Paradise Lost: Smyrna 1922 - The Destruction of Islam's City of Tolerance (2 page)

A Note on Sources

The source material for
Paradise Lost
has been gathered largely from unpublished letters and diaries written by the great Levantine dynasties who had made Smyrna their home. These writings, which were never intended for publication, were often written at speed and in the most desperate circumstances.

Although many of the Levantine authors held British nationality, they had never lived in Britain and often spoke six or seven languages. This gave rise to a delightfully quirky and eccentric style in their private musings. I decided against correcting their numerous grammatical errors. But I have standardised spelling, provided translations for Turkish words and phrases and supplied full names whenever the author uses initials.

There is currently no archive of the Smyrniot Levantine families and their heritage is in danger of being lost. It is the author’s intention to deposit all the documents collected during his researches in Exeter University Library, which already houses a portion of the Whittall family records.

PART ONE

Paradise

Wheel of Fortune

T
he Turkish cavalry presented a magnificent spectacle as it cantered along the waterfront. The horsemen sat high in their saddles, their scimitars unsheathed and glinting in the sun. On their heads they wore black Circassian fezzes adorned with the crescent and star. As they rode, they cried out, ‘
Korkma! Korkma!
’ ‘Fear not! Fear not!’

Their entry into the city of Smyrna on 9 September 1922 was watched by thousands of anxious inhabitants. On the terrace of the famous Sporting Club, a group of British businessmen rose to their feet in order to catch a better view of the historic scene. From the nearby Greek warehouses, the packers and stevedores spilled out onto the quayside. ‘Long Live Kemal,’ they cried nervously, praising the man who would soon acquire the sobriquet Ataturk.

News of the troops’ arrival quickly spread to the American colony of Paradise, where Dr Alexander MacLachlan, director of the American International College, was keeping a watchful eye for signs of trouble. He ran up the Stars and Stripes over the college building as a precaution and jotted down some contingency plans. Yet he remained sanguine in the face of the day’s events. When the British consul, Sir Harry Lamb, had offered to help with the evacuation of American citizens, MacLachlan politely declined. ‘I felt we were not taking any risk by remaining at our post,’ he later wrote.

Throughout the course of the day, Smyrna held its breath. The Turkish cavalry’s triumphant entry came at the end of a brutal, three-year war with Greece – a war fought on Turkish territory in which Britain, and other Western powers, had aided and armed the Greeks.

Now, it was feared that there would be a backlash. Smyrna was known throughout the world of Islam for having a majority Christian population and there were concerns that the newly victorious Turkish army would sweep into the city to unleash a terrible fury on the infidel inhabitants. This, after all, was a city whose gaze had long been turned westwards towards Greece and the warm waters of the Aegean. Smyrna had little in common with the barren hinterlands of central Anatolia from whence the Turkish cavalry had come. She had a Greek population that was at least twice that of Athens and the reminders of her great Byzantine heritage were to be found scattered throughout the city. In the candlelit gloom of her cuspidated churches, Orthodox priests chanted dirges for the soul of St Polycarp, martyred here in the second century. Even at that early date, Smyrna had an impeccable Christian pedigree. St John the Divine had named the city one of the Seven Churches of Asia Minor.

By 1922, its Christian population included Greeks, Armenians, Levantines, Europeans and Americans. Many feared that St John’s apocalyptic vision of doom was about to come to pass. There were dark predictions of a return to the days of old, when conquering Islamic armies were sanctioned three days of pillage, following the capture of a resisting town.

Yet there had been no resistance to the Turkish army and few inhabitants could really believe that their city would meet with such a fate. Smyrna had long been celebrated as a beacon of tolerance – home to scores of nationalities with a shared outlook and intertwined lives. It was little wonder that the Americans living in the metropolis had named their colony Paradise; life here was remarkably free from prejudice and many found it ironic that they had to come to the Islamic world to find a place that had none of the bigotry so omnipresent at home.

There was another reason why Smyrna’s inhabitants were confident that the city would be spared. In the harbour there was the reassuring presence of no fewer than twenty-one battleships, including eleven British, five French and several Italian. There were also three large American destroyers, among them the newly arrived USS
Litchfield
. Everyone believed that these ships would deter the Turkish army from committing any excesses.

By mid-afternoon of that day, the population breathed a collective sigh of relief. It was clear that the doom-laden predictions were wrong. Smyrna had been spared. In the tranquil suburb of Bournabat, where the great Levantine dynasties had their mansions, there were many who felt that the sense of panic had been overblown from the start. Hortense Wood had spent much of the morning peering out of her drawing-room window at the passing cavalry. Now, she felt that the danger had passed. ‘Perfect discipline and perfect quiet,’ she noted in her diary. ‘Not a shot was fired. And thus came the change from Greek to Turkish administration, in perfect tranquillity and against all expectations and apprehensions.’

She also felt vindicated. She had confidently predicted to her family that people were making a fuss about nothing and had insisted all along that Smyrna would fall peacefully into Turkish hands.

Others actually welcomed the arrival of the Turkish army after long days of uncertainty. Grace Williamson, an English nurse living in the city, was relieved and happy that it was all over. ‘What a week we have spent!!’ she wrote. ‘There was hardly a bit of trouble . . . No shooting on the streets! Thank God. Such a relief, everyone is inwardly delighted to have the Turks back again.’

What happened over the two weeks that followed must surely rank as one of the most compelling human dramas of the twentieth century. Innocent civilians – men, women and children from scores of different nationalities – were caught in a humanitarian disaster on a scale that the world had never before seen. The entire population of the city became the victim of a reckless foreign policy that had gone hopelessly, disastrously wrong.

The American consul, George Horton, witnessed scenes of such horror that he would carry them with him to the grave. ‘One of the keenest impressions which I brought away from Smyrna,’ he wrote, ‘was a feeling of shame that I belonged to the human race.’

The
New York Times
put it even more succinctly. ‘Smyrna Wiped Out’, was its headline. It was not hyperbole; it was a bold statement of fact.

Smyrna’s hundreds of thousands of refugees clung to the hope that the Western governments who had done so much to precipitate the crisis would now come to their rescue. But those governments displayed a shocking callousness towards their own nationals, choosing to abandon the refugees to their fate in order not to jeopardise the chance of striking rich deals with the newly victorious Turkish regime.

Amidst the suffering there were to be acts of supreme heroism – men and women who risked their lives to save those caught up in a nightmare beyond their control. One of these individuals would launch what was to prove the most extraordinary rescue operation of the modern age, even though it seemed as if a miracle would be needed to save the vast crowds before they were consumed by the unfolding cataclysm.

No individual was able to avert the even greater crisis that occurred in the aftermath of Smyrna’s destruction. Almost two million people were to find themselves caught up in a catastrophe on a truly epic scale, one that sent shock waves across Europe and America and was to cause the downfall of two governments. As families were forcibly evicted from their ancestral homes – and 2,000 years of Christian civilisation in Asia Minor came to an abrupt end – a vibrant new country came into being. Ataturk’s modern Turkish republic arose from the ashes of Smyrna.

The events of September 1922 are fast becoming just another chapter of history. Yet to a handful of people – all in their nineties – the destruction of Smyrna continues to haunt them every day of their lives.

‘Now, how would you like to converse?’ asks Petros Brussalis, ninety-three years of age when I visit him at his home in Athens. He speaks with an accent as crisp and old-fashioned as a Huntley and Palmer biscuit. ‘Greek? French? English? My English is a trifle rusty these days.’

His enunciation is that of his Edwardian governess; his sentiments are those of a man who has never quite recovered from the loss of his childhood. ‘Forget Constantinople, Alexandria and Beirut,’ he says. ‘Smyrna before the
katastrophi
was the most cosmopolitan place on earth.’

The city into which Petros was born was one in which fig-laden camels nudged their way past the latest Newton Bennett motor car; in which the strange new vogue of the cinema was embraced as early as 1908. There were seventeen companies dealing exclusively in imported Parisian luxuries. And if Petros’s father cared to read a daily newspaper, he had quite a choice: eleven Greek, seven Turkish, five Armenian, four French and five Hebrew, not to mention the ones shipped in from every capital city in Europe.

The Brussalis family were well-to-do merchants whose offices stood in the heart of Smyrna. In the late afternoon, when the infamous
imbat
or west wind blew in off the sea, Petros’s father and mother would dress up in their finery and join the evening
passeggiata
along the Aegean waterfront. The imposing banks and clubhouses that lined the quayside were tangible symbols of Smyrna’s prosperity. The Sporting Club, Grand Hotel Kraemer Palace and Théâtre de Smyrne were built on such a grand scale that their whitewashed walls, glimmering in the sunshine, were visible for miles out to sea.

Amidst the grandeur there was intense human activity. Hawkers and street traders peddled their wares along the mile-long quayside. Water sellers jangled their brass bowls;
hodjas
– Muslim holy men – mumbled prayers in the hope of earning a copper or two. And impecunious legal clerks, often Italian, would proffer language lessons at knock-down prices.

‘You saw all sorts . . .’ recalled the French journalist, Gaston Deschamps. ‘Swiss hoteliers, German traders, Austrian tailors, English mill owners, Dutch fig merchants, Italian brokers, Hungarian bureaucrats, Armenian agents and Greek bankers.’

The waterfront was lined with lively bars, brasseries and shaded café gardens, each of which tempted the palate with a series of enticing scents. The odour of roasted cinnamon would herald an Armenian patisserie; apple smoke spilled forth from hookahs in the Turkish cafés. Coffee and olives, crushed mint and armagnac: each smell was distinctive and revealed the presence of more than three dozen culinary traditions. Caucasian pastries,
boeuf à la mode
, Greek game pies and Yorkshire pudding could all be found in the quayside restaurants of Smyrna.