Morning Star, UK
May 5, 2008 Monday

Feature – The ravaged pearl of the Aegean

by Gordon Parsons

Paradise Lost
by Giles Milton (Hodder and Stoughton, £20)

The total annihilation of Smyrna, the modern Izmir, by Kemal Ataturk’s
Turkish forces triumphing over the defeated Greek army in 1922 was
described by one eyewitness as having "scarcely a parallel in the
history of the world for hideousness and danger."

The grotesque record of the rest of the 20th century surely makes the
claim appear extravagant. Nevertheless, Giles Milton’s detailed,
day-by-day account, largely compiled from personal diaries and
contemporary reports of the ravaging of this cosmopolitan "pearl of
the Aegean" which, even through the first world war, had remained an
Edwardian enclave of summer balls, tea dances and family picnics – at
least for the privileged Levantine, Greek and Armenian merchants –
depicts a modern Pandemonium, outrivalling that of the author’s
classic namesake.

The turning of blind eyes to the human tragedy on the part of the
great European powers, busily weighing up their own interests in the
face of a rising Turkish nationalism, comes as no surprise in the
light of recent history.

The Turkish government, still today denying the earlier Armenian
genocide, will not welcome this forensic revelation of the barbarity
of their national hero who saw his way to power and the destruction of
the Greek dreams of a greater Greece that hoped to encompass large
portions of Asia Minor "with the great city of Smyrna at its heart."