Keeping It Within the Family, 1862–1908 Similarly, they built their schools where they resided. This ensured that a
Dönme could be born, schooled, married, and initiated into business life
in the same neighborhood, which here seems like a ghetto, although self-
imposed or enforced by communal leaders.
Owing to their international business, religious, familial, and adminis-
trative positions compelling temporary or longer-term dispersal through-
out the Ottoman Empire and western and central Europe, Dönme lives
were not limited to the neighborhood in which they were raised. Never-
theless, their spatial distribution in Salonika allows us to make some gen-
eralizations about the different Dönme sects.
The Dönme were not only open to the new and the international, but
perpetuated that which marked them as separate. For example, the Karakaş
appear more conservative, choosing to remain together in the closed
streets of the city’s medieval core, its predominantly Muslim north-central
district, especially in the six contiguous neighborhoods of Balat, Katip
Musliheddin, Kadı Abdullah, Hacı Hasan, Sinancık, and Hacı İsmail.
These neighborhoods were marked by Karakaş residences, businesses that
Karakaş owned and operated with their extended families, schools (Hacı
İsmail, Sinancık, Katip Musliheddin),^21 and their main pilgrimage site
(Kadı Abdullah), the tomb of Osman Baba, the founder of the group,^22
which the Karakaş visited before the most important life-cycle events, in-
cluding circumcision and marriage.^23 Descendants of Karakaş Dönme told
me that even as late as the 1970 s, there had been elderly people who made
pilgrimages to the still-remembered site and collected small amounts of
its holy earth in jars to take back with them to their home countries. An
interviewee told me that when she tried to take some soil, Greek residents
in apartments overlooking it yelled at her not to disturb a holy site.^24 Ap-
parently, Orthodox Christians had appropriated the memory of the sanc-
tity of the space. This had been the main Karakaş quarter, she said, and
Baruchia (Osman Baba) had his “home” there. The plot of land where the
house had stood was considered a holy spot, and until a few years ago,
it was roped off, with a tree in the middle, but no trace of this remains
today. The famed educator Şemsi Efendi, who is discussed in Chapter 2 ,
owned property on Eski Zindan street near the tomb.^25 We can speculate
that street was the heart of Karakaş settlement in the city and the location
of a secret house of worship and communal gathering.^26
Karakaş choice of these neighborhoods may reflect close affiliation with
the Bektaşi Sufi order, known for its esotericism and antinomianism and