Istanbul
Turkish Republic. Haldun, son of Faik Nüzhet, the last Ottoman finance
minister, is a good example. I was told Haldun was born in Salonika in
1905.^27 A photograph from prior to 1913 shows Faik in a dark suit sporting
a handlebar mustache, close-cropped hair, and slight smile. He sits com-
fortably, with his left leg crossed over his right. Behind his right shoulder
stands his younger wife, Şükriye. She looks, not at the camera, like her
husband, but past the camera, giving her a distracted or cool and resigned
appearance. Her hair is bobbed into a short style, and she appears to wear
earrings and a fashionable dark dress that would have been in style in any
major European city at the time. Directly in front of her is their daughter,
Feridun. She is wearing her hair in pigtails, with white ribbons that match
her short, white pleated dress with oversized collar and large buttons. She
has one hand on her father’s left knee. In the picture, there appears to be
another daughter, also with white ribbons in her long hair and an identi-
cal dress with her sister also with her hands on her father’s left knee. But
the second child with pigtails and a white dress is not the couple’s second
daughter, but Haldun, their son. He came to Istanbul with his family
after Salonika fell to Greece. His father sent him abroad for his education,
including Switzerland, France, and the Sorbonne in Paris. He became a
Freemason like his father. He did not return to Istanbul until the 1930 s,
where he married a Muslim woman who was not a Dönme.^28
According to the genealogy provided by a descendant, three of the four
children of the Kapancı Sarrafzade Ahmet Tevfik Ehat, son of Sarrafzade
Osman Ehat, co-founder of the Terakki school, married foreign women,
and two settled abroad.^29 Reşat Tesal’s brother married Atatürk’s army
buddy Nuri Conker’s daughter. Conker was distantly related by marriage
(mother’s brother’s wife’s relative). In 1944 , Tesal married a woman whose
father was from Trabzon and her mother’s family from Bosnia.^30 Some
Dönme were marrying outsiders. If they were satisfied breaking the bonds
of the community maintained for so long through endogamy, did they
find the need to continue to educate their children in their own schools
or bury their dead in separate cemeteries?
Separate Schools
In 1927 , an elderly Dönme exchangee from Salonika explained that in
her former domicile, the group had had its own schools, where the chil-
dren were separated from others and thus strengthened in their belief. But