Keeping It Within the Family, 1862–1908 of worship, the city’s newest and last Ottoman mosque, in the new sub-
urb beyond the city center in a period of literal and figurative smashing
of old barriers. Yet, as always, they erected boundaries between themselves
and others, such as by inscribing meaning into their mosque that only
they were meant to understand and by segregating their dead.
Separate Cemeteries
Death is part of life. Death, like marriage and birth, is one of the times
in one’s life when community affiliations are most clearly articulated. In
death, as in life, Dönme tended to cluster together according to sect. A cru-
cial practice that maintained their distinct identity was burying their dead
in their own cemeteries. In an empire where groups were divided from one
another by religion, this was another clear sign that the Dönme were neither
simply Jewish nor merely Muslim. In Salonika, there were separate Dönme
cemeteries for each sect. Each sect also tended the tombs of its leaders, for
example, that of Osman Baba in the center of Salonika, cared for by the
Karakaş. Although hardly a trace (only a couple of photographs) remains of
these cemeteries, we can piece together information about them.
Salonika did not have secular municipal cemeteries. Each individual
had to be buried by the burial society of a religious community in a plot
of land set aside for its members. If the Dönme had been Jews, or had
been considered Jews by Jews, they would have been buried in the vast
Jewish cemetery in the city, with its estimated 300 , 000 tombstones, the
largest Jewish cemetery in the world,^54 but this was not the case. What
is peculiar is that the Kapancı cemetery was built adjacent to the Jew-
ish cemetery, forming part of its northwestern boundary, to the east of
the Byzantine core of the city.^55 The Kapancı began interring their dead
next to the Jewish cemetery in the early eighteenth century. The oldest
tombstone discovered by archaeologists dates from 1737. Their cemetery
was walled off, forming an enclosed space restricted to Dönme graves,
abutting yet separated from the neighboring Jewish graves. The Karakaş
maintained two cemeteries northwest of the Byzantine core of the city
near the Mevlevi Sufi lodge.^56 Their cemeteries are referred to in the Jour-
nal l’Indépendant’s turn-of-the-twentieth-century city map as “Cimetières
turcs.” The two cemeteries faced each other across a street.