Paradise Lost Smyrna 1922, The Destruction of Islam's City of Tolerance by Giles Milton
Basic Books, 464 pp., $27.95
The destruction of Smyrna--modern Izmir--in 1922 was one of the great atrocities of the early 20th century. A great trading city of western Anatolia, a place of wealth and civilized values, vibrant with culture, was reduced to ashes, and perhaps 100,000 of its multiethnic population, especially the Greeks and the Armenians, were either drowned, burnt alive, or bayoneted by the army of the new Turkey or its irregulars.
How could this be? This question is answered with a searing truthfulness by Giles Milton in his energetic and terrifically readable narrative of the events, Paradise Lost.
Smyrna had had a Greek population since about 1000 b.c. It was one of the cities which claimed to be the birthplace of Homer. The Ionian cities of the eastern Aegean seaboard, of which it became the most important, were (apart from Athens) the most civilized cities of ancient Greece, where poets, philosophers, and painters flourished and created the unforgettable heritage of classical civilization, which became civilization for all of us.
Its importance continued in Ottoman times, when the Greek genius had transformed itself into a talent for commerce and shipping. Smyrna's commercial significance continued into modern times, with the establishment of foreign consulates in the city from the 17th century--of which the English was arguably the most important. By the early 19th century vast palaces were being built in the suburbs for the city's merchant families, who lived in a style of unrestrained luxury.
These expatriate families, of whom the leaders were the English Whittalls, were known as "Levantines." They were tolerated by the Ottoman authorities: The unwritten deal was that they could do virtually what they liked, and make as much (untaxed) money as they wished, but that they would support the Ottoman Empire in any political dispute it had with the powers of Europe.
Smyrna was virtually untouched in World War I. The Ottoman Turkish governor was enlightened, and spent much time disobeying or evading orders from the extremist ruling group in the imperial capital. The city saw no real warfare. Even in the post-1918 period, following the Ottoman defeat, things started to return to normal, with the return of extravagance and display for the families of the merchant houses. At this time Smyrna had a Greek governor, similarly enlightened and opposed to ethnic politics.
The city's problems started at the peace conference. Here Giles Milton is at his best, because he shows us the many-sidedness of the causes of the catastrophe which overcame the city. He does not foist one single answer on us. Often people try to reduce historical causation in the eastern Mediterranean to a single cause--usually "nationalism" or "Islam"--but history is more complex, as Thucydides demonstrated.
The catastrophe at Smyrna had many causes. Among them were the irresolute and disputed aftermath of World War I, with its conflicting secret imperial deals, British Prime Minister David Lloyd George's simplistic support for the Greeks, the moody manner in which the Italian delegation had stormed out of the Peace Conference upon realizing that they were to be denied spoils, the weakness of the Greek army in Anatolia (combined with the craziness of the manner in which it had overreached itself in campaigning eastwards), the punitive ethnic singularity of the Kemalist vision, and the pitilessness of the irregulars attached to the Turkish army.
All these elements combined to bring about an inferno of destruction on those terrible days in September 1922.
One can go further and say that there was little overt nationalism in the area, unless it was stoked. Most of the population realized that, as inhabitants of a trading city, they depended for their livelihood on serving people of all nationalities. Nor was there much place for Islam. Since the 1908 Young Turk revolution, the Ottoman Empire had been growing secular and positivistic, downgrading religion. Smyrna, a maritime trading city like Beirut, Alexandria, Trieste, or Marseille, was too busy making money to be devout. The conquering army of 1922, like its leader Mustafa Kemal, creator of the new Turkey, owed nothing to religion.
The issue has been problematic for Turkey's modern historians, and for nations and people who wanted to be Turkey's friends. For a long time the myth persisted that the Greeks and Armenians burnt their districts themselves. The eyewitness accounts that Milton gives us here show that this view is unsustainable: The barrels of kerosene were unloaded, guarded, and directed by Turkish troops.
Politically, the landing of the Greek army in Smyrna in May 1919 has also been characterized as the Allies' attempt to "carve up" Turkey. This, too, was based on uncertain political logic. It was certainly a grave political mistake. But "Turkey"--the Kemalist republic--at that time did not exist. There was only a defeated Ottoman Empire. Smyrna and its surrounding region had, according to Woodrow Wilson's principles, a reasonable, though not watertight, claim to be a liberated Greek area rather than a still-imperial Turkish one.
One question to which Milton's devastating narrative seems to demand an answer is: How did the Turkish troops coordinate their activities with the irregulars, who performed the work of death, looting, raping, killing, and burning? What was the chain of command? It appears that a number of the Levantine observers of Kemal's capture of Smyrna were entirely taken in by the smart uniforms and impeccable drill of his army as it entered the city. The ladies loved their military elegance.
The account in Paradise Lost makes us ask: What was the connection between those fine social and military manners, and the murderous, horrific violence perpetrated on the streets? Kemal's revolution, though widely acclaimed, had a massive shadow side.
Who are the heroes and villains of the story? The heroes must be the Americans Asa Jennings and Esther Lovejoy, who at incredible risk to themselves sought to rescue hundreds of thousands of stranded refugees on the city's quayside. There was a good cast of villains, beyond those who rolled barrels of kerosene along the city's streets: chiefly the commanders of the Allied warships in the harbor, who with precise bureaucratic cowardice and cruelty refrained from any action of humanity which might alleviate the condition of the starving, frying mass of humanity, threatened with murder by the local militia, on the grounds that any humane action might he construed as endangering Allied "neutrality."
The British poured boiling water on desperate refugees who swam up to their vessels. And Admiral Bristol, the representative of official America, a man whose liking for the Turks led him to despise and detest members of the other communities, insisted that American reporters cable home reports favorable to the Turks. (Fortunately, they stopped obeying him and reported what they saw.)
There is not much in the way of a moral to be drawn from the frightful narrative of Smyrna's inferno of destruction--except for the need for ordinary humanity in extraordinary circumstances, and for the best intelligence at all times. It would also seem advisable to distrust those, like Lloyd George, whose politics are driven by a schoolboy view of good and evil. Giles Milton's account, by reason of its forthrightness, its brilliant use of hitherto- unseen archival Levantine sources, its feeling for the day-to-day life of the city, and its devastating quest for the hidden truth, seems also to lay to rest some of the ghosts of that shocking and shameful event.
Christopher J. Walker is the author, most recently, of Islam and the West.