The main place where the Dönme refused to disappear in Turkey was
in the minds of their enemies, where obsession with them was given a
new lease on life with the country’s democratization and liberalization,
especially the freeing of the press and the return of fascist and antisemitic
journals in the 1950 s. Ahmet Emin Yalman bore the brunt of the attacks.
§ When Yalman visited Malatya in Turkey’s heartland in the summer of
1952 , he was unaware that he was being followed by a group of plotters
against his life. One evening after dinner, as he started in the direction of
his hotel on the opposite side of a spacious square a little before midnight,
he “suddenly had the sensation of being showered with pebbles. I had
heard no noise; nobody was in sight. Having had no previous experience
of being shot at, everything seemed to me rather uncanny. My first
thought was that some boys were throwing pebbles at each other from
hiding places, so I stretched out my hand and cried: ‘Stop that nonsense.’
Then I somehow felt that I was in danger and ran toward my hotel.
I suddenly became aware that my right hand was full of blood, and
something warm was dripping from my abdomen and legs. Noticing a
group of men at the hotel entrance, I cried, ‘Doctor! Taxi!’ They made no
response. Judging, therefore, that they must be associates of my unknown
assailants, I started to run in the opposite direction, only to fall to the
ground, unconscious.”^1
Yalman took his brush with death in his stride. Although shot in his
right hand, abdomen, and both legs from close range, the wounds were
not serious. On the second day after the attack, before a wall of newspaper
reporters and cameramen, and his intrepid wife, he addressed his young
attacker: “Hüseyin, you pretend to be a good believer. As such, you mustPostscript
The Shooting of Ahmet Emin Yalman