Cover photo: Unknown photographer, from an Italian ship (Wikimedia Commons, public domain)
Smyrna 1922: The End of a Cosmopolitan City
How the Aegean's most cosmopolitan city was lost in a few days — and what crossed the sea.
About
"Gavur Izmir," the Turks called it: Smyrna of the infidels. It was one of the richest, most cosmopolitan cities in the Mediterranean, where you could hear Greek, Turkish, Armenian, French and Italian in the same street. In September 1922, in just a few days, that city was lost forever.
This audiobook follows the whole story: from the Greek landing of 1919 and the dream of the Great Idea, to the collapse of the front, the murder of Metropolitan Chrysostomos, the great fire, and the hundreds of thousands of people trapped on the waterfront in front of the neutral warships of the Great Powers. And the unlikely hero, an obscure American minister, who found the ships to save them.
A story about a city that burned — and about what of it crossed the sea and still lives on in Greece today, in its neighborhoods, its music and its kitchens.
Sources
- Wikipedia — "Burning of Smyrna" — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burning_of_Smyrna
- Wikipedia — "Greco-Turkish War (1919–1922)" — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greco-Turkish_War_(1919%E2%80%931922)
- Wikipedia — "Greek landing at Smyrna" — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_landing_at_Smyrna
- Wikipedia — "Fire of Manisa" — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_of_Manisa
- Wikipedia — "Chrysostomos of Smyrna" — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chrysostomos_of_Smyrna
- Wikipedia — "Asa Jennings" — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asa_Jennings
- Wikipedia — "Population exchange between Greece and Turkey" — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_exchange_between_Greece_and_Turkey
- BU Today — "A Failed Minister Who Saved 250,000 Christians" (Lou Ureneck, 2015) — https://www.bu.edu/articles/2015/a-failed-minister-who-saved-250000-christians
- Kirkus Reviews — Lou Ureneck, "The Great Fire" — https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/lou-ureneck/the-great-fire-one/
- George Horton — "The Blight of Asia" (1926)
- Pontos News — "Law 2645/1998: 14 September Day of National Remembrance" (in Greek) — http://www.pontos-news.gr/pontic-article/154354/i-14i-septemvrioy-imera-ethnikis-mnimis-genoktonias-ton-ellinon-tis-mikras
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