Reinscribing the Dönme in the Secular Nation-State members of their group from elsewhere. A handful of turban-topped late
seventeenth-century Balcı and Dilber family headstones (Ali Agha, son of
Abdullah, 1690 ; Ali Agha, 1697 ) stand smack in the middle of the Karakaş
section of the Bülbüldere Cemetery. It is most likely that the tombstones
were brought here by Karakaş between 1917 and 1923 , because I have only
been able to trace the main Karakaş presence in the city back to the mid-
nineteenth century. Karakaş left their most important tomb, however, that
of Osman Baba, in Salonika, and returned to that city on pilgrimage.
Graves or tombs are “places of return” for a dispersed group when they
are made into pilgrimage sites.^51 The most important tomb for many
Dönme, especially the Yakubi and Kapancı, was that of Shabbatai Tzevi
in Ulcinj in what is now Montenegro. Kapancı insistence on labeling
themselves “Salonikan” on their Istanbul gravestones so soon (less than
a decade) after their arrival en masse in the city points to a motive of
return. It also points to a sense of desire, longing, and absence and loss
(they were expelled from the city where they had emerged and then been
established for nearly two and a half centuries), a code word for a secret
identity (Dönme), a way of perpetuating that identity, a continued sign
of their sense of togetherness, and a displaying of their rootedness in and
identification with one space, even while in exile. It also marks a Dönme
myth of origin that was distinct from that of the Jews, whose myth of ori-
gin and return was not centered on the Aegean Sea. Although Jews were
in diaspora, their imagined origin and place of return (at least in a theo-
logical, religious if not material sense) referred also to a distinct yet dif-
ferent place. When the Dönme had to leave Salonika, their center, their
world, their community, collapsed in an Istanbul that was itself stripped
of its cosmopolitan features in the nation-state, could not be a new cen-
ter. Living in Istanbul affected the choices available to them, especially
issues of mobility.
“In a society of migrants, what is important is not where you were
born, but where you die... place of death is important because it often
becomes the site of burial. Tombstones abroad acknowledge the shift in
allegiance—from origins to destinations—that migrants take whole life-
times or more to come to terms with,” Engseng Ho contends.^52 This is
contradicted in the Dönme case, especially the Kapancı, by their insis-
tence on articulating their Salonikan origins. The Dönme used the tomb-
stones to mark not only their place of birth, their Salonikan origins, and
their place of death, Istanbul, their end, but also identified themselves as