Ottoman Salonika
reactionaries, and Islam, and identifies the Feyziye founders, administra-
tors, teachers, and students with everything progressive. Although never
once using the term Dönme, the author aims to demonstrate that Dönme
actions anticipated the republic. In interviews, Sandalcı also outlined the
secular and nationalist credentials of his family, going back to his grand-
father, who, he says, was entirely against the Dönme tradition, fighting
against it and wanting it to dissolve as soon as possible. For this reason,
Sandalcı says, he and others supported an education in the positive sci-
ences, hoping that it would break the hold of superstition on youth. Un-
like Sandalcı, Mehmet Alkan, the author of the history of the Terakki
school, writes openly that its founders were Dönme and says one of the
reasons they founded schools “was because members of Dönme commu-
nities wanted to educate their children in their own schools,” the Karakaş
at the Feyziye and the Kapancı at the Terakki.^98
Adopting a different strategy from Alkan, Sandalcı told me he did not
want to discuss the Dönme in his book, only to write about a modern
educational establishment, to show what staunch Turkish nationalists and
Kemalist secularists the graduates of the Feyziye school and its successor
have been. This is not too different from the aim of Alkan, who writes
that the Terakki school had been originally founded to “raise a generation
of modern, enlightened people,” exemplifying Ottoman modernization
and the role education played in it.^99 But Sandalcı’s book goes much fur-
ther. It was written to serve as a counter to anti-Dönme conspiracy theo-
ries. He did not want to consider the distant past. To him, it is an ancient
religious story that is unrelated to the school, and in fact, reviews of his
history in the Turkish press did not write about the Dönme aspect.
Sandalcı says that the Dönme schools have neither taught about the
Dönme religion nor raised their students as Dönme since relocating to
Istanbul after Salonika fell to Greece in 1912. The operative part of this
assertion is “since relocating to Istanbul.” While morals play a large role
in the examples of speeches quoted by Sandalcı and the lesson plans he
includes in his book, he studiously avoids mentioning religion and moral-
ity in his analysis of his schools. To do so would upset the narrative of the
schools’ supporters, who engage in a nationalist rewriting of Dönme edu-
cation to fit the aims of the secularist republic. Sandalcı follows a long line
of Dönme writers who have made these arguments. Ahmet Emin Yalman
published his (first) memoir in English in 1956 , as a parable of the trans-
formation from empire to nation-state. For Yalman, the Ottoman Empire