Traveling and Trading The Karakaş Dönme also played a very significant role in the textile
trade. In interviews I conducted, a descendant of Mehmet Karakaş in-
formed me that textiles were most important to the group’s economic
strength.^36 He said that his family name, Sandalcı, does not refer to “oars-
men,” as might be assumed, but to the sellers of a certain type of silk cloth.
He also noted that most of the leading Karakaş families, including the
Balcı, Dilber, İpekçi, Karakaş, and Mısırlı were all in the trade, and said
that the Mısırlıs were descended from Jewish cloth merchants in Spain.
The 1908 French-language report from the Salonika Chamber of Com-
merce lists Balcı and Karakaş as dealers in socks, stockings, and shawls.^37
Tobacco was one of the most important staples in Salonika’s new econ-
omy, and the tobacco trade was also an area where the Dönme, especially
the Kapancı, played a leading role. One example is the family of Kapancı
Tütüncü [Tobacco Merchant] Dr. Nâzım, who would later play a very
significant political role. The Dönme preferred to own their own busi-
nesses, without partners, and to deal only with relatives.^38 Because of the
global extent of the tobacco market, branches of Dönme families such as
that of Kapancı Duhani [Smoke / Tobacco] Hasan Akif, recognized in the
Selânik Vilâyeti Salnamesi as another of the great merchants of the city
and included in the list of four prominent tobacco merchants,^39 started a
tobacco business in Salonika and expanded it into a tobacco empire with
branches in Austria, Belgium, Germany, and England, exporting tobacco
as far as North America.^40 An early nineteenth-century Ottoman-French
dictionary noted that the Dönme were so dominant in the manufacture
and trade of tobacco products that the state referred to them as “the com-
munity of merchants of tobacco.”^41 Foreigners had long commented that
the Ottomans labeled the entire community of Dönme as “the group or
social class of tobacco merchants” due to their long association, at least
since the mid nineteenth century, with this product.^42 It is significant
that the Dönme dominated the production, distribution, and sale of ciga-
rettes, which suited the pace and lifestyle of the turn-of-the-century city
better than the traditional pipe.^43 This was an era of accelerated com-
munication: with the advent of steamboats, and then railroads, the time
needed for a letter from Salonika to reach Paris decreased from a month
in the early nineteenth century to two weeks in the 1860 s and less than
three days in the 1880 s.^44
All those people coming and going needed places to stay, to eat, and to
be entertained. Dönme merchants also owned coffeehouses, hotel cafés,