Between Empire and Nation-State
Number fifteen spelled out that notebooks and books must be clean and
orderly and covered in paper; if there were stains, erasures, or doodles, the
teacher would rip up the notebook. The remaining rules prohibited lit-
tering, drawing on walls, and spitting, which was “absolutely” forbidden.
Other rules declared that there must be a very important reason not to
come to school, for a lost day was as valuable as a lost year. Even play was
a required task. According to rule twenty-one, while it was permissible for
students to work in the morning and during lunch breaks, it was forbid-
den to do homework; at recess, it was necessary to stroll or play.
A memoir by the Karakaş Dönme Reşat Tesal summarizes the chal-
lenges the group faced. His family left Thessaloníki following the Greek
conquest of the city, and resettled in Volos, a port city in central Greece.
But life in Volos proved impossible, so they returned to Thessaloníki
after the 1917 fire. By the time Reşat started school, there were hardly any
“Turkish” (i.e., Muslim) schools left in the city, including the Karakaş’
Feyziye. Despite the difficult conditions, his father, Ömer Dürrü Tesal,
was elected to parliament representing Thessaloníki in 1913. He remained
in office until 1924.^28 Nevertheless, life for the Tesals was challenging,
because a mob of Greek refugees forcibly installed themselves in their
home and remained there until the Tesal family left the city. Life for the
Muslim minority in general was very difficult, for it faced constant ver-
bal and physical attacks, sequestration of property, and the closure of its
schools. The last director of the Feyziye school, İsmet Efendi, opened the
“pitiful school” in a wooden shed in the yard of his home with a bent and
crooked desk and a few worn-out benches and tiny blackboard. But it
soon closed, because he was compelled to migrate to Istanbul.^29
The 1917 fire had accelerated the Dönme loss of property. It affected
the Dönme unequally; the worst hit were the Karakaş, because their six
main neighborhoods were burned to the ground. The Dilber family espe-
cially lost many properties and buildings, including factories, first to the
fire, and then to government seizure and appropriation in the subsequent
years before the population exchange.^30 That the fire swept through Kadı
Abdullah neighborhood was an especially bad omen for the Karakaş, for
plans for reconstructing the city affected their main pilgrimage center,
the tomb of Osman Baba. The fire allowed Greek, British, and French
planners to expropriate land, demolish surviving Ottoman structures,
and construct in their place a new Greek city shorn of its Jewish, Mus-
lim, and Dönme past.^31