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.’
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.
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.
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.
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.
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