Reinscribing the Dönme in the Secular Nation-State in the new republic, their children had to be sent to the state-run schools,
where they were excluded, ridiculed, and even beaten up by their Turkish
classmates.^31 Based on the need of their terrorized youth, called Greek
bastards and worse by their schoolmates, the only two Salonikan schools
to survive the population exchange and bridge the transition from empire
to nation-state, at least in Turkey, if not in Greece, and be reestablished
in Istanbul, were the two schools founded by Dönme, the Feyziye and
Terakki.^32 Yet their mission had changed: once marked by the teaching of
religion and international values, in Turkey, the schools were secularized
and nationalized. While they could still function to ensure communal
identity, it was an identity gutted of its primary ideological substance.
from excellence (feyziye) to light (işik)
As Mert Sandalcı’s grandfather explained to him, in the wake of the
Balkan Wars, the Dönme decided to migrate to Istanbul, where they had
relatives and could most comfortably continue to do business; by 1915 ,
much of the Feyziye school’s administration had resettled in the Otto-
man capital.^33 First he suggests that those who left Salonika after 1912
(assuming they were Turks, and that life for Turks under Greek rule was
impossible) desired to educate their children in the manner and way in
which they were accustomed. Despite there being other “modern” schools
in Istanbul, they thus set up their own: Yeni ( 1915 ), Feyziye ( 1917 ), Şişli
Lisan ( 1919 ), and Feyz-i Ata ( 1921 ). But as seen in Reşat Tesal’s autobiogra-
phy, quoted at the beginning of this chapter, another reason was the way
Dönme children were being mistreated in Istanbul schools.
At first, most Karakaş settled in Bakırköy. But as the number of mi-
grants increased, they began to settle in other districts, including Sulta-
nahmet, Gedikpaşa, Teşvikiye, and Şişli, where their children faced the
problem of getting along with other children at school ( 140 ). For the Sa-
lonikans, the years between 1917 and 1923 were the most difficult, because
“these migrant children were continually marked as Greeks or Jews, and
not understanding why they were subject to this treatment from other
children, had a hard time” ( 141 ). In addition, the fact that these migrants
had financial difficulties and lived humbly, unlike their schoolmates, only
exacerbated the problem.
In this context, leading Karakaş families built a school first in Bayezid.
On Jacques Pervitich’s 1930 s map, it appears as an école Turque ( 144 – 45 ),