Istanbul
being from their place of origin, although it was outside the boundar-
ies of the nation-state to which they now belonged. Tombstone inscrip-
tions mark a life’s journeys and final return, even if symbolic, to one’s true
home. Graves marked “Salonikan” urge the visitor to imagine that the
deceased, and thousands lying next to him or her, may have died in this
land, but belonged somewhere else. Burial marked the loss of the abil-
ity to return. Kapancı Dönme remembered, did not wish to forget their
origin. The grave of Kapancı Nuri Rasim has a section that speaks in the
voice of his brother Etem:
I spent my life suffering from many illnesses. I learned English, French, and
German language and literature. Shortly after we inherited our father’s father’s
business in Manchester, I left it to my brother Nuri, the true inheritor of my
success, who elevated the family. I was buried at the age of twenty-two in
Salonika. Now, not even my bones remain. In order to remember my name,
they put my photograph on Nuri’s grave.Etem’s disembodied voice speaks to Salonikan mobility, mentioning En-
gland and Turkey, but ultimate belonging in Salonika where his body lies.
The Dönme lost their city and even the desiccated bones of their dead,
but not the memory of their origins.
It is not unusual to find headstones of Dönme graves from the 1920 s that
speak to a life of mobility. Mobility also means that people may die far away
from their homelands. Written in her voice, the tombstone of the seven-
year-old Kapancı Aisha, daughter of Asıf Efendi, mentions how “my father
died in a foreign land.” “Graves, while they are endpoints for migrants,
are beginnings for their descendants, marking the truth of their presence
in a land,” Ho observes.^53 The era of cosmopolitanism was at an end. The
Dönme had to acknowledge that they would not be able to return to Salo-
nika. By the 1930 s, the distinct Dönme cemeteries in Istanbul had become
the new locus of Salonikan life, among the few places where Dönme rituals
were perpetuated, whether openly or secretly, under Islamic cover.
Tombstones not only mark beginnings and endpoints, but can be used
to mark distinction, difference, transregional identity, and continuing
dispersal and diaspora. The oval photograph on the grave of Kapancı
Osman Nusret (d. 1936 ) is ringed by many Ottoman postage stamps and
a single Turkish one, presenting an intriguing mix of Ottoman and Turk-
ish symbols (fig. 8. 5 ). Represented on the Ottoman stamps are famous
sights in Istanbul: Hagia Sophia, the greatest church in Christendom