Istanbul
“communism” and property sharing, improper sexual behavior and moral
laxity serving merely to illustrate how dishonorable these dissenters were.
And in the Islamic world, claims throughout the centuries that widely
differing groups have engaged in the same practice of “extinguishing the
candle” makes one cautious about believing whether there can be even a
kernel of truth in such attacks. Furthermore, claims of orgies, sexual rites,
and swinging have interested sexually repressed bourgeois societies since
Victorian times. Writing during the Victorian age, Lucy Garnett claimed
about the Dönme, “As, however, little or nothing is positively known of
their beliefs and practices, conjecture has full scope, and the imagination
of their chief enemies, the Jews, runs riot in inventing crimes to lay at their
door. They are accused of holding secret assemblies by night, at which they
indulge in every kind of immorality, an accusation which has been brought
against every peculiar sect which has made any secret of its doctrine.”^38
The Ottoman-language daily Resimli Dünya published one of the most
lurid accounts of Dönme practice. A three-part account beginning in Sep-
tember 1925 concerned Meziyet Hanım, allegedly a Karakaş Dönme, who
claimed that in 1923 her family, because they disapproved of her being
in love with a man who was not a Dönme, and because she misled them
by lying, saying it was too late not to marry him, for he had already im-
pregnated her, dressed her up and sent her to a secret compound in Fatih,
Istanbul, where she was forced to have sex with relatives. This must have
reminded readers of charges of “extinguishing the candle.”^39 In October,
Resimli Dünya published an account by a young Kapancı who asserted: “I
believe that the ceremony called ‘the extinguishing of the candles’ is still
practiced by the Karakaş. I believe also that it was practiced by members
of my group.”^40 However, because he was single, and the ritualized sex
was only practiced by married couples, he had had no opportunity to
confirm its existence. This may have been a case of shifting the blame or
having the public focus on the other still practicing Dönme group. Otto-
man and then Turkish newspapers in this era were filled of such reports,
and not only about the Dönme. Several years later, Akşam published a
story about how “some individuals who were practicing the ceremony of
the ‘extinction of the candles’ in a room were caught in flagrant délit.”^41
The people in question were not Dönme, but Alevi, another group in the
Ottoman Empire long subject to accusations of immorality.^42
Those who spoke about the custom in the Turkish press were either
outspoken enemies of the group or young people who had only heard