Postscript
In 2005 , the Üsküdar Municipality finally contracted with a private
security firm to hire guards to police the cemetery and keep away vandals
who come to break the oval porcelain photographs on the tombstones,
believing that it is a sin to display photographs of the dead. Despite the
guards, however, the pictures of Dönme on the gravestones marked with
the word “Salonikan” are being chipped away one by one. Barely discern-
able among the clamor of conspiracy theories, the voices of the past carved
in the stones are just about all that remains. Having lost their pictures
and Salonika, their ghostly home city, to which there is no returning, the
graves in the Valley of the Nightingales still call out: “O visitor!.. .”