Reinscribing the Dönme in the Secular Nation-State sure to leave the city. The Christian population declined from 450 , 000
to 240 , 000 between 1914 and 1927. In 1927 , the main street of Pera, the
Grande Rue de Péra, officially became İstiklâl Caddesi, Independence
Avenue. The city lost its cosmopolitan character, not only because the
minority population shrunk as the total population of the city decreased
by almost one-third in the same period,^16 but because it lost its orienta-
tion, its connection between the local and the international, its openness,
its choice to be that way, as well as its being the home city of mobile
diasporas.
Self-Segregation
Reflecting the loss of the cosmopolitan milieu from when they were
based in Salonika during the days of empire, like other transregional
ethno-religious groups, the Dönme had a much more restricted diaspora
after they were forced to reside in the Turkish Republic. The Dönme mi-
grants, no matter to which group they adhered, adopted similar strategies.
At the same time, boundaries between the groups, and borders between
Dönme and others, began to break down.
The great Kapancı merchant families mainly settled in Teşvikiye and
Nişantaşı. According to interviews I conducted with a member of the
family, the descendants of the great Kapancı tobacco merchant and early
board member of the Terakki school Hasan Akif—namely, the family of
his granddaughter Nuriye and grandson Ali Riza, who had married each
other—moved from Brussels to Istanbul in 1939. World War II broke out
while they were visiting their grandmother Fatma Akif, and they ended
up staying. They settled in Nişantaşı, where exchangees were given homes
of Orthodox Christians who had been expelled to Greece. This family did
not need government assistance, because all of their family in Istanbul
lived in the neighborhood. In Nişantaşı, they imagined that the Teşvikiye
Mosque, which has the same inscription over the mihrab as the Dönme
New Mosque in Salonika, resembled it and made them feel at home, as
did the presence of so many relatives, fellow Dönme, and other Salo-
nikans in the neighborhood. The same interviewee claimed that in the
1920 s and 1930 s, Dönme religious leaders prayed and performed rituals
in the basement of the Teşvikiye mosque, usually for funerals of Dönme.
They were joined two or three years later by the few relatives who had
remained in Salonika, Nuriye’s brother Akif Fuat and his family. Hasan