Conclusion
society, when cultural and religious pluralism could be viewed as a posi-
tive feature, and when Turks began to once again imagine connections
with the world well beyond the boundaries of the nation-state.
Hellenized Thessaloníki was designated European Capital of Culture for
1997 , after city planners and leaders in the former domicile of the Dönme
spent decades at best neglecting and at worst erasing almost every trace
of its Ottoman past, including its Dönme, Muslim, and Jewish elements.
The city’s most obvious Ottoman symbol, the White Tower, constructed
on orders of Sultan Suleiman I in the sixteenth century, was converted
into a Byzantine museum. The exhibit explains the city’s history only until
1430 , when it became a part of the Ottoman Empire, labeled the period of
Turkish occupation. A panel at the entrance of the museum declares the
tower was built in the sixteenth century, but it does not state who built
it. In the 1920 s, the city’s Sufi lodges, including the Mevlevi, were torn
down. The Véritas and L’Avenir de Orient Masonic lodges did not survive
the rise of antisemitism and the Metaxas dictatorship.^8 Between 1922 and
1925 , the Dönme mosque was shorn of its minaret, made to house refugees
from Anatolia and then turned into a museum and gallery.^9 The Dönme
cemeteries disappeared beneath the new concrete skin of the city. During
the Nazi occupation Ahmet Kapancı’s villa, draped on the street side in a
black banner marked SS and by another in the courtyard with the Death’s
Head, was where Alois Brunner and Adolf Eichmann’s close aid Dieter
Wisliceny organized the deportation of the city’s Jews to Auschwitz.^10
The international trader Mehmet Kapancı’s villa, after housing a parade
of Greek royalty and politicians, ultimately became the National Bank of
Greece’s Cultural Center for Northern Greece. Dönme schools were forced
to close in accordance with the Treaty of Lausanne, and the Dönme pres-
ence in the city was erased from the local Greek historical record.^11
Greek letters above the door of the New Mosque, the most modern and
last mosque built in the city, announce “Archaeology Museum” (fig. C. 1 ),
marring its esthetic appearance and bearing witness to how the modern
Dönme presence, if recognized, has been relegated to the ancient past.
At the same time, this latest cultural layer marks the building as local,
confining it to a fixed, absolute time and space, not the space-time that
connected Dönme from Salonika to many elsewheres, and thus obscuring
the mobility of the people who built it.^12 In 1997 , the mosque became one
of the sites chosen to host exhibits celebrating the selection of the city as
Cultural Capital of Europe.