Conclusion being. Dönme routes were stopped by rigid nation-state borders. Their
circulation was frozen and blocked. They were redirected to a new pil-
grimage destination: Ankara, later the site of Atatürk’s mausoleum. The
Dönme had to eke out a living in a narrow, landlocked commercial space.
The world the Dönme were forced to live in was based on homogeneity,
discontinuity, disconnection, and rupture.
By World War II, at the latest, the Dönme had ceased to be a real pres-
ence in Greece and Turkey, two of the successor states of the Ottoman
Empire, and Salonika and Istanbul had lost their cosmopolitan nature.
Whereas turn-of-the-twentieth-century Salonika had had the smallest
Muslim population among major Ottoman cities, and one of the largest
Jewish ones, Istanbul had had one of the largest Greek populations. At the
beginning of the twenty-first century, however, there were only 1 , 000 Jews
(and no Dönme) in Thessaloníki, a city of over 800 , 000 inhabitants, and
2 , 000 Orthodox Christians (and an unknown number of Dönme descen-
dants) in Istanbul, a city of over twelve million people. Istanbul would not
again become a globally connected city until the 1980 s, after the Turkish
Republic abandoned the extreme nationalism of the early republican era.
These processes occurred long after the disappearance of the Dönme.
Contrary to what it had been half a century before, the cosmopolitan
nature of Istanbul became a source of pride for Turkish nationalists, some-
thing that put Turkey on a par with Europe, a status to be embraced, not
disparaged or expunged. Moreover, in the 1990 s, descendants of Dönme
and others began publishing works explaining the history, culture, and
religious beliefs of the group.^5 Esin Eden and Nicholas Stavroulakis’s Sa-
lonica: A Family Cookbook, based on Ottoman-language recipes prepared
in the nineteenth century by two of Eden’s great aunts, was published first
in Greece in English, and then in Turkish in Turkey. However, the histori-
cal section explaining the history of the Dönme is omitted from the Turk-
ish version. This disparity, according to the preface, “was felt necessary
given the quite different milieux in which the two versions were going
to appear.”^6 This change is evidence not only of a concern to avoid add-
ing fuel to the widespread fear and hatred of the Dönme in Turkey, but
also displays the secularization of ritual, because food formerly had secret,
sacred, mystical meanings for the Dönme.^7 Similarly, Dönme genealogies
compiled since the 1990 s are also without religious significance, being in-
stead the work of family nostalgia. Turkish public interest in the Dönme
only became possible when the group had practically disappeared from