Magical Cappadocia

Turkey boasts an extraordinary array of different landscapes, from the Mediterranean coast to the mountainous interior, from parched brown planes, to the damp mountains of the northeast, enveloped in mist and carpeted with wild flowers. Among the most spectacular is the otherworldly landscape of Cappadocia, with its fairy chimneys, caused by the continual erosion of the soft, volcanic tuff rock, soaring up into the sky. With its lush, verdant valleys carving through the brown moonscape surface, Cappadocia is one of the most magical places.

Fairy chimneys, Cappadocia

Humans have also played their part in shaping the landscape. For Cappadocia is another of those regions of Turkey where the ghostly remnants of past civilisations, of people who are no longer there, are all around, images of a world that is no more. Wandering around the valleys that crisscross the hilly terrain, one repeatedly comes across little chapels carved into the rock, and occasionally substantial churches with vaulted ceilings and arches. There are hundreds of them, dating back a thousand years and more. Some are in poor condition now, the continual erosion gouging out gaping holes in their ceilings. Or else they have been damaged by later occupiers of this land who have adapted them for other uses, often as pigeon coops. Altars and little niches have been shaped out of the soft stone. In many, painted designs are still visible, often simple, primitive, drawn on to the bare rock. But others are much more sophisticated, with intricate, vivid frescoes painted by the masters of their day.

Dark Church, Göreme

The most splendid of these rock churches are now properly looked after, and visitors must pay to enter. The Göreme Open Air Museum is a monastery complex including numerous little chapels, the finest of which are very fine indeed. Their original names are frequently unknown, and the names by which they are identified today are often taken from prominent frescoes inside. Most impressive of all is the 11th century Dark Church, so-called because there is only one very small window, letting little natural light inside, which helped to preserve the frescoes. After centuries as a pigeon coop, the bird droppings were scraped away to reveal the best preserved frescoes in all Cappadocia.

In a forerunner of the high-rise dwellings of the 20th centuries, Cappadocia’s residents hollowed out the towering rocks for their dwellings. Holes in the rocks reveal the windows and doors that once led into peoples’ homes. In Göreme some of these rock houses are still in use, wooden doors and glass windows fitted into the entrances. Some hotels have cave rooms. Most spectacular are the huge rocks that once contained whole communities, living in warrens of tunnels and cave dwellings. The immense rock of Üçhisar, not far from Göreme, dominates the landscape for miles around, giving me a bearing on my hikes. The tunnels and caves of the rock itself have now been abandoned, the population living in houses clustered around its base. Similar great rock villages are found at Çavuşin and Ortahisar, also abandoned.

Üçhisar

Troglodyte inhabitants of the past also built vast underground towns, elaborate mazes of narrow tunnels and chambers, sometimes opening out into broad, high caverns, here a church, there a schoolroom, a winery, stables. I visited the underground city of Derinkuyu, creeping along the passageways, hunching over at times in order to fit through the narrow passages. In some places great circular doors stand to the side of the tunnel that in times gone by could have been rolled across to seal off different levels from each other, for defence.

At ground level in Derinkuyu there stands a great Christian basilica, a remnant of more recent Christian inhabitants who only left Cappadocia less than a century ago. By the 12th century, Cappadocia had come under the rule of the Seljuk Turks, and after them the Ottomans. Over subsequent centuries, many of the Christians of Cappadocia adopted the Turkish language, written in the Greek alphabet. Others who continued to speak Greek spoke a dialect heavily influenced by Turkish, known as Cappadocian Greek. As part of the 1923 population exchange between Greece and Turkey, Cappadocia’s Christians had to leave their ancestral home and settle in Greece. The newly arrived settlers quickly adopted the modern Greek language, but some third-generation descendants of those original settlers continue to speak Cappadocian Greek in a number of places in Greece.

Bruce Clark writes in his fascinating book Twice a Stranger, about the population exchange, how things very nearly turned out differently for the Cappadocian Christians. In September 1922, a congress was held in Kayseri, in Cappadocia, of a new, self-proclaimed Turkish Orthodox Church. Its main advocate was a pro-Turkish Orthodox priest known as Papa Eftim. His ambition seems to have been to supplant the Orthodox Patriarchate in Constantinople. For some in the Turkish government, the idea of a distinct Turkish Christian community, speaking Turkish and loyal to Turkey, and with its own Turkish Church hierarchy, had some appeal. Had it come about, it might have given greater substance to the idea of Turkey as a modern secular state, in which different religions could coexist. Turkey might have been a different kind of state. And the Cappadocians might have been able to stay in their homes, as most would almost certainly have preferred, having been largely spared the horrors of war that many other Greek communities in Anatolia had suffered. But it was not to be. In the end, there was not enough support at the Lausanne Peace Conference for leaving the Cappadocian Christians be, and so they were packed off to Greece along with the rest.

Bruce Clark writes how attachment to the old homeland remains especially strong among the Greeks of Cappadocian origin, and that nowhere else in Turkey are Greek visitors as welcomed by Turks, especially if they are of Cappadocian stock. It is a uniquely beautiful land, and the Christians who lived there for nearly two millennia left a powerful imprint. Today, Muslim Turkish guides show around nominally Christian European visitors, explaining to them the significance of the icons, the theology, the Orthodox Christian belief system. Today, after long neglect, the ancient churches are cared for, the cultural heritage of the people who are no longer there valued and preserved. That is cause for hope.

Haji Bektash Veli

Cappadocia is a popular tourist destination. Visitors are drawn by its striking rock formations, its houses, medieval churches and towns carved out of the rocks, its troglodyte underground settlements. It is all very compelling. A different sort of visitor is attracted to the little town of Hacibektaş, a site of pilgrimage for Muslims from around Turkey and beyond. This was once the centre of the Bektashi dervish order, inspired by the medieval sage Haji Bektash Veli, after whom the town is named.

Haji Bektash Veli is believed to have come from Turkmenistan. After his travels, he settled at this town in central Anatolia. The mystical Sufi order he inspired became very influential over centuries throughout Anatolia and the Balkans. It was the official sect of the Janissaries, the elite Ottoman troops recruited among the Sultan’s Christian subjects through the ‘Devşirme’ system of blood tribute. Some have suggested that the eclectic belief system of the Bektashi, with its wide-ranging influences, may have appealed to men who had in their early childhood been Christian. When the Janissary corps was abolished at the order of Sultan Mahmud II in the so-called ‘Auspicious Incident’ in 1826, and thousands of its members massacred, the Bektashi too were driven underground. Although the sect experienced a revival during the ‘Tanzimat’ reform period during the 19th century, it was finally driven out of Turkey in 1925 by Mustapha Kemal Ataturk, along with other Sufi orders.

Haji Bektash Veli, with gazelle and lion

The Bektashi sect’s headquarters was moved to Tirana. The Bektashi had long been influential among Albanian Muslims. Ali Pasha Tepelena, the early 19th century ruler of southern Albania and most of Greece, is believed to have been an adherent. Bektashism thrived in Albania until the communist takeover in 1945, following which many dervishes and babas, the heads of the Bektashi Tekkes (communities somewhat akin to Christian monasteries), were executed. With the banning of all religious practice in 1967, the Bektashi, like all religious communities in communist Albania, were shut down. But since the end of communist rule in 1990, the Bektashi have experienced a revival. While I was working in Albania in 2011, Hajji Reshat Bardhi, the Dedebaba, the overall head of the order, died. Leading politicians and foreign diplomats were among those who paid their respects, indicating the influence of the sect in the country.

A dervish in the early 20th century, Hacibektaş

The pilgrims visiting Haji Bektash Veli’s mausoleum in Hacibektaş when I visited bore witness to his continuing influence outside Albania. The former centre of the Bektashi order is now a museum. Although Ataturk had closed down the sect in Turkey, a sign at the entrance asserts that the ideas of Haji Bektash Veli were applied by Ataturk in establishing the Turkish Republic. Indeed, Haji Bektash Veli’s enlightened teachings were in many ways ahead of his time. He was a noted advocate of the rights of women, arguing that a society that did not educate its women could not progress. Among sayings attributed to the sage in the museum is one that states that ‘In the language of conversation, you cannot discriminate between man and woman. Everything God has created is in order. To us, there is no difference between man and woman. If you thing there is, you are mistaken.’ He was also a pacifist, and in the most famous painting of him, he is depicted holding a gazelle and a lion, illustrating his words quoted in the museum that ‘Greed and malice disappear by love in our midst, Lion and gazelle are friends in our embrace.’

The Hacibektaş complex

The 14th century ceremony and meeting house holds an exhibition of artefacts and photographs, including a group picture of some of the last dervishes and babas when the order was closed down in 1925. In the kitchens, the famous black cauldron of the Bektashi is exhibited. The cauldron symbolised fellowship, and also held a symbolic importance for the Janissaries. In his novel The Janissary Tree, Jason Goodwin describes a murderous plot in the 1830s involving surviving former Janissaries against the modernising reforms of the Sultan. As an ominous warning of their intent, the Janissaries bang their cauldrons, their traditional protest and precursor of violent demonstrations.

The Master House, which contains the mausoleum of Haji Bektash Veli, included the oldest part of the complex. The ‘Cilehane’, or ‘Suffering Place’, is a small room where dervishes would withdraw for prayer and fasting, and is believed to originate from the time of Haji Bektash Veli himself. Pilgrims, the majority of them women when I visited, shuffled around the mausoleum, praying before the tombs of the holy men, reaching out and touching them. One group of men whispered in Arabic among themselves, reading the explanatory plaques in English rather than Turkish. The scene was very much reminiscent of Christian pilgrimage sites, with the veneration of saints. One could see why more orthodox Sunni Muslims might look askance upon Bektashism. The legacy of Haji Bektash Veli is complicated and controversial. Many Muslims claim he did not found any distinct Bektashi order, which only emerged after his death. Alevis claim him as a teacher of Alevism. Whatever the truth, which is by now lost in the mist of the past, I found his humanism, his tolerance, his espousal of women’s rights, attractive, and a valuable counterpoint to so many of the trends in modern Islam.

A visit to Çeşme

My principal motive in visiting Çeşme, a small coastal town west of Izmir, was the hope of seeing a little bit of the lost world of the cosmopolitan Levant that had been partly preserved. Izmir itself, or Smyrna as it had been known, had been largely destroyed by the great fire of 1922 and the depredations of 20th century town planners. Çeşme is, of course, now a Turkish town, its Greek population having departed for good in 1922. The last remnants of the retreating Greek army that had been routed by the Turks in the summer of 1922 had been evacuated from Çeşme. As the Turkish army of Mustafa Kemal entered Smyrna, the last Greek troops were still hastening away.

Çeşme is a charming little town. Many old houses, once the homes of rich Greek merchants, still survive. The main street leading down to the seafront is dominated by the large Greek basilica of Ayios Haralambos. It is no longer used for the purpose it was built, its congregation having departed. When I visited, it was firmly bolted, although it is sometimes used for exhibitions.

Just across the water from Çeşme is the Greek island of Chios. The town and the island have long been closely linked, and many of Çeşme’s onetime Greek inhabitants moved to Chios during the population exchange in 1922-23. Now they are linked again, by tourism. Regular ferries carry visitors, Greeks and Turks among them, back and forth. One waterfront restaurant in Çeşme had a menu in Greek, including Greek coffee, identical to Turkish coffee, but the name is important to Greeks. Before travelling to Çeşme, I read online the account of a Turkish visitor to Chios who, asked at a supermarket checkout whether he was Turkish, was told that in that case he could have a discount.

The owner of the guesthouse where I stayed told me that hotel owners from Çeşme and Chios cooperated in order jointly to promote tourism. He told me of an initial meeting at which one of the Çeşme Turks had produced old photos from before the population exchange. A Greek from Chios had recognised his grandfather in one of them. It was evidently an emotional moment. In his book, Twice a Stranger, Economist journalist Bruce Clark described cases of emotional visits to towns or villages by descendants of people who had been forced to leave during the population exchange, often welcomed with open arms by the current residents.

The population exchange had been a traumatic experience, people uprooted from their homes and forced to move to an alien country, whose language, in some cases, they did not even speak. Many retained a lifelong attachment and nostalgia for the places they had left. Visiting Thessaloniki a few weeks earlier, I was told by a Greek man that he could remember as late as the 1950s that one cinema in the town continued to show Turkish films to audiences of Greeks who had been born in Turkey.

Cezayirli Gazi Hasan Pasha, with lion, Çeşme

The Çeşme seafront is dominated by the castle. A plaque states that it was built in 1508, during the reign of Sultan Beyazit II, although some believe there was already a fortress there, built by the earlier Genoese rulers. Outside the castle walls stands a statue of Cezayirli Gazi Hasan Pasha, the Ottoman admiral at the Battle of Çeşme, in 1770. Hasan Pasha is hailed as one of the greatest Ottoman admirals, and he went on to hold the position of Grand Vizier, second only to the Sultan in the Empire. All this seemed rather peculiar given that the battle ended in defeat for the Ottoman fleet, at the hands of the Russians. Inside the castle is a museum devoted to the battle and the background of European politics at the time. Again Hasan Pasha is lauded for his outstanding performance during the battle. He had succeeded in sinking the Russian flagship, losing his own flagship in the process. The museum’s exhibits delight in taunting the then Russian Empress Catherine the Great for her expansionist policies as well as her notorious carnal appetites. Two cartoons from the contemporary British press are displayed. One shows the devil offering Catherine Constantinople and Warsaw in a dream. Another shows the Empress striding across Europe’s monarchs from Russia to Constantinople, while the monarchs gawp up her skirts and make lascivious remarks.

The temptation of Catherine the Great

At one time, Çeşme had been a popular retreat for the wealthy of Smyrna. Nowadays it is a favoured resort for Istanbul’s smart set. Next to the castle is a caravanserai built in the 16th century on the order of Suleiman the Magnificent. Now it has been renovated as a smart hotel. Non-guests are allowed to peak in. There are good fish restaurants in Çeşme. The lowness of the prices led me to believe that the fish on offer must be farmed. But they were so tasty that I think they were wild. Delicious. Though I did not particularly like the local habit of washing it down with raki.

Izmir: Once there was a city

Visiting Izmir, I knew I was coming to a large modern town. I was fascinated by the city’s past, and wanted to search out some of the remnants of what Izmir had once been. But I had no illusions, and was not expecting much. There are older pockets, notably the bazaar area, a warren of busy narrow streets clustered around the town’s oldest mosques, close to the Konak, the centre of the city’s government. Older buildings are also dotted around the streets just behind the long seafront quay, the Cordon. But most of Izmir is modern, ugly and uninspiring. It was not always so. For Izmir was once Smyrna, one of the great cosmopolitan metropolises of the Levant, a splendid jumble of different nations, religions, cultures and architectural styles.

Visitors to Smyrna in the 19th century and at the beginning of the 20th described it as a kind of paradise. Giles Milton titled his book about the destruction of the city in the fire of 1922 ‘Paradise Lost’. Phillip Mansel, in his book about the cities of the Levant, cites several visitors who were overwhelmed by Smyrna’s charms. The Turkish writer Naci Gundem described it as like a ‘fairy-tale country’, with ‘a magic atmosphere which made the most depressed souls end by laughing.’ The British writer Norman Douglas, who visited in 1895, wrote that it ‘seemed to be the most enjoyable place on earth.’ Like many visitors, he was struck by the city’s cosmopolitan character, ‘the variegated crowds about the harbour, eastern bustle and noise.’

Smyrna as it was

As in other great Levantine cities, several nations rubbed shoulders in Smyrna, and many languages were spoken. As well as Turks, there were large Greek, Armenian and Jewish communities, as well as western European ‘Franks’: French, British, Italians and Dutch, and, by the beginning of the 20th century, Americans. Trade built Smyrna, and fabulous fortunes were made. Many of the western European families had lived in Smyrna for generations. Some of them had never visited their professed home countries. They were Levantines, and Smyrna was their home. Christian churches of various denominations, mosques and synagogues all contributed to the colour of the city.

But tension in Smyrna was never far below the surface. For Turks, the privileges enjoyed by the western Franks under the notorious ‘Capitulations’, and the powers granted to their consuls, were a source of humiliation. The wealth of Greek and Armenian merchants was resented. Conflicts among the great powers all too often brought bloodshed to the streets of Smyrna. The Battle of Çeşme, 50 miles west of Smyrna, in 1770, when a Russian fleet destroyed its Ottoman counterpart, was followed by a massacre of Smyrna Greeks, whose enthusiasm for their fellow Orthodox Russians was well known. Then, as on later occasions, Christians took refuge on foreign ships moored in the harbour. In 1797, the murder of a janissary by two Cephalonian Greeks led to a rampage along Frank Street, the centre of the western European community, and the burning of churches and consulates. Hundreds of Christians, mainly Greeks, were murdered, and the fires spread to the Greek and Armenian quarters. The Greek revolt in 1821 brought massacres of Greeks in Smyrna, as in Istanbul.

Greeks were not always the victims. On several occasions in the 19th century, Greeks in Smyrna accused Jews of ritually sacrificing Christian children, leading to attacks on Jews. In 1901, the bells of St. Photeini monastery rang out to call people to anti-Jewish riots. Yet despite all this, Smyrna’s cosmopolitan character endured. The Greek community thrived. Its schools were considered among the best in the town; its cultural life was rich; its merchants built opulent mansions. Smyrna’s Jews continued to build synagogues. And when the authorities had the will, they could limit the fallout of interethnic strife. In 1895 and 1896, Armenian terrorist attacks in Istanbul were followed by massacres of thousands of Armenians, but in Smyrna the governor organised patrols to prevent such revenge attacks. When in 1915 the order came from the Ottoman government to deport Smyrna’s Armenians, the city’s enlightened governor, Rahmi Bey, a cosmopolitan Levantine to his core, refused to comply. As in Salonika, following the Young Turk revolution in 1908 there was an outpouring of joy and optimism in Smyrna that cut across ethnic and confessional lines.

Yet any appearance of positive inter-communal relations, or of an over-arching Smyrna identity that could encompass differences, proved illusory, or at best a very thin veneer. It began to fall apart with the Balkan wars of 1912 and 1913. Some Turks now considered that only the loyalty of Muslims could be counted on. Mustafa Kemal (later Ataturk) recorded seeing the Cordon in Smyrna ‘full of members of a race which was our sworn enemy.’ Greeks, for their part, no longer disguised their longing to be incorporated in the mother country, which increasingly funded Greek national organisations in Smyrna.

The peculiar Levantine world survived in Smyrna in the First World War. While many British and French Smyrniots left to fight in their respective armies, others remained behind, and, despite some initial difficulties, continued to live much as before, protected by Rahmi Bey. Western-owned businesses continued to operate, even supplying uniforms to the Ottoman army. This was a feature of Smyrna. During an earlier war with Greece, the Smyrna authorities had allowed Greeks, Ottoman subjects among them, to go off to join the Greek army, with flags flying and the Greek anthem playing, and with tickets and food provided by the Greek consul.

The old Muslim quarter, Izmir

Smyrna’s tragedy began with the arrival of Greek troops in May 1919. The First World War was over. At its close, Greece was on the winning, Allied side, and its government looked forward to picking apart the corpse of the prostrate Ottoman Empire. Following the Greek landing, a fight broke out at the Ottoman barracks, near the Konak, leading to hundreds of deaths, mainly Turkish. Some Turkish prisoners were summarily killed on the Cordon, and Greek soldiers ran amok in the Muslim quarter. A few Greeks still wearing the fez were mistaken for Turks and also killed. But the Greeks, in their hour of triumph, had not reckoned with Mustafa Kemal, who was soon beginning to organise Turkish resistance in Anatolia.

Yet under Greek occupation, Smyrna’s cosmopolitan spirit still hung on, in large part thanks to another enlightened ruler, the Greek High Commissioner, Aristides Sterghiades. He had governed the partly Muslim city of Ioannina, near Greece’s border with Albania, in 1913, and he was determined to maintain good relations with Muslims in Smyrna. He punished some who had murdered Turks following the Greek army’s arrival, executing ringleaders. During his period in control, Turkish remained an official language, alongside Greek, and the number of Turkish-language newspapers actually increased. Some Turkish officials cooperated with the new regime. Smyrna’s Greeks loathed him.

But Smyrna could not survive the brutalities of the war in Anatolia. The Greek army came close to capturing Ankara, but, as its lines of communication were over-extended, and as Kemal’s army grew in strength, its fortunes were reversed. Following its rout in August 1922, its soldiers fled pell-mell for the coast, slaughtering, burning and raping as they went. Many of the Turkish soldiers advancing behind them were bent on revenge. On 9 September, the first Turkish troops entered Smyrna, Kemal arriving the following day. Kemal issued a proclamation threatening death to any Turkish soldier who harmed civilians. It had no effect. The Orthodox Archbishop, Chrysostomos, a firebrand Greek nationalist and a figure of hate for Turks, was torn apart by a mob as he left a meeting with the newly appointed city governor at the Konak. Some Turks who had collaborated with the Greek occupation were murdered.

As pillage, rape and murder escalated, fires began to be set in the Armenian quarter. Having been spared under Rahmi Bey, Smyrna’s Armenians were finally subjected to the wrath, the extraordinary vindictiveness harboured by many Turks towards their nation. When, on 13 September, the wind changed direction, blowing away from the Muslim and Jewish quarters, the various fires in the Christian quarters merged into an inferno. Most of the Greek and Armenian quarters, and much of the Frankish quarter, were engulfed. The human catastrophe which followed was witnessed from the foreign ships standing out in the harbour, and by many Europeans and Americans who remained in the city. People with foreign passports had been taken aboard British, French, Italian and American warships. The remaining Christians crowded on to the Cordon, hundreds of thousands of them, hemmed in by the fire behind, the sea in front, and Turkish soldiers to either side. The Cordon, the glory of Smyrna, which Naci Gundem had written made Smyrna Smyrna, became a scene of Hell.

Smyrna burns, 1922

Watching through binoculars from the ships, sailors saw Smyrniots on the quay robbed, pushed into the fire or into the sea, and beaten or stabbed to death by Turkish soldiers and irregulars. Young girls were picked out, raped, and often horribly mutilated. The sea was choked with corpses. The stench reached the ships, where some played music in order to drown out the noise of the unfolding horror. Some swam out from the Cordon to the ships, where they were not always welcomed. At last, the British admiral ordered that boats be sent to take some of the people off; some capsized under the weight of desperate humanity.

After the fire had burned itself out, Kemal ordered that the remaining Greeks and Armenians be expelled. Women and children, as well as older men, were evacuated, many of them by flotillas of private boats organised by American charity workers and under American flags. Men of military age, often defined very liberally, were marched off into the interior, to be abused, starved, murdered and worked to death. Few survived.

What of the responsibility for the tragedy at Smyrna? The official Turkish position has long been that the fires were started by Armenians and Greeks. That was what Kemal told the French consul while the fire was still raging. This assertion is repeated in the displays at the Ahmet Priştina City Archive and Museum, which I visited during my stay in Izmir. Yet numerous witnesses, including Americans and French, who were present in the city when the fires started, reported seeing Turkish soldiers and irregulars starting the fires. And contrary to official claims, it seems they were working under orders. Some Turkish witnesses later cast doubt on the official position. Kemal’s Chief of Staff, Ismet Inonu, later wrote that the young said they were following orders, while the old blamed lack of discipline. A Turkish journalist, Falih Rifki Atay, wrote in his memoirs that he was determined to tell the truth. The story he told was different to the reports he had written at the time. ‘Were those responsible for the fire really the Armenian arsonists, as we were told in those days,’ he asked? Quoting from his contemporaneous notes, he asked ‘why were we burning down Izmir’, just as they burned all the Armenian districts in Anatolia during the deportations of 1915? He was not alone in blaming Nurettin Pasha, the nationalist city governor appointed by Kemal, who he described as ‘a dyed-in-the-wool fanatic and rabble-rouser’.

There is something especially repugnant and unworthy about blaming the enormous tragedy visited upon the Christians of Smyrna, the arson, the theft, the mass rape, the wholesale slaughter, on the victims themselves. Kemal was present in the city. His callousness was revealed by his statement at a celebratory dinner while the city burned, ‘Yes, let it burn! Let it crash down! We can replace everything.’ To what extent Turkish soldiers and irregulars acted under orders and to what extent they ran amok, they were under his command; they and their actions were his responsibility. Not a national hero; a war criminal, plain and simple.

A new city has been built on the ruins of burned Smyrna. The bustling Turkish quarter, with its bazaar, its mosques, its cafes and kebab houses, is still there. It escaped the blaze, surely not coincidentally. Beyond the old Muslim quarter, a synagogue stands behind a high wall topped by a still higher wire mesh fence, testament to the once flourishing Jewish community. Nearby, the Asansor, a high lift, still takes people up the steep cliff face to the town above. It was built by a Jewish philanthropist at the beginning of the 20th century.

Where the Armenian quarter once stood, there is now a large city park. It does not blot out the memory of the horrors perpetrated there. Walking in Izmir, I found myself thinking of Lady Macbeth: ‘out, damned spot’. Ataturk had built a new city, but he had not managed to wash away the blood on his hands.

An old street, Izmir

Some other remnants survived. Although the long boulevards running parallel with the Cordon are now largely modern, soulless, a few buildings from before the fire remain, and some of the shady narrow streets running inland from the coast are intact, retaining an echo of the charm of old Smyrna. Here and there, grand buildings survive. Little clusters of old buildings stand out on the Cordon, one of which was occupied by Ataturk during his stays in Izmir, which now houses a museum. Another, now the Greek consulate, defiantly flies the Greek flag. The Roman Catholic church of St. John Polycarp, a bishop of Smyrna martyred in AD 167, survives. Like many Christian churches in Turkey, it sits behind high walls. Unfortunately, the church only grants visits to groups. I was turned away by an unfriendly voice on the entry phone. The 19th century Anglican Church in Alsancak, the former Frankish quarter, also survived. It contains a plaque honouring the members of Smyrna’s British community who gave their lives in the First World War, fighting on the opposing side to Turkey.

Old photographs of pre-1922 Smyrna show a bustling city, the Cordon packed with people, horses and carts, produce being loaded on to the ships that crowded along the length of the quay. Modern Izmir is a sad place by comparison. The Cordon is a wide open space, a featureless park dotted with young hand-holding lovers. When I visited, there was no shipping along the quay, just a few grey warships further out in the bay. The one similarity is the fishermen casting their rods along the quay, both then and now. With few exceptions, the buildings along the Cordon are modern blocks. There are cafes, but none of them match up to the elegance, the style of old Smyrna. When Kemal arrived in Smyrna, before the fire destroyed it, he drank a raki at the Hotel Kraemer. Now an equestrian statue of Kemal stands where the famous hotel once stood. On its plinth is a plaque quoting Kemal’s famous words to his troops as they set out on their advance towards Smyrna: ‘Soldiers! Your first goal is the Mediterranean.’ The statue looks forlorn and alone, with major roads passing around it on all sides. Is this ugly, modern Izmir what they fought for?

I had a similar feeling when I visited the Konak, the seat of government. In front of it stands the clock tower, built in 1901, that has become a symbol of Izmir. Old photos show the clock at the centre of a busy, attractive square. No more. The area in front of the Konak has been cleared. The clock looks lost in a large empty space. So does the attractive little old mosque nearby, with its beautiful, colourful tiles, lost among concrete and hideousness. Much like Thessaloniki, having been destroyed by fire, Izmir fell victim to the worst of 20th century town planning and architecture. Following the fire, The Times wrote that ‘one of the richest cities in the Levant is like a skeleton’. Izmir was rebuilt. But the spirit of the marvellous, rich, diverse city that was Smyrna was destroyed forever.