Book Review: Paradise Lost: Smyrna 1922, the Destruction of Islam's City of Tolerance

One striking place in Izmir is the harborside that separates Alsancak from the bay--an 80-meter-wide, green, grassy park, perfect for strolling. It is called the Kordon by Izmirians, and it stretches one kilometer along the waterfront. Simple math shows that it is 80,000 meters squared.

On a typical evening, the park fills will people strolling. A few fishermen stand at the water. There is a bike path and a tramway. Every few hundred meters there is a playground--or a statue of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk. People are hawking sunflower seeds or Gevrek, a special type of bagel, covered with roasted sesame seeds. Once, I saw a man carrying two thermos bottles and paper cups, selling Chai.

But as I learned, reading Giles Milton's Paradise Lost, no matter how much the harborside seems like a place of leisure and tranquility, it is the sight of one of humanity's greatest tragedies: a fire that consumed the city in September of 1922 and put an end to the complex balance of Greeks, Turks, Armenians, Jews, and Levantines* that seem like a golden age almost 100 years later. (*Europeans whose business interests had kept them in the area for generations).

Milton focuses on the Levantine community, an assembly of two or three dozen families who made their homes in the tony suburb of Bournabat, in the hills east of the city. Of British, French and Dutch origins, the families had lived in Smyrna for generations--and the hardships of late-1922 would show them how weakly the British "motherland" supported them.

The subtitle of the book implies that Smyrna was a city of tolerance--a town 'too busy to hate' and the pearl of the Aegean. But the reader learns quickly that there was a fragile racial balance in the city, with an ethnically homogenous "quarter" for Armenians, Turks, Greeks, Jews, and Europeans, in this seemingly heterogeneous community.

The tragedy for the Turks stretched back a century before 1922, as the Ottoman Empire shrank under an onslaught of Russian and Austrian invasions, as well as nationalist uprisings in Greece, Bulgaria, and Serbia. In the 10 years between 1912 and 1922, the remnants of the Ottoman Empire lost much European territory and by the end of World War I, where the ruling "Young Turks" of the time had tragically backed the Central Powers, the empire was facing its end. 

As leaders met in Versailles to create a new world order, England and France wasted little time. Britain moved troops into Constantinople, where the sultan clung to power. France landed near Adana on the Mediterranean Coast. The Middle East was carved up, with Syria and Lebanon under French control, Palestine and Iraq to the British. The Italians wanted in on the action, and Germany, with decades of investment and sponsorship of the Ottomans, wasn't fully out of the picture.

Into this feeding frenzy strolled Greek politician Eleftherios Venizelos, a lover of classics whose connection to reality may have been weaker than TE Lawrence (of Arabia). His Megali Idea was nothing less than the resurrection of the Byzantine Empire on the bones of the House of Osman. He set his sights on Smyrna, which became the beachhead for a Greek invasion of Anatolia in 1919.

Any why not Smyna? Greeks had ringed the Aegean since ancient times. Homer was Greek, and he was from Smyrna. Milton doesn't mention exact proportions of the population, but Greeks, Armenians and Turks could be found in all but the tiniest villages. So when the Greek army landed in Smyrna, no less than the orthodox patriarch of Smyrna himself, as well as thousands of Greeks waving blue and white flags were there to greet them. And as the soldiers lined up on the pier, the first violence was committed against Smyrnian Turks.

After if "greater Greece" was for the Greeks, there wasn't much need for Turks anymore. Milton implies that much of the racial violence was local in nature: irregulars and militias driving out Turkish families and confiscating their wealth. The Greek army pushed from the coast toward the interior, slowed by nationalist forces, but advancing mile by bloody mile.

In 1921, the Greeks had a choice to make. They held the heights inland from Smyrna. They could consolidate and defend the new borders of greater Greece, or they could charge across the high, dry Anatolian plateau, take out the nationalist army (the only force of Turks with any hope of stopping them). 

They went for it.

At this point, one thinks of Mustafa Kemal, the leader of the nationalist forces, based in Ankara. Greeks were battling for the heights around the city. The British Army occupied Constantinople. It was life or death for Turkey, and Kemal's forces blocked the Greek advance, forced them down from the heights to the Sakira River at the end of 1921 (see image from Wikipedia).

Their supply lines stretched to the breaking point and harrassed by Turkish cavalry. The dream of greater Greece died on the dry plains of central Anatolia. On August 26, Kemal launched a devastating counteroffensive, telling his soldiers, "You're goal is the sea." Kemal and his nationalists wanted all of the Anatolian Peninsula for the Turks.

And so a sort of reverse cleansing of the races occured. Greeks had destroyed mosques and burned Turkish quarters on their push eastward. Now as the army fled westward, tens of thousands of refugees fled with them.

Some of the best chapters of Paradise Lost describe the trickle of refugees into Smyrna in September 1922 that grew into a flood. Many slept in the streets or stayed with relatives if they were lucky. Soon retreating Greek army units arrived, bound for transports in the harbor, waiting to take them home.

But where was home for the region's Greek citizens? Many of them spoke Turkish, even if they worshipped in churches. Their families were part of the fabric of this land. Where would they go?

The Turkish Army took control of Smyrna on September 9. Refugees were still pouring into the city, making their way to the harbor, praying for a way out. But the Greek transports that had whisked its soldiers away did not return.  Milton estimates that 700,000 refugees had come to Smyrna, most of them in the Kordon on the harborside--the area I estimated earlier to be about 80,000 square meters (image of refugees on the harborside from Wikipedia).

Looting was rampant. The victorious Turkish Army had reached the sea, and it would take its revenge. Even worse were the irregular fighters, many of them refugees from towns burned out by advancing Greek forces two years earlier.

Things went from bad to worse on September 13, 1922. A fire broke out in the Armenian Quarter of the city. Milton claims the arson was organized by the Turkish Army, citing testimony in the Royal Courst of Justice by witnesses for a case brought by the Guardian Insurance company. (He also admits that Turkish scholars reject this claim, putting the blame on the city's defeated Armenian and Greek defenders.

One exchange really struck me.

Two Greek firefighters with the Smyrna Fire Brigade rushed to the Armenian Quarter to put out a fire. Sergeant Tchorbadjis recalled, "I went down into one of the rooms and saw a Turkish soldier well armed. He was setting fire to the interior of a drawer. He looked rather fiercely at me when he saw me but he left. I caught the strong smell of patroleum" (p 307).

His partner, Emmanuel Katsaros, recalled a similar interaction at the Armenian Club, which he had been soaking with water to prevent the fire's spread, only to see "two Turkish soldiers enter the building with drums of petroleum. He protested when he saw one of them sluicing petrol across the floor.

'On the one hand we are trying to stop the firest and on the other you are setting them,' he said. 

'You have your orders,' replied the soldier, 'and we have ours'" (308).

(As I am living in Turkey among Turks, I should point out that the testimony comes from Greeks, not Turks.)

One of Kemal's officers protested to the general who would soon take the name Atatürk, "We have taken Izmir (this had always been the Turkish name for the city), but what's the use? The city and half of Anatolia have been reduced to ruins" (p 311).

Kemal played down the seriousness of the ongoing fires. "From his point of view, the burning of this infidel city was a small and necessary price to pay for the liberation of his country," Milton writes (Ibid).  The city's Armenian, Greek, and European quarters were obliterated by the fire. The Jewish and Turkish quarters survived (image below: the great fire of Smyrna from Wikipedia).

The fires raged for five days and nights. Terrorized refugees huddled in the Kordon or leaped into the waters of the bay to esape the heat. A handful of foreign naval vessels rescued several thousand, but they were under strict orders to maintain neutrality and do nothing to agitate the victorious Turks.

A hero emerged on the 19th, the sixth day of the conflagration. An American, Asa Jennings, began with one empty Italian cargo ship whose captain he cajoled into taking on 2,000 refugees. Arriving on the island of Mytilene with these refugees, he found 25 unused Greek transport ships left over from the evacuation of the army. Soon these ships were in action, with more to join later. In the end 200,000 Greek refugees were evacuated. 

According to Wikipedia, between 30,000 and 100,000 died in the great fire--the numbers are hard to total as so many were displaced from interior villages. Another 30,000 to 60,000 were marched into the interior of Turkey, few of whom were seen again (image below: Smyrna after the great fire, 1922).

This was a tough book for me to read. I have been in the Izmir area only a short time, so I haven't been able to go over the details with locals here, least of all Turks, whose language is still quite difficult for me. In my visits to the Kordon, I have noted many monuments to Atatürk, but I haven't seen any memorial for the burned victims of the fire--again, I can't read Turkish either. 

As I began writing this, the calendar counted down. One month from now will be the 100th anniversary of the fire. I'll keep readers posted.

 

I'm not sure why an author named, "Milton," would entitle a work, Paradise Lost. The only Paradise mentioned in the text is an American area where a college was located.