclaimed that the Dönme, whom it labeled one of the most
“modern” groups in the empire, were “the only group working in the
movement” in the city.^85 Slousch concurred with the view that Dönme
intellectuals and civil servants were playing a crucial role. He noted that
their history and religion caused them to evolve more and more into an
association of freethinkers, separate from Muslims and Jews, placed in
position to be an evolutionary and progressive factor in the city.^86 Slousch
argued the youth had become liberals, a generation committed to physical
and moral rejuvenation, free of former prejudices and constraints, rank-
ing among the avant-garde of the army of civilization that propagated the
ideas of justice and progress.
It is not coincidental that when the revolution went public, speeches
were made at the outset in July 1908 on the first floor balcony of the
Kapancı-owned Olympos Hotel on the freshly renamed Plateia Eleutherias
(formerly Olympos Square). A black-and-white postcard depicts a mas-