The Bulgakov Museum, Kyiv

The Bulgakov museum, on Andriivskyi Descent, in the beautiful heart of old Kyiv, is situated in the apartment where Mikhail Bulgakov was brought up and lived as a young man. His famous literary works were written later, after he left this house. This was his family home, and he practiced medicine here. But the apartment is also significant because it was the model for the family home of the fictional Turbin family, the main characters of Bulgakov’s first novel, The White Guard. Bulgakov lived in Kyiv during part of the civil war that followed the Bolshevik revolution, and witnessed firsthand the tumultuous events as the various competing armies, White, Red, Ukrainian nationalist, German, came and went. The museum depicts the lives of two families that lived there, the Bulgakovs themselves and the fictional Turbins.

The Bulgakov Museum, Kyiv

Following the February Revolution, a Central Council of Ukraine had taken power in Kyiv, and declared Ukraine’s autonomy within Russia, which was later recognised by Russia’s Provisional Government. However, following the October Revolution, the Central Council denounced the Bolsheviks and declared an independent Ukrainian People’s Republic. The Central Council was in turn driven out by the Germans in April 2018, and was replaced by the pro-German Ukrainian State under Pavlo Skoropadskyi, a former general in the Imperial Russian Army, who styled himself Hetman, the title of the heads of the Zaporizhian Cossack host that had held sway in much of Ukraine between the 16th and 18th centuries. Following the German surrender in November 2018, Skoropadskyi’s rule swiftly collapsed as Ukrainian forces under Symon Petliura, the head of the Central Council’s military, approached the city. Skoropadskyi withdrew with the Germans.

The White Guard opens in late 1918, as the well-to-do Turbins, supporters of the Hetmanate, participate in the defence of the city against Petliura’s army. The novel depicts the chaos of the civil war, the euphoria of many Ukrainians as Petliura, who appears as a figure of almost legendary proportions, enters Kyiv, as well as the terror of those who, like the Turbins, had opposed Petliura. In one particularly heart-rending scene, an entirely innocent Jewish man is murdered by Petliura’s troops. As so often, the Jewish population were targeted for special cruelty.

The White Guard is in a fine tradition in Russian literature that includes Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Pasternak’s Dr Zhivago, that depicts tumultuous historical events through the lives and experiences of a group of people living through them. His take on those events was unsurprisingly controversial. The White Guard was first published in serial form in a Soviet-era journal in 1925, but it was shut down before reaching the end. A censored version was published in the Soviet Union in 1966, but the complete version was not published there until 1989. Nevertheless, Stalin was said to have enjoyed the stage adaptation of the novel, The Days of the Turbins, so much that he saw it multiple times.

Bulgakov has also been controversial in Ukraine more recently. In 2022, following the full-scale Russian invasion, there were calls from some quarters for the museum on Andriivskyi Descent to be closed, because Bulgakov, who though born in Kyiv was of a Russian family, could not be considered a Ukrainian writer, and because he was allegedly opposed to Ukrainian statehood. Since the onset of Russian aggression against Ukraine in 2014, there have been widespread calls to reject all Russian culture, to remove statues of Russian cultural figures and to rename streets named after them, all in the name of “cultural decolonisation”. Such calls have reached a new pitch since the full-scale invasion in February 2022. There is, for example, no longer a square named after Tolstoy in Kyiv, who admittedly had no connection with the city. It has been renamed the Square of Ukrainian Heroes. But the then minister of culture rejected the calls to close the Bulgakov museum. My guide assured me it would not be closed. Outside the museum, a statue of a seated Bulgakov has, like many other statues around Ukraine, been covered up for protection against potential missile attacks. So perhaps Bulgakov, a great figure of world literature and one of Kyiv’s most famous sons, might be safe.

Historical memory in Lviv

Lviv is a beautiful city in western Ukraine. In many ways it has a distinct spirit, reflecting its different historical heritage from the rest of the country. Lviv, together with the eastern Galicia region of which it is the most important city, had spent much less of its history under Russian or Soviet rule. As part of the partition of Poland in the 18th century, Lviv had been annexed to the Austrian Hapsburg Empire. After an attempt to establish an independent Ukrainian state at the end of the First World War, Lviv and the rest of western Ukraine was incorporated into the restored Polish state. But while Lviv itself had a predominantly Polish and Jewish population, with Ukrainians in a minority, in the surrounding territory of eastern Galicia Ukrainians were in the majority.

Dissatisfaction with Polish rule was strongly felt among the Ukrainian population, and radical nationalists of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) carried on a violent campaign of terrorist attacks targeting the Polish state as well as Ukrainians who they regarded as traitors or collaborators. The onset of the Second World War seemed to offer them another chance to establish an independent state under their exclusivist, totalitarian rule. After the invasion and dismemberment of Poland by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union in the summer of 1939, most of the OUN leadership took refuge in the German occupied west of the country, where they established close ties with the Nazis. Following a split in the organisation, a more radical faction, the OUN-B, so-named after its leader, Stepan Bandera, made plans for a national revolution they hoped to carry out in Ukraine with Nazi support.

The OUN-B was a typical fascist organisation of its day, in its totalitarian ideology, its intolerance towards other nations in the territory it claimed, and its vicious antisemitism. Its members adopted the outstretched arm fascist salute, and drew inspiration from other fascist movements in Italy, Slovakia and Croatia, as well as Germany. Bandera, as “providnyk” (leader), throughout his life insisted upon the leadership principle (“führerprinzip” in German) of unswerving submission to the leader’s will.

When the Germans launched Operation Barbarossa in June 1941, they did not allow Bandera to cross into the newly occupied territory. But other OUN leaders were quick to take up the opportunity. When the German army reached Lviv, one of Bandera’s key subordinates, Yaroslav Stetsko, proclaimed a new Ukrainian state on 30 June. The arrival of the German army was followed by a bloody pogrom against the city’s Jewish population, in which a militia organised by the OUN-B took a prominent part.

Lviv’s brief experience of Soviet rule in 1939-41 had been brutally repressive. Tens of thousands of people were arrested, and frequently tortured, and hundreds of thousands were deported. Before the hasty Soviet withdrawal from the city in the face of the German advance, the NKVD secret police were ordered to shoot all remaining political prisoners. Thousands were murdered in NKVD prisons in Lviv.

Memorial to the victims of communist crimes, Lviv

I visited the National Museum - Memorial of the Victims of the Occupying Regimes “Prison on Lonsky Street”, located in one of the prisons where the NKVD murders took place. While the museum depicts the harsh prison regime during periods as a Polish, Soviet and Nazi gaol, its particular focus is on the NKVD murders, during which, according to the information provided, 1,681 were killed, or 41 per cent of the NKVD murders carried out in prisons in Lviv. However, as the historian John-Paul Himka has described, the museum gives an incomplete account of the bloody events at Lonsky prison in the days before and after the Soviet withdrawal from the city in June 1941.

Upon the arrival of the German army in the town, the bodies of the murdered prisoners were brought out into the prison yard, where shocked Lviv residents came to identify their loved ones. As the English-language text at the museum acknowledges, Jewish residents of Lviv were rounded up and forced to carry out the bodies, which were already decomposing in the summer heat. What the museum does not relate is how these Jews were savagely beaten and murdered, and how this developed into a full-scale pogrom, during which Jews were dragged from their homes, beaten and humiliated in the street, raped and murdered. This is a serious omission, made worse by the emphasis that during the Nazi occupation it was mainly Ukrainians, members of the OUN, who were victimised at the prison. Thus while the museum’s account glosses over the massacre of Jews that took place inside Lonsky Prison as well as elsewhere in the city, it presents the organisation whose members actively participated in that massacre as the primary victims of Nazi repression.

In line with typical Nazi propaganda, the OUN conflated Jews with communism. Supposed “Jewish Bolshevism” and the Jewish population were held responsible for the NKVD murders in Lviv, despite the fact that Jews were among the NKVD’s victims. Ukrainian newspapers at the time played up this association, whipping up passions against the city’s Jews. Of course, those newspapers were produced under the supervision of the German occupiers. But the conflation of Jews and communists and hostility to Jews as an enemy of the Ukrainian people were key aspects of OUN ideology.

The English-language text in the museum states that among its aims is “to encourage patriotism among the citizens of Ukraine.” As has been described by Himka, as well as by Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe and other historians, this is in line with a practice among OUN apologists in the Ukrainian diaspora and in western Ukraine to rewrite history so as to glorify the role of the OUN and to minimise, deny or ignore the fascist nature of the organisation, its collaboration with the Nazis and the terrible crimes its members perpetrated. It is a narrative which in recent years been pressed upon the rest of the country as well.

As it became clear that Nazi Germany would lose the war, the OUN tried to distance itself from its earlier fascist associations, and presented itself as resisting both Nazi and Soviet occupation. In fact the OUN-B’s initial overtures to the German occupiers in 1941 had been rebuffed, as the latter had no interest in supporting Ukrainian aspirations to establish an independent state. Several OUN-B members, including Bandera himself, were arrested by the Germans. Nevertheless, many members of the OUN-B militia joined the Ukrainian police force established by the Germans, which participated extensively in the holocaust. And when in 1942 the OUN-B established the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), many members of the Ukrainian police deserted to the new organisation. While the OUN-B tried to downplay its earlier fascism and Nazi collaboration, the UPA continued to murder Jews, as well as massacring tens of thousands of Poles in a genocidal campaign to cleanse the Eastern Galicia and Volhynia regions of Poles.

OUN apologists claim that the organisation was not responsible for the Lviv pogrom in July 1941, for which they blame the Germans and criminal elements in the Lviv population. But as numerous Jewish survivors attested, the OUN-B militia was extensively involved in rounding up the Jewish victims. Furthermore, photographs of the events taken by Germans show that many perpetrators were wearing the OUN-B militia’s armbands. The museum at the prison on Lonsky Street claims to bear witness to the terrible events that took place there. But its omission of the pogrom and silence about the role played by members of the OUN-B, whose members it presents as heroes and victims, is an unconscionable distortion of history.

Close by the Lonsky prison museum is a monument to the victims of communist crimes. It is marked by the Ukrainian trident, and does not indicate that there were also non-Ukrainian victims. However, elsewhere in the city, a monument to the NKVD murders commemorates Ukrainian, Polish and Jewish victims.

Rossoliński-Liebe’s book, “Stepan Bandera, the Life and Afterlife of a Ukrainian Nationalist: Fascism, Genocide and Cult”, describes how, as the Soviet Union collapsed, monuments glorifying the OUN and Bandera began to be erected in western Ukraine. A large statue of Bandera was unveiled in Lviv in 2007. The rehabilitation of Bandera and the OUN was stepped up during the presidency of Viktor Yushchenko, from 2005-10, who designated Bandera, as well as another leading OUN-B figure, Roman Shukhevych, as heroes of Ukraine. This move was reversed under Yushchenko’s successor, Viktor Yanukovych, but the rewriting of history to glorify the OUN as fighters for Ukrainian independence, while glossing over or denying their crimes and their Nazi collaboration has gathered pace since the onset of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine in 2014.

The designation of Bandera as a hero was denounced by the European Parliament as well as by the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Jewish human rights organisation which promotes remembrance of the holocaust. The Simon Wiesenthal Center also sharply condemned the decision of the Ukrainian parliament in 2018 to mark Bandera’s birthday on 1 January. The glorification of Bandera and the OUN is also widely denounced in Poland. The noted historian of the holocaust and of Ukraine, Timothy Snyder, in an article in the New York Review of Books in February 2010, described Yushchenko’s rehabilitation of Bandera as ethically unsound and as casting a shadow on his political legacy.

None of this deters the OUN’s Ukrainian apologists. There is a widely held perception today in Ukraine that their history has too long been seen through a Russian or Soviet lens, and that they should now tell their own story. There is considerable justification for this view. In the Soviet Union, the OUN and Bandera were denounced as Nazi collaborators and criminals, but the immense crimes of the Soviet regime, its savage repression of resistance to Soviet rule in western Ukraine, and the mass executions and deportations, were covered up. In response to any who criticise the glorification of Bandera and the OUN or denounce their record, a stock reply from Ukrainian OUN apologists is to claim that they are spreading Soviet and Russian propaganda. However, such inferences do not hold weight in light of the clear historical record of the fascist nature of the OUN, its Nazi collaboration and the horrendous crimes committed by many of its adherents.

I also visited the Memorial Museum of Totalitarian Regimes “Territory of Terror”, which is located in what was during World War II Lviv’s Jewish ghetto. This was also the location of a Soviet transit camp from 1944-1955, for deportations to the east. The museum’s exhibits and accompanying texts commemorate the mass murder of Lviv’s Jewish residents, both in the city’s ghetto and at the Janowska slave labour camp on the outskirts of the city, as well as the deportations by the Soviet regime. In general, it gives a much fuller account of the horrors inflicted by both the Nazi and Soviet regimes than is the case at the Lonsky prison museum. That said, it does not document the crimes committed by the OUN and the UPA, whose members are depicted as victims. Notably, a series of displays in front of the museum when I visited, about individual victims, mostly concern Ukrainian victims rather than Jews, many of them OUN and UPA, or members of their families.

This troubling lionisation of people with such an unsavoury record is likely to continue to stain the country’s reputation. Ukraine has rightly received enormous international support for its heroic struggle against Russian aggression. Yet key allies, notably Poland, are among the countries that are particularly offended by such historical revisionism. What is especially baffling is that modern Ukraine, a democratic state aspiring to membership of the European Union, with a Jewish president and a Crimean Tatar defence minister, has nothing to do with the intolerant, totalitarian fascism espoused by Bandera and the OUN. Yet it is very hard to find Ukrainians who are willing to push back against the nationalist narrative, at least in public. In recent decades much has been done to uncover Ukraine’s painful history of Soviet repression. A more serious, honest and frank discussion of other aspects of the country’s difficult 20th century history is also needed.

Isaac Babel's Odessa

The Odessa of Isaac Babel’s youth was a vibrant, notoriously rumbunctious place. A city of wealthy merchants and squalid poverty, of high culture and unbridled gangsterism. A melange of nationalities drawn by the opportunities offered in one of the Russian Empire’s most important ports. Odessa was one of the great cosmopolitan cities of the Eastern Mediterranean and Black Sea regions, along with Istanbul, Smyrna, Salonika and Alexandria. Babel was born there in 1894, in the rough and tumble district of Moldavanka, a largely Jewish neighbourhood notorious for its lawlessness and dissipation. The family soon moved to the nearby town of Mykolaiv, but returned to Odessa, to a more salubrious district, in 1906.

Babel wrote his Odessa Stories during the early 1920s. His portrayal of life in Moldavanka in the first two decades of the 20th century, with its close-knit Jewish community and its notorious gangsters, did much to build the legend of old Odessa that continues to define the city to this day. According to this legend, while they preyed on their fellow Odessans, these flamboyant hoodlums became popular heroes, a part of the city’s heritage. In her book, Tales of Old Odessa, Roshanna P. Sylvester portrays the “unsavoury terrain” of Moldavanka, with its “dark allies, filthy streets, crumbling buildings and violence”, but also the “businesslike criminality” of the “thieving aristocrats” and “gentlemen burglars”.

Comprising up to 30 per cent of the city’s population, the Jews of Odessa played a crucial role in the city’s life and its character. As Charles King describes in his history of the city, Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams, they had mainly come from western Ukraine, in the Pale of Settlement on the western fringes of the Russian Empire. Many of them thrived in Odessa, becoming rich from the trade in grain from their old homelands in Galicia down to the port of Odessa and onwards from there. Odessa, with its freeport status, offered a degree of freedom denied to Jews elsewhere in the Empire, although Odessa too was scarred by murderous anti-Jewish pogroms. The world of the Jewish community in Odessa was quite different to that of the shtetls of the western border lands, with a higher degree of integration in the wider community. Just as Odessa’s Jews were prominent among the city’s wealthy bourgeoisie, they were also conspicuous in the seamier side of the city, in the slums and among the criminal gangs of Moldavanka. This was the side of Odessa that Babel portrayed in his stories.

Benya Krik, as portrayed in the 1926 Soviet silent film

Among Babel’s rich cast of characters, most famous of all was Benya Krik, the gangster “king” of Moldavanka. It was a world of filth and squalor, of thieves and prostitutes, violence and murder. But in the character of Benya Krik there was also a kind of gallantry. There was honour among these thieves. When Benya extorted money from Odessa businesses, he sent them his terms in polite, business-like letters. When a senseless murder takes place during one of Benya’s raids, the gangster provides a pension to the victim’s mother and a lavish funeral for her son. For while Benya Krik preys on his fellow Odessans, in his fashion he also provides for the people of Moldavanka.

Babel based the fictitious character of Benya Krik on a real-life Moldavanka crime boss, the notorious Mishka Yaponchik (real name Mikhail Vinnitsky), Mishka the Japanese, so-called because of his physical appearance. According to a profile of Yaponchik in the October 2020 edition of the Odessa Journal, while still in his early teens he took part in a Jewish self-defence unit during the 1905 pogrom. He held on to the weapon he had been given, and was soon robbing the shops and the homes of the wealthy, and extorting money from businesses. Through guile, force of character and sheer nerve, Mishka Yaponchik established himself as the leader of Odessa’s gangs of thieves. Merchants and shopkeepers paid him tribute, and the police were in his thrall. Despite the fear he inspired, Yaponchik presented himself as a dandy, with his well-cut suits, his bow tie, and lilies in his buttonhole. He had a seat at the Opera and his own table at the fashionable Fanconi Café. But like the fictional Benya Krik, he didn’t forget Moldavanka, putting on lavish feasts for the people from whom he had sprung.

Eventually Yaponchik’s luck ran out. With the coming of the Bolsheviks, the world which had made him, in which an astute gangster could reach an unspoken accommodation with the authorities, was gone. He tried to adapt to the shifting sands of the Russian Civil War, making approaches to General Denikin’s Whites when they controlled the city, and even forming a Red Army unit when the Boslsheviks took over. But his cunning and wiliness were not enough to preserve him. Betrayed by his fellow gangster, Grigory Kotovsky, who had also become a Red Army commander, Yaponchik was shot in the summer of 1919.

By the time Babel wrote the Odessa Stories, in the early 1920s, the Odessa he depicted, the Odessa of Misha Yaponchik and Benya Krik, was already a thing of the past. But the image of Odessa from those times lived on in peoples’ imaginations, both in Odessans’ sense of themselves and their city, and in the way that others perceived them. Odessa’s reputation as a free-wheeling port city, and that of its people as sharp-witted hucksters, living off their wits, not always on the right-side of the law, has endured. Odessans are especially proud of their distinctive humour, which, while the Jewish population of the city is much diminished, is said to have its roots in Jewish wit.

Moldavanka is no longer the slum portrayed by Babel, although many of its old buildings are crumbling and run down, and the district is in a much worse state than the vibrant city centre. At weekends, Moldavanka holds a sprawling flea market. Among souvenir stands selling Soviet era medals and other memorabilia, traders lay out pitiable little assortments of tattered clothes and dilapidated household ornaments, the wretched possessions of impoverished households hoping for a bit of change to keep their heads above water. Perhaps this desperate commerce is in some way a throwback to the shady entrepreneurialism of Babel’s Moldavanka.

Was the romance of old Odessa, with its gallant gangsters and gentleman crooks ever real? I have my doubts. Corruption and criminality in today’s Odessa take a different form, and are found above all in the corridors of power and among the well-connected business figures who are granted government contracts, and the construction tycoons who are allowed to flout planning rules. As in Babel’s day, many in the police are biddable, and prosecutors are all too often for sale. In the face of these modern-day besuited hoodlums, ordinary Odessans are powerless and largely resigned. They pay their bribes when they have to, and their expectations of the corrupted state are low. But that they are resigned does not mean they like it. Were Odessans of a century ago who accepted the gangsters who preyed upon them but who every now and then threw a big party any more content with the state of things?

Tradition and Modernity in Baku

I arrived in Baku in the morning, tired and dirty after a long day at Kyiv airport and a night-time flight. Flying up from Odessa early the previous day, my onward flight to Baku was cancelled, and I was re-scheduled on a later flight. But then came the news of the shooting down of the Malaysian airliner over eastern Ukraine that afternoon, and all flights heading eastwards were delayed. I sat in the airport departures area, struggling to communicate with the other three Baku-bound transit passengers, and texting my friend in Odessa about the horrifying news. But eventually we got under way. Do you like the airport, my young Azeri travelling companion asked me when we arrived at the shiny modern terminal building? Very nice, I replied. The city too, he added.

The Maiden's Tower, Baku

Baku is indeed a fine looking city, at least in the city centre. Further out, it resembles a vast building site, with clouds of dust whipped up by the strong winds for which the city is notorious. For Baku has been thoroughly revamped and reinvented in recent years, oil money poured into the transformation of the former Soviet town. Swathes of Soviet-era apartment buildings have been cut down. The old city centre has in part survived the changes of the 20th century. Wandering in the old walled city, narrow, shady streets overhung with balconies retain their charm. But it is quite different from so many other old Muslim towns, such as one sees in Central Asia, with the dusty streets of windowless walls hiding the secret lives of the families behind them. In Baku’s old town the houses are open to the world, with windows and balconies. It is an eclectic mixture, reflecting Azerbaijan’s complex history, influenced by east and west. Previously part of Persia, modern-day Azerbaijan was conquered by Imperial Russia in the early 19th century. The city centre also boasts impressive mansions built with the oil wealth of the early 20th century.

The tension between Baku’s eastern roots and western influences was poignantly portrayed in Kurban Said’s marvellous novel ‘Ali and Nino’. Coming from a wealthy Baku Jewish family, the author moved to Germany at the time of the Bolshevik revolution, and converted to Islam. The hero of the novel, Ali, is a sophisticated product of Russian education, speaking French and English, and with a modern, educated bride, Nino. But Ali is also the scion of a notable Persian Azeri family, and is drawn to his eastern heritage.

Old town and flame towers, Baku

Baku also boasts interesting modern architecture. Beyond the old city, the wavy, pointy tips of the flame towers shimmer and flick at the sky. But the iconic building of Baku is the mysterious, bewildering Maiden’s tower. No one knows for sure for what purpose it was built? Only that its shape, with the long projection jutting out from its cylindrical core, is unique and unfathomable. It appears to have been built in the 12th century, although its foundations may date back several centuries earlier. Popular legend attributes its name to the story of a King’s daughter who threw herself to her death from the tower rather than marry an unloved suitor. Another explanation links the name ‘virgin’ to its never having been taken by force. Some experts think it may have been designed as an astronomical observatory, although it also for a time formed part of the city’s defences.

Baku’s story for the past 150 years has been dominated by oil. Vast fortunes were made here, for the Nobel brothers and the Rothschilds among others. The young Stalin cut his revolutionary teeth as an agitator among the oil workers. Hitler’s drive against Stalingrad was aimed towards the oil wells of Baku, which he considered critical to the German war effort. In the middle of the 20th century almost half the world’s oil production came from Baku. While the city’s wells contribute far less proportionately nowadays, oil has again been central to the country’s efforts to rebuild itself since independence and the disastrous war with Armenia over Nagorno-Karabakh in the early 1990s.

Absheron peninsula

Much of today’s production is offshore, from rigs in the Caspian. But the land around Baku, on the Absheron peninsula, is cluttered with wells, the derricks like some kind of giant, demented birds bobbing their heads up and down, stretching for miles across the flat, dust-blown landscape, pecking away at the oil-soaked earth. It is a forlorn and hideous scene.

For thousands of years oil has oozed, and gas has seeped out of the ground on the Absheron peninsula. In places, once ignited, the ground literally burns. At Yanar Dag (Burning Mountain), a short bus ride out of Baku, flames lick the blackened sandstone of a ten-metre long strip of hillside. It is said it was accidentally ignited by the dropped cigarette of a careless shepherd in the 1950s. Not far away, at the Baku suburb of Surakhani, is the temple of fire, or ‘Ateshgah’. Thought to have been built in the 17th century, it consists of a courtyard, with an altar in the middle, and cells around the perimeter where holy men once lived. On the altar, a fire burns. The shrine was once a Hindu place of worship, and has also been a place of pilgrimage for Zoroastrians, followers of the pre-Islamic religion of Persia. Some have speculated that the site may have been a Zoroastrian place of worship much earlier. The fires at the shrine used to be fuelled by natural gas vents of the type that proliferated around the Absheron peninsula. But the commercial exploitation of the gas wells caused the flames to go out. They are now fuelled by the Baku mains supply.

Ateshgah temple

As in the time of Ali and Nino, modern Baku still has a face to the west and a face to the east. The city centre, outside the old-town walls, has a modern brash feel. On the central square, a statue of a sassy young woman in jeans and a skimpy top holds an umbrella in one hand and a mobile phone in the other. In cafes and bars around the square perimeter evening revellers sip cold beer and tuck into kebabs and pizza. Yet it was Ramadan when I visited, and at restaurants away from the city centre tables were prepared well in advance for the diners who would sit in front of their plates waiting for the signal that it was time to break the day’s fast. Conservatism and modernity exist side by side.

Travellers to Bukhara

From Samarkand I continued by train to Bukhara. A great political, cultural and religious centre through millennia, Bukhara’s many historical monuments have been restored less assertively and more sensitively than those of Samarkand. Although much has changed in the past one hundred years, it is nevertheless possible to get much more of a sense of the old city wandering around its streets and lanes, than is the case in Samarkand. Much has yet to undergo restoration at all. Like Samarkand, Bukhara is attracting more and more tourists, but it is as yet far from overwhelmed. For me it was the most beautiful, the most atmospheric city I visited in Central Asia.

Bukhara was the capital of the Persian Samanid dynasty in the 9th and 10th centuries. The intricate yet beautifully simple mausoleum of Ismail Samani, the founder of the dynasty, is in stark contrast to the scale and bombast of the monuments of Samarkand. In general, Bukahra’s architecture seems to express elegance, beauty and the sense of quiet peacefulness that is so often evident in Islamic design, rather than the power and awe that the great buildings of Samarkand seem to have been built for. But this impression might in part be due to the restoration and rebuilding of recent times, and the redesign of the old centre of Samarkand.

The Kalon Minaret and Mosque, Bukhara

The Kalon minaret, standing at nearly 50 metres, was built in the 12th century under the rule of the Turkic Karakhanid dynasty, which supplanted the Samanids. Circled by concentric rings of geometric patterns, the tower tapers towards the top before opening out into an elaborately decorated gallery. It is said that when Genghis Khan conquered the city in 1220, he was so impressed by the tower that he ordered that it be spared when much of the rest of the city was destroyed. The minaret was once also known as the tower of death, as criminals were for centuries executed by being hurled from it. Fitzroy MacLean, then a young diplomat serving at the British embassy in Moscow, visited Bukhara in 1938, and wrote how executions in this manner, having ceased after 1870, had again been practiced in 1917-1920. MacLean travelled widely in Central Asia and the Caucasus, doggedly trying to evade his NKVD shadows. He wrote about his experiences in his memoir, Eastern Approaches, which also covered his time with the SAS in North Africa and as an envoy with Tito’s Partisans in Yugoslavia. He described Bukhara, where he slept in parks during his stay, as an ‘enchanted city’, rivalling ‘the finest architecture of the Italian Renaissance.’

Down one side of the Kalon minaret there are lighter patches, where the damage done by Boslshevik artillery in 1920 was repaired. In the 1870s, The Emirate of Bukhara, which covered a large territory, including Samarkand, became a Russian protectorate, but retained broad autonomy. When the Bolsheviks first tried to take control of the city in 1918, the last Emir, Alim Khan, had them slaughtered, along with several hundred Russian Bolshevik sympathisers in the city. But it was a temporary respite. In 1920 a stronger Red Army unit under General Frunze arrived, storming the Ark, or citadel, leaving the Emir to flee into exile (he died in 1944 in Kabul).

The Mir-i-Arab Medressa, Bukhara

Below the Kalon Minaret is a 17th century mosque of the same name, which replaced an earlier mosque destroyed by Genghis Khan. Used as a warehouse in Soviet times, it was returned to its intended use in 1991. Inside, a large open space is surrounded by arched galleries. It is said it can fit 10,000 worshipers. Opposite the mosque is the Mir-i-Arab Medressa. Unusual among the numerous medressas in Uzbekistan, this one is still working, and visitors were not allowed beyond the entrance foyer. I listened from there to the students at prayer. Later I looked in at the courtyard, laid out in the typical pattern, with arched alcoves all around, on two stories, where the students live and study, all richly decorated with blue and gold tiles.

Unlike in Samarkand, in Bukhara the historical buildings are surrounded on all sides by the old town. Wandering around its dusty streets there are several unrestored medressas and mosques. Bukhara had once been noted for its numerous pools, which were used for drinking and washing. They also spread disease, and were mostly drained after the communist takeover. But there are a few left, including the Lyabi-Hauz (‘around the pool’ in Tajik), a plaza around a pool, shaded by mulberry trees, some of them very ancient, which is the heart of the old town. Richly tiled medressas fronting on to the plaza cast their reflections in the pool. Where once old men sat drinking tea and playing draughts in the shade of the trees, now there are restaurants frequented by families, as well as by tourists. One afternoon I sat in the shade of a tree by another pool in a less frequented part of the old town, overlooked by a medressa and a mosque, with a smaller version of the Kalon Minaret. Boys played around the pool, diving into the water from the steps. The oldest medressa in Bukhara and all Uzbekistan is the Ulugbek Medressa, built in 1417, unrestored, but with much of its intricate tiling still intact.

The old town, Bukhara

In the narrow streets close to the Lyabi-Hauz is the Jewish Centre, comprising a small synagogue and school. This is the old Jewish quarter, once a ghetto, but with few of its Jews left today. Daniel Metcalfe had written about Bukhara’s Jewish community in his 2009 book Out of Steppe, about his travels among some of the endangered minority groups in Central Asia. He had pretended to be Jewish, discovering his family roots in Bukhara, in order to gain an entrée to this dwindling people. Spotting a man about to enter the Centre, I asked if I could have a look inside. The synagogue itself is small and simple. He told me a bit about the Bukharan Jews. Only a few hundred remain today, most having left as the Soviet Union broke up, for Israel and America, and some for Europe. At the time of the communist takeover there were several synagogues in Bukhara, but only two are left now.

Jews have a long history in Central Asia, some say going back well over two millennia. They have their own language, Bukhori, a dialect of Tajik. In the heyday of the Silk Road, they had thrived, playing an important role in the trans-continental trade. After the discovery of the sea route between Europe and Asia, the Jews of Bukhara went into a long decline that mirrored that of the Silk Road itself. Once a great centre of Islamic culture and learning, Central Asia became a vast, remote and little-known desert. In Bukahra, trade and intellectual enquiry were replaced by ignorance and religious intolerance. The Jews faced persecution and pressure to convert to Islam. Yet somehow they survived. The first synagogue was built in 1620. Before that, it is said that Jews shared the Maghoki-Attar Mosque, praying there in the evening, after the Muslims had finished their devotions. This is the oldest mosque in Bukhara, a mixture of the 12-century original and 16th century reconstruction. The holiness of the site long predates the arrival of Islam. Beneath the mosque, archaeologists have found the remains of a 5th century Zoroastrian temple.

In 1843, Bukhara was visited by an eccentric German Jewish convert to Christianity, Joseph Wolff, who had travelled widely in Asia, the Caucasus and North Africa in search of the lost tribes of Israel. Wolff, having settled in England, had become an Anglican Priest. He travelled to Bukhara in the hope of helping two British officers, Lieutenant-Colonel Charles Stoddart and Captain Arthur Conolly, who had been held captive there. In fact the two men had already been executed by the time he arrived. According to Wolff’s account, he avoided the same fate only because the Emir, Nasrullah Khan, found his clerical attire hilarious and laughed uncontrollably at the sight.

Sir Alexander 'Bokhara' Burnes

Conolly is said to have coined the phrase the ‘Great Game’ to describe the 19th century struggle between Britain and Russia for influence in Central Asia. He was a noted player of the game, having undertaken a journey from Russia through the Caucasus and Central Asia to India in 1829-31. Perhaps the most famous of all the Great Game players was a Scot named Alexander Burnes, an officer in the army of the British East India Company. An extraordinarily talented linguist, fluent in Persian, Hindustani and several other oriental languages, Burnes undertook his travels in local garb, and was at ease in the manners and customs of the people of the region. In 1832, he made a journey from India, through Afghanistan, and up to Bukhara. Burnes became fast friends with the Koosh Begee, or Grand Vizier of Bukhara, but he never met Nasrullah Khan, who had succeeded as Emir five years previously. In Britain his exploits made him a hero, and earned him the epithet ‘Bokhara Burnes.’ He was showered with honours, and granted a private audience with the King. Burnes was later one of the first casualties of Britain’s disastrous retreat from Afghanistan, cut down by a mob in Kabul in November 1841.

Stoddart had been sent to Bukhara to reassure the Emir about British intentions in the invasion of Afghanistan, as well as to try to persuade him to release the Russian slaves in Bukhara, and thus remove a potential excuse for a Russian attack. He was also supposed to sound out the possibility of a treaty of friendship between Britain and Bukhara, whose main aim, as always in the Great Game, would be to forestall Russian influence.

When Burnes had visited Bukhara a few years earlier he had gone to the slave market, describing how ‘the feelings of a European revolt at this most odious traffic’ (it was not long since Britain had outlawed the Atlantic slave trade). He also discreetly met a Russian slave, said to be one of 130 in the city, who had been seized by slavers at a Russian outpost at the age of ten. After 15 years in captivity, the man acknowledged that he was well treated by his master, but said he longed to see his native land. While publicly professing Islam, crossing himself he told Burnes he remained a Christian in his heart.

Stoddart’s mission to Bukhara went wrong from the outset. Unlike Burnes, who had been careful scrupulously to respect local customs during his visit, Stoddart ignored Bukhara’s protocols, riding through the city to the Ark, although non-Muslims were expressly forbidden to ride a horse in the city. A bluff soldier, Stoddart was no diplomat. When summoned into the Emir’s presence, rather than performing a symbolic act of obeisance, as urged to do by a court usher, Stoddart struck the man. Nasrullah Khan had him thrown into prison, into the notorious vermin-infested ‘bug pit’. The unfortunate Stoddart remained a captive for the next three years, some of the time under relatively comfortable house arrest, at other times in the Emir’s frightful gaol, depending on the whim of the capricious despot.

The Ark, then and now, Bukhara

I visited the gaol, the Zindon, close by the Ark, now open to the public as a rather gruesome museum. The bug pit itself, a deep, squalid brick hole, is still there, with a couple of wretched-looking stuffed human dummies completing the grim scene. Bizarrely, the floor of the pit was strewn with money, as if it were a wishing well. I could hardly imagine a more unlikely place to look for good fortune. For the men who languished there, including Stoddart, it must have seemed like Hell.

The Ark itself, with its thick walls, is still impressive. It was severely damaged when Frunze stormed it in 1920, supported by aerial bombardment. Apparently the royal apartments were in a bad state of disrepair even before that. Its entrance is flanked by twin towers built in the 18th century. Across from the Ark is the intricately decorated Bolo-Hauz Mosque, built in the 18th century, where Emirs once worshipped.

Conolly’s mission was no less ill-starred than Stoddart’s. He set out with big plans to persuade the three khanates of central Asia, Khiva, Bukhara and Kokand, to unite against Russia and to abolish slavery. He also hoped to secure the release of Stoddart. Burnes had warned that there was little chance of persuading the khans, longstanding rivals, to unite, but Conolly had not been deterred. He was well received in Khiva and Kokand, but found no interest in his proposals. Indeed, Kokand was about to go to war with Bukhara. So Conolly set off on the final stage of his mission, to Bukhara. His initial welcome by the Emir appeared cordial, but his prior visits to Khiva and Kokand had confirmed Nasrullah Khan’s suspicions that he, as well as Stoddart, was a spy, in cahoots with his old enemies. Furthermore, the Emir was peeved that he had not received a reply to a letter he had sent some months earlier to Queen Victoria, who he considered to be his equal. Conolly joined Stoddart in the bug pit. What finally did for them was the news of the catastrophic British retreat from Kabul in January 1842. The British, it appeared, were not to be feared. On a June morning in 1842, Stoddart and Conolly were led out onto the Registan, the great square in front of the Ark, filthy, ragged and half-starved. Their graves had already been dug. First Stoddart, and then Conolly was beheaded with a large knife.

The stories of Stoddart and Conolly, of Burnes and other adventurers of their ilk, had long captivated me. Peter Hopkirk opened his masterful history of The Great Game with an account of the execution of Stoddart and Conolly. As I walked across the wide space in front of the Ark, now empty, the bustling market that old photos reveal once stood there gone, I thought of those two hapless, ill-prepared, yet courageous men, their remains presumably still somewhere beneath my feet. I have taken part in numerous overseas missions, working for international organisations, some of them in Central Asia. Nowadays we have elaborate security backup, constant communications with headquarters, and security rules that prohibit us from doing anything that might put us at risk. In truth, international workers are sometimes still killed, despite all precautions; several have died in recent years in Afghanistan. But how different are the experiences of the modern traveller to those of the early pioneers, men like Stoddart and Conolly who set out on journeys lasting several months, across little known lands, risking attack by brigands and capture by slave traders, far from any possibility of help, never knowing what their fate might be when they reached their destination. What effete times we live in by comparison.

Magical Cappadocia

Turkey boasts an extraordinary array of different landscapes, from the Mediterranean coast to the mountainous interior, from parched brown plains, 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 century, 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.

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.

Museums in Macedonia

Among the new buildings going up along the River Vardar as part of the Skopje 2014 project are a couple of grand new museums, the neoclassical Museum of Archaeology and the Museum of the Macedonian Struggle. This is not just about building a grander capital. These buildings form part of the government’s endeavour to shore up the identity of a nation in face of the denials of its existence by some of its neighbours. The nearly finished Museum of Archaeology, like the statues of Alexander the Great and Philip II of Macedon, asserts the continuity claimed for the modern Macedonian nation with Macedonian antiquity. The Museum of the Macedonian Struggle focuses on the fight for freedom and independence of the Macedonian people during the late-19th and the first half of the 20th centuries. As was apparent from some of the exhibits, the struggle portrayed here relates to the whole of historic Macedonia, including northern Greece. But Thessaloniki, capital of Greek Macedonia, also has its Museum of the Macedonian Struggle. It gives a very different perspective of the same period, and the Macedonian people whose story it tells is not the same Macedonian people with which the museum in Skopje is concerned.

Museum of the Macedonian Struggle, Skopje

Under Ottoman rule, Macedonia was a jumble of ethnicities, Slavs, Greeks, Turks, Jews, Albanians and others. It gave its name to a mixed fruit salad, a Macédoine. This all came to an end with the catastrophes of the Balkan Wars of 1912-13 and the population exchange that followed the Greek defeat in Anatolia in 1923. Following the carve-up of Macedonia among the emergent Balkan states, the Slavs (and Albanians) of north-west Macedonia found themselves incorporated into Serbia. After World War II, Tito gave them their own republic. They were not to be Bulgarians, although their language was almost identical to Bulgarian. The new museum in Skopje commemorates their struggle. It barely acknowledges that, at the start of the 20th century, many Macedonians saw themselves as Bulgarians. Yet it is hard to ignore this. Among the exhibits from the Balkan wars are the banners of the irregular Macedonian detachments from Bitola and Ohrid, with the red, green and white of Bulgaria. Also exhibited is a photograph of irregulars marching under the Arch of Galerius in Salonika. They are described as Macedonians, although it was Bulgarian forces that entered Salonika one day after the city was surrendered to the Greek army. Leon Sciaky, who grew up in Salonika in the early 20th century, and spent summers in the Slav-inhabited villages to the north of the city, was in no doubt; he described them as Bulgarians.

Such questions of the complexities of national identity are not reflected in the museum in Skopje. That is not what it is about. It is a one-sided presentation, displaying the struggle of only one of the nations that had inhabited Macedonia, and had fought over it. It is also partly motivated by modern politics. The ruling party which initiated Skopje 2014, VMRO-DPMNE, claims succession from the older VMRO, the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organisation, which led the struggle of the Macedonian Slavs, be they Bulgarian or not, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Furthermore, the museum presents the sufferings of Macedonian opponents of communism under the Tito regime. The link is plain. Those who suffered were from VMRO, whereas today’s main opposition party, the SDSM, is the successor of the former communists.

Greeks too have known how to use history selectively to underpin national goals. The fact that northern Greece, including Epirus and Thrace as well as Macedonia, was not predominantly Greek-inhabited before the Balkan wars and the population exchange with Turkey was awkward for the nationalist narrative of Greek history for much of the 20th century. The expulsion of non-Greeks, the Bulgarian and Macedonian Slavs, Turks and Albanians, and their replacement with Greek refugees from the emergent Turkish Republic, was a matter of policy, to strengthen Greece’s hold on its newly acquired territories. It was a policy that continued long after the Second World War. In the 1980s, Greek communists who had fled the country following the civil war in the 1940s were allowed to return, in a gesture of national reconciliation. But non-ethnic Greeks from northern Greece, and perhaps half of the communist-led Partisans were Slavs, were excluded. I went to an exhibition at the Yeni Tzami (New Mosque) in Thessaloniki devoted to the Greek communist diaspora in Eastern Europe following the civil war. Among all the recipient countries, the display did not include Yugoslavia, still less Macedonia, although some Greek communists, and many Slav Partisans from northern Greece, went there. The exhibition perhaps reflected a coming-to-terms with a painful episode in the country’s history. But if so, it is only a partial coming to terms. It does not include non-ethnic Greeks.

The White Tower, Thessaloniki, as it was

Yet museums in northern Greece do reflect the multi-ethnic past of the region. The White Tower, an Ottoman-era edifice on the Thessaloniki seafront that once formed part of the city fortifications, and which has become a symbol of the town, now houses a museum of the city. The photographs and exhibits portray the cosmopolitan diversity that was the city’s richness, its Jewish merchants, its mosques, the hustle and bustle of one of the Mediterranean’s great ports. It tells the story of a city that is no more, most of its people having been driven out or, in the case of the Jewish victims of the Holocaust, murdered. And most of the city itself was physically destroyed by the great fire of 1917 and by the depredations of post-World War II town planners. But that the story is told might suggest a more relaxed attitude of today’s Greek inhabitants towards the past of the city they inhabit. Some Ottoman-era buildings and monuments are now being restored, cared for and valued in a departure from the practice of several decades past.

One of the most poignant museums in Thessaloniki is the small Jewish museum. With photographs and text, as well as artefacts, the museum tells the story of the community that was once the city’s largest, accounting for around one-half of the population. The community was descended from the Spanish Jews expelled in the 15th century by the most Catholic and most intolerant of Spain’s monarchs, Ferdinand and Isabella. At the start of the 20th century, they were still speaking their Spanish dialect, Ladino. Sultan Bayazit II had ordered that Spanish Jews arriving in the Ottoman Empire be made welcome, reportedly observing that King Ferdinand could not be a wise monarch when he thus impoverished his country, and in so doing enriched Bayazit’s Empire. Spanish Jews settled in many Ottoman towns, but made their greatest mark in Salonika. But, as described in Leon Sciaky’s marvellous memoir, Farewell to Salonica, that world largely came to an end following the city’s incorporation into Greece in 1912. The city’s Jewish quarter was particularly ravaged by the 1917 fire, and many Jews, including Sciaky, left after that. Most of the rest were deported and murdered during the World War II German occupation. The city’s vast Jewish cemetery was destroyed by the occupiers, not just a wanton act of vandalism, but a deliberate attempt to erase centuries of Jewish history in the city. Several of the tombstones that were recovered are now displayed in the museum. Though a tiny remnant of what it once was, a small Jewish community remains in Thessaloniki.

Monument to the Battle of Kilkis

Having read Sciaky’s account of his final, tragic visit, with his grandfather, to the small town of Kilkis, to the north of Salonika, immediately after the Greek army’s victory over Bulgaria in June 1913, and the flight of the entire Bulgarian population of the region (see post of 10 December 2012), I decided to visit the town. Modern Kilkis is a non-descript town of characterless blocks. And it is a Greek town, its former Bulgarian identity rubbed out a century ago. On the edge of the town is a monument and a small museum dedicated to the battle. A couple of soldiers standing guard outside what appeared to be a military headquarters helpfully pointed me in the right direction. A sign on the main road leading to Thessaloniki pointed me to the ‘Sacred site’ of the battle. Having read the report by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace on The Causes and Conduct of the Balkan Wars, with its description of the Greek army’s murderous campaign in the Kilkis area, its burning of the town and the butchery and rape of the Bulgarian inhabitants who did not get away fast enough, I found this assertion of sanctity hard to stomach. In some ways, the monument itself, no doubt unwittingly, is a more fitting commemoration of the terrible events. A Greek soldier, holding a fallen comrade in one arm, another at his feet, points his pistol at the ground, to all appearances in the act of shooting a defenceless person in front of him. The museum contains numerous photos, as well as letters, maps, uniforms and weapons. It was difficult for me to form much of an impression, as the text was in Greek only. This museum was not aimed at foreign visitors. But it appeared to give a relatively even account of the battle, with photographs of Bulgarian forces as well as Greek. What it did not appear to show at all was the massive civilian tragedy of the rape of Kilkis by the Greek conquerors.

Museums can have many purposes. They are supposed to record and document past eras and events. But sometimes they reflect the times in which they were built as much as the times they portray. They are not always neutral or dispassionate. The museum in Kilkis, opened in the 1960s, records an important victory in establishing the frontiers of modern Greece. In this narrative, the Bulgarians were a military foe. That they were also the majority population of that region, displaced after the battle, is not the theme for this museum. Still less is the Museum of the Macedonian Struggle in Skopje about giving a full picture of the many-sided battle for Macedonia. The politics of identity in this beleaguered little country is too raw for that at the moment. But the museum of the city of Thessaloniki is an example of what a good museum can be. In bringing to life the great city of the past, it educates its visitors, and helps reconcile the modern city with the cities that were once there, but which have been washed away.