Conclusion
Accepting that religion was a vital element, we can avoid false dichoto-
mies between progress and reaction, modern and traditional, secular and
religious, or linking tradition to religion and irrationality, modernity to
secularism and rationality, and secularism to cosmopolitanism. Secularity
assumes links to progress, liberty, tolerance, democracy, and the public
sphere.^1 Ignoring the practice of plural, religious empires, modern secu-
larists see religion as a threat to freedom of thought and expression, and
secularism as “a necessity for the democratic life of religiously diverse soci-
eties.”^2 Accordingly, they assume a religious majority poses a greater threat
than a secular majority, that a religious society cannot be tolerant, that
only a secular society can be free of violence, coercion, and persecution.^3
The history of the twentieth century and the experience of the Dönme
argue to the contrary, that secularism guarantees neither democracy nor
tolerance of minorities.^4
Unfortunately for the Dönme, they contributed to a revolution that
set in motion processes of secularism and nationalism. Accordingly, the
transregional impact of the transcultural Dönme, which extended as far
as Paris and Berlin, ran into a wall after Salonika fell to Greece in 1912
and was Hellenized, and the Turkish Republic replaced the Ottoman
Empire just over a decade later. Ottoman Salonika became Greek Thes-
saloníki, and Istanbul became a predominantly Turkish city. Because they
were proponents of and represented cosmopolitanism, the Dönme had
no place in the nation-states of Greece and Turkey.
The world the Dönme had helped create was a heterogeneous one,
based on continuities, connections, and mobility. The Dönme forged
a wide commercial space, whose home base, Salonika, was also their
main site of religious pilgrimage, along with the small town of Ulcinj (in
present-day Montenegro), where their messiah is buried. Pilgrimage did
not take them to Jerusalem, and few to Mecca. Their lives were marked
by movement and travel and transregional itineraries.
Then, abruptly, there was spatial break. People who had once belonged
to many places no longer truly belonged anywhere. A map of the Dönme
world before 1923 was centered on Salonika. It had axes running north
and south, from Manchester to Munich, and west and east, from Paris to
Istanbul. After 1923 , their world was centered in Istanbul, and connected
only to minor Turkish cities such as Samsun, Trabzon, Ankara, and Izmir.
The Greco-Turkish population exchange of 1923 – 24 was a catastrophe,
a major rupture that ended the possibility of a cosmopolitan mode of