Reinscribing the Dönme in the Secular Nation-State By World War I, one-tenth of the city’s million inhabitants were for-
eign subjects and fewer than half were non-Muslim. But foreign occupa-
tion and state policy stopped the city’s cosmopolitanism dead in its tracks.
First came the occupation of the British, French, and Italians from the
end of World War I to 1922 , and then the willful isolation of the city by
the new Turkish Republic, which saw it as corrupt, amoral, and foreign.
Istanbul was suspect for its being “Byzantine,” inhabited by “ ‘others,’
those who were not really of us.”^9 Transferring the capital to an inland
place “without significations,” and “a neutral space devoid of history and
symbolic weight” illustrates the desire to “forget and erase from memory”
coastal places associated with Greeks,^10 and one might add, people such as
the Dönme who came from Greece.
In this period, some considered Istanbul to be the corrupt capital of
a corrupt regime, “a Sodom,” in contrast with the peasant town of An-
kara, which according to Ahmet Emin Yalman, had “no hotels, no electric
lights, and no conveniences. You had to carry your own bed and find a
space for it in the house of a friend. When it was your turn to get a bite
to eat in the only restaurant, called ‘Anadolu’ (the Turkish name for Ana-
tolia), you certainly were not carried away by gastronomic delight.” Nev-
ertheless, in the author’s view, it was comparable to Paradise, because it
meant Turks were on the path to satisfy their dreams and desires, namely,
the creation of a national home purified of extraneous elements.^11
Istanbul lost its financial capital with the closing of seaborne connec-
tions to the Mediterranean and Black Seas during World War I, and
had to abandon its cultural and political capital as well. It was no longer
the center of an empire that stretched from Europe to the Persian Gulf,
North Africa to Iran. Neither Christians nor Muslims could look to it
as the center of the world, a borderland bridge between continents and
cultural zones, the conductor of international flows of goods and capital.
The symbol of a great plural empire was to the Turkish revolutionaries
the emblem of anti-national and obscurantist religious forces that had
to be destroyed. The elements leading Istanbul’s cosmopolitanism and
globalization, whether foreign, Levantine, non-Muslim, or Muslim “com-
pradors” who were middlemen for colonial capital like the Dönme, were
considered inauthentic, unwelcome in the nation-state. This may have
contributed to urban violence, and the discriminatory, harsh, and even
violent backlash against them. The Dönme were especially despised for
they were labeled pejoratively “cosmopolitan,” in Antonio Gramsci’s sense