Smyrna 1922: The End of a Cosmopolitan City

"Gavur Izmir." That's what the Turks called it: Smyrna of the infidels. The nickname was no compliment, but it said something true. Inside a Muslim empire, this city on the edge of the Aegean seemed to belong somewhere else. Along its waterfront, the cafés almost touched the water, steamships tied up a few steps from the theaters, and in the streets you could hear Greek, Turkish, Armenian, the Judeo-Spanish of the Jewish community, French and Italian. It was one of the richest, most cosmopolitan cities in the eastern Mediterranean. And yet, in September of nineteen twenty-two, in just a few days, that Smyrna was lost forever.

How many people lived there, nobody knows for certain. The numbers change depending on who is counting. One modern estimate puts the population at more than two hundred and sixty thousand before the war, with Greeks making up more than half. Alongside them lived Turks, Jews, Armenians, and thousands of European merchants, the Levantines, with their villas, their clubs and their churches. From the port, figs, raisins, tobacco and carpets from the Anatolian interior left for the whole world. As long as the wealth kept flowing, the communities lived side by side, not without tension, but without killing each other. Until the First World War changed everything.

The war ends with the Ottoman Empire defeated. At the Paris Peace Conference, the Greek prime minister, Eleftherios Venizelos, backed by the British prime minister, Lloyd George, achieves something that only a few years earlier would have seemed like a dream. On the fifteenth of May, nineteen nineteen, Greek troops land in Smyrna. The city's Greeks welcome them with flags, flowers and tears. The Great Idea, the vision of a Greece of two continents and five seas, seems to be coming true. But on that very same day, a gunshot, fired by someone we still can't identify, sets off panic. Bloodshed follows, and dozens, perhaps hundreds, of Turks are killed, soldiers and civilians alike. For many Turks, that day will become the spark of their own struggle.

The Greek high commissioner, Aristeidis Stergiadis, tries to hold the balance. He sends those responsible for the violence to court-martial, dozens of Greeks among them, and insists on equal treatment for Muslims, which puts him at odds with many of the city's Greeks. For three years, Smyrna lives under Greek administration. The mathematician Constantin Carathéodory sets up a brand-new university there, scheduled to open its doors in October of nineteen twenty-two. And in August of nineteen twenty, the Treaty of Sèvres gives Greece the administration of the region, with the prospect of union after five years. On paper, everything looks won. In reality, nothing has been decided yet.

And here the story takes a sharp turn. In November of nineteen twenty, Venizelos loses the election. King Constantine returns to the throne, and the Allies, who had never trusted him, begin to pull away. The new government, however, doesn't end the war. Instead, the Greek army pushes deeper and deeper into Anatolia, chasing the forces of Mustafa Kemal, the officer who has organized the Turkish national movement in Ankara. In the summer of nineteen twenty-one, at the Sakarya River, the Greeks come within about a hundred kilometers of Ankara. The battle lasts twenty-one days. In the end, exhausted, the Greek army falls back.

What follows is a whole year of waiting, on a front hundreds of kilometers long, with tired soldiers and supplies that never quite arrive. Kemal uses that year to prepare. On the twenty-sixth of August, nineteen twenty-two, he launches his great offensive, and within days the Greek front collapses. The retreat turns into a flight toward the sea, and the departing army leaves scorched earth behind it. An American vice-consul who toured the region shortly afterward wrote that the burnings were not random, but organized. In Manisa, most of the town was reduced to ash. Running alongside the army are thousands of Christian villagers from the interior, afraid of reprisals. All of them are heading for the same place. Smyrna.

By early September, the city is overflowing with refugees. They sleep in churchyards, in railway stations, on sidewalks. The last Greek soldiers board their ships and leave, and the Greek administration leaves with them. Smyrna is left without an army. And yet many of its Christians don't panic, because in the harbor they can see something that gives them courage: warships from Britain, France, Italy and the United States. The Great Powers are here, they tell themselves. They won't let anything bad happen. What they don't know is that the crews of those ships have one explicit order: strict neutrality. They are there to protect only their own citizens.

On the morning of Saturday, the ninth of September, Turkish cavalry enter the city and ride along the waterfront. For the first few hours, there is a tense calm. Then the looting and the killing begin, first in the Armenian quarter. That same day, Turkish soldiers take the Orthodox Metropolitan of Smyrna, Chrysostomos, to the military commander, Nureddin Pasha. Chrysostomos had refused to leave while there was still time. He would not abandon his flock. Nureddin sends him out of his office, and outside an enraged mob seizes him by the beard, beats him, and kills him in a side street. Whether Nureddin deliberately handed him over to the mob, historians still disagree. French soldiers saw it happen. They had orders not to intervene.

Over the following days, fear spreads from neighborhood to neighborhood. Soldiers and irregulars break into homes, looting, killing, raping. Men are arrested and never come back. It's estimated that within four days, before the worst had even begun, around two thousand Greeks and Armenians had been killed. Those who can, shut themselves inside schools, churches, the buildings of foreign institutions, hoping a foreign flag on the door will save them. The Armenians, who remember all too well what had happened to their people just seven years earlier, barricade themselves in their quarter. And on the afternoon of the thirteenth of September, in the Armenian quarter, a fire breaks out.

A strong wind is blowing, and no one makes a serious effort to put it out. Within hours, the flames leap from house to house, from the Armenian quarter to the Greek quarter, and from there into the European neighborhoods. Minnie Mills, the director of an American girls' school, later testified that she saw with her own eyes a Turkish officer walk into a house carrying tins of petroleum, and a few minutes later the house was engulfed in flames. For decades, the official Turkish version was that Armenians and Greeks had set the fire. Most historians, however, including Turkish scholars, conclude that Turkish troops lit it and spread it. And there is one detail that is hard to explain any other way: the Turkish and Jewish quarters did not burn.

Tens of thousands of people, perhaps hundreds of thousands, now have nowhere left to go but toward the water. They crowd onto the waterfront, a narrow strip between a city in flames and a sea they cannot cross. Behind them, the streets are sealed off by Turkish troops. In front of them, the sea. The heat from the fire becomes unbearable. Some throw themselves into the water to escape the flames, and drown. Others try to swim out to the ships. A naval officer noted that the whole city was one great blaze and that the harbor was lit up as bright as day. And in that same harbor, a few hundred meters from the shore, the warships of the Great Powers are watching.

The crews have their orders, and at first they follow them. According to witnesses, on some ships music was played loudly so the screams from the shore couldn't be heard. But there were exceptions. Little by little, some ships began to take refugees on board, and a Japanese freighter is said to have dumped its cargo into the sea to make room for as many people as it could carry. The American consul general, George Horton, who lived through those days up close, later wrote a line that is hard to forget. That one of the strongest feelings he carried away from Smyrna was a sense of shame at belonging to the human race.

When the flames finally die down, the Smyrna its people knew no longer exists. Estimates of the dead are wildly far apart, from ten thousand to more than a hundred thousand, because no one ever counted them. For the survivors, though, the nightmare isn't over. The Turkish authorities announce that all Greek and Armenian men between eighteen and forty-five are to be treated as prisoners of war. Tens of thousands are sent into the interior, to labor battalions, and many never return. Everyone else, mostly women, children and the elderly, must leave by the first of October. But there's a problem. There are no ships to take them.

This is where a man no one would ever cast as a hero steps into the story. Asa Jennings is an American, an obscure Methodist minister from a small town in upstate New York, working for the YMCA. He stands just over five feet tall, with a hunched back from tuberculosis of the spine. He had come to Smyrna with his family shortly before the disaster. He looks at the waterfront and decides to do something no one has asked him to do. First, he bribes the captain of an Italian ship to carry refugees to the island of Lesbos. Then he goes there himself.

In the harbor of Mytilene, he finds exactly what he needs: Greek ships, empty, riding at anchor. He climbs aboard the battleship Kilkis, and with the help of her captain, Ioannis Theofanidis, he sends a message to the government in Athens: they need ships, and they need them now. To get them, he uses everything he has: persistence, pressure, even a threat he could never have carried out. And he succeeds. But one more obstacle remains, because the Turks don't want Greek ships in the harbor. The answer is a compromise. The ships will go in without flying the Greek flag, escorted by the American destroyer Edsall. Her commander is Halsey Powell, an officer who decided to interpret his orders as freely as he possibly could.

On the twenty-fourth of September, the first ships enter the harbor of Smyrna. On the waterfront, people who have spent days trapped between the fire and the sea finally see something coming for them. Boarding goes on day and night, and American sailors try to protect those waiting in line. The ships load up, sail for the islands, for Piraeus and Thessaloniki, and come back again. In about a week, more than two hundred and fifty thousand people leave Smyrna. Greece later honored Jennings with its highest distinctions. At home, though, his name was quickly forgotten, partly because American diplomacy wanted good relations with the new Turkey.

The Greece that receives them is a defeated country in shock. Days after the disaster, army officers rise up, King Constantine abdicates, and six politicians and generals held responsible for the defeat are executed after a trial that is still disputed today. In January of nineteen twenty-three, in Lausanne, Greece and Turkey sign something unprecedented: a compulsory exchange of populations. The criterion is not language, but religion. Around one point two million Orthodox Christians end up in Greece, and roughly four hundred thousand Muslims leave for Turkey. Orthodox Christians who spoke Turkish arrived as Greeks. Muslims from Crete who spoke Greek at home left as Turks.

For a country of just over five million people, this means that nearly one in five is suddenly a refugee. They arrive with only what they managed to carry, and for years they live in tents, in shacks, in theaters and schools. Around Athens, Piraeus and Thessaloniki, entire new neighborhoods are built, and the refugees name them after the places they lost: New Smyrna, New Ionia, New Philadelphia. They bring their music with them, the santouri and the songs of Smyrna, which will give rebetiko one of its most distinctive sounds. They bring their flavors, their spices, meatballs seasoned with cumin. And they bring a wound that will be handed down from generation to generation.

And Smyrna? It was rebuilt, under its Turkish name and with different people. In the first Turkish census, in nineteen twenty-seven, nearly nine out of ten of its inhabitants were Muslim. Where the burned neighborhoods once stood, there is now a large park and the grounds of an international fair. Carathéodory's university, which was supposed to open in October of nineteen twenty-two, never admitted a single student. And Izmir, the third-largest city in today's Turkey, is a lively city with a waterfront full of people strolling by the water at dusk, in the very place where hundreds of thousands once waited for a ship.

In Greece, since nineteen ninety-eight, the fourteenth of September has been the official Day of National Remembrance of the Genocide of the Greeks of Asia Minor by the Turkish State. But the most living memory isn't found in anniversaries. It's in a grandmother who put cumin in the food, because that's how her mother made it. In a song someone hums without knowing where it came from. In a bus sign in Athens that reads "New Smyrna." The Turks called it Gavur Izmir, Smyrna of the infidels. That city burned in September of nineteen twenty-two. But something of it never burned. It simply crossed the sea.