New research by an Istanbul - based creative person has documented hundreds of haunting , mahogany - intone exposure belong to Turkey ’s mysterious Dönme community — a once - thriving spiritual religious sect that commit a unique set of beliefs ground on Sufi mysticism and Hebraism . Today , few persist after their true identity was identify .
Dönme is a Turkish term mean to “ grow from one path to another ” or , in this context , to exchange . in the beginning , the biotic community was followers of the heretical , seventeenth - C rabbi , Sabbatai Zevi , who rejected many traditional Judaic beliefs in following of iconoclastic religious mysticism . Proclaiming himself the Messiah , the magnetic Zevi travel the Ottoman Empire , promise Jews impending rescue from their prospicient exile , until the authorities decided to put an end to his troublemaking by offering him the pick of death or conversion to Islam .
Zevi chose to convert , leaving 1000 of followers baffle and abandoned . But some 300 family unit join Zevi in converting to Islam . By the late 1600s , they had build a residential area in Salonika , a urban center with a tumid Jewish universe in Ottoman Greece .
Separate Unto Themselves
This Turkish community was not like the conversos — the Spanish and Portuguese Jews who had been forced to change to Christianity centuries earlier but who practiced their Judaism in arcanum . The Dönme had really and willingly converted to Islam , although their religious practices were charm by those of the Judaic religious sect that had brought them together .
For the next two centuries , they led an autonomous communal life , hewing to endogamous marriage practices , build disjoined schools and cemetery , passing down their mystic traditions from generation to generation .
They were not unseeable , however . Many were prominent citizen and businessmen who helped transmute Salonika into a widely distributed middle of commerce . And , they take on a salient role in the Young Turks movement that , in the other 20th C , pushed for ending the absolutistic might of the Sultan and ushering in a modern nation .
The fateful turning full point for the biotic community follow in 1912 , when their city was conquered by Greece , and most of them resettle in Istanbul — where it was harder to blend in and go unnoticed . As Adam Kirsch , a conduce editor for Tablet Magazinewrotein an clause about the Dönme :
Now in the public eye as never before , they were the subject of a number of muckraking paper articles and Word … . In 1919 , one anonymous publishing accused them of being inbred to the degree of biological degeneracy … .At the same clock time , the Dönme were said to be “ always occupied with Department of Commerce . Because they do not view others to be human , they consider it among the law and applaudable qualities of their religious belief to cheat other nations with various intrigues and schemes . ”
It is unsufferable to miss how closely such anti - Dönme magniloquence resembles anti - Semitic rhetoric , both the modern biological type and the traditional economical type . The Dönme may not have been Jews , but they functioned in the Turkish imagination as Jews — they were cliquish , untrusty foreigner , who were actually more threatening than the existent Jews because they had so long pretended to be Muslims .
In the 1920s , then , as the modern Turkish state was founded on a racial and nationalist basis , the Dönme get along in for severe discrimination . Even one big Dönme journalist wrote that “ this problem must be decisively liquidated , ” so that those Dönme “ who are truly Turkish and Muslim [ can be ] distinguished in public opinion … and carry through from the necessary of acquit on their back the social stain . ”
Soon enough the “ trouble ” was knock off , through exogamy and acculturation .
By mid - 100 , the Dönme had begun to go away as a separate residential district , and today their burial site in Istanbul are the only place where their existence is really manifested as a distinct group .
Portraits Of A Community
It was these secluded graveyards that came to the attention of artist and research worker , C.M. Koseman .
“ In the last months of 2011 , I developed an unnatural phobia of demise — of someone hurting or killing me , or of bonk one intrust felo-de-se , ” he come back . “ I grew paranoid and ended up hurting mass who were important for me . In the conclusion I realise that I had to confront these phobic neurosis . so as to defeat my fears , I began taking treks in onetime burying ground across Istanbul . ” It was on one such trek that Kosemen notice the old tombstones with pic signed by the same man , Osman Hasan .
For three year the unseasoned artist pull together and document the tombstone portraits of the Dönmes , mainly from the Bülbülderesi ( Valley of the Nightingales ) cemetery on the Asiatic shore of Istanbul . His piece of work uncovered a routine of dramatic portrait , as well as a variety of important architectural and liturgical details of Dönme gravestone . “ The research rise in scope and detail as I guarantee more trips to the necropolis , ” he say . “ I was introduced to one of Osman Hasan ’s last living descendants , who told me of other portraits by Osman Hasan in several other cemeteries across Istanbul . Aside from the pic , I discovered symbol such as anthropomorphic carving of butterflies , planets and stars — bizarre allegories of renascence and metamorphosis . I think many of these symbols have been never been documented before . ”
Kosemen partake in some of these photos with us :
A stone cutting of a humanoid butterfly stroke from Istanbul ’s Bülbülderesi burial site . butterfly stroke symbols are unparalleled to the Dönme biotic community as symbols of metamorphosis .
An obelisk with intricate decoration and the pic of the at rest .
Portrait of the hauntingly beautiful Methafet , who die at a untested eld , possibly as a solvent of self-annihilation .
The name on this gentleman’s gentleman ’s tomb has been erase . This exposure by Osman Hasan is all that remain of his memory .
portrayal of the unseasoned Mr. Osman Ferid . A lot of the photo on Istanbul ’s Dönme graveyard go to untested people who die between the 1890s and the thirties .
This portrait of Madame Hasibe shows Osman Hasan ’s unique artistic technique , which combines photographs with painting .
Recently , Kosemen ’s research was write in a book title , Osman Hasan and the Tombstone Photographs of the Dönmes . “ The current view of the Dönmes in Turkey , is one of faceless , scheming ‘ hidden Jews ’ that can be blamed for anything disliked by any particular political viewpoint , Kosemen says . “ The literature about the grouping is replete with conspiracy theories and antisemitism . By revealing the living , human portraits of the Dönmes , I hope that this book will help cast this group as actual people , and not invisible scapegoats . ”
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