Istanbul
Athens. Perhaps if, like the Orthodox Christians, if the Dönme had been
a religious community recognized by the Ottoman state, with a ceremo-
nial religious leader at its head acting as a patriarch, they would have
been allowed to remain in their home city. Yet the same economic logic
that mitigated against the continued presence of the Dönme in Salonika
was used against Istanbul Orthodox Christians. But at least temporarily,
this much larger population was given reprieve. While there were ten to
twenty thousand Dönme in Salonika in 1923 , there were twelve times as
many Orthodox Christians in Istanbul. That population had already de-
clined by a third since just before 1908 , to 120 , 000 from 180 , 000.^31
The expulsion of Christians and Muslims so that they would not be
able to be potential fifth columnists was an admission that religious mi-
norities would not be considered a part of the social fabric of either Tur-
key or Greece; it was a final turn to xenophobia and away from accepting
a plural society. This contributed to the ethno-religious homogeniza-
tion of the population and economy of each country, the completion of
a process begun in the deportations, migrations, and massacres of the
Russian-Ottoman War of 1877 – 78 , the Balkan Wars ( 1912 – 13 ), World
War I ( 1914 – 18 ), Armenian deportation and massacres ( 1915 – 17 ), and the
Greek-Turkish war of 1919 – 22.^32
To understand much of this violent history, we have to return to ex-
amine CUP ideology and policy. Although after the revolution of 1908 ,
the CUP was less ideological and more pragmatic, still, Darwinism, the
supremacy of science and the struggle against superstitious religion, and
antipathy to religion lurked in the background.^33 The leaders of the CUP
had adopted Turkish racial nationalism and the dominant role of Turks in
the remaining territories of the Ottoman Empire as their main ideology.^34
At the same time, they engaged in secularist policies, which paved the
way to religion being a faith and a strictly personal matter in the Turkish
Republic.^35
The core of the CUP, which planned and implemented policies that
promoted Turks and Muslims at the expense of Christians and other non-
Turkish peoples adopted currents of thought that promoted new ways of
thinking about religious and national difference. Interior Minister Talat
Pasha, who was the architect of the deportation and massacres of Ar-
menians and Assyrians, and Mehmet Reşid, a co-founder of the CUP
and the governor in Diyarbakir in 1915 - 16 who implemented the depor-
tations, were social Darwinists and positivists who believed there was a