The Daily Telegraph (Australia)
July 12, 2008 Saturday
1 – State Edition

City of the dead

by GREG THOM

As far as human tragedies go, the destruction of Smyrna (now
modern-day Izmir) in 1922 was among the worst. There was rape, pillage
and murder. Then a ferocious, deliberately lit fire threatened to
consume half a million desperate refugees trapped on the quayside.

It was a disaster of biblical proportions. Author Giles Milton,
recounting the city’s descent into Armageddon, could not have chosen a
more apt title for his book.

A few years before, this city in southwest Turkey was vibrant,
multicultural and picturesque. For decades it had been a beacon of
religious harmony and economic prosperity. Its European, Greek,
Turkish, Jewish and Armenian people lived harmoniously. No one was
happier with the status quo than the Levantine community.

They were Europeans who had settled in the area generations before,
and who’d become fabulously wealthy and powerful.

Their villas, lavish balls and boating excursions epitomised the
excesses that Edwardian grandeur had to offer.

But a brutal war between an expansionist Greece and the decaying
leftovers of the old Ottoman empire, which found itself on the losing
side in the aftermath of World War I, was to change everything.

When the resurgent and victorious Turkish army under Mustafa Kemal,
the founder of modern Turkey, rode into Smyrna on the heels of the
defeated Greeks, the city’s fate was sealed.

Who was at fault for what followed has been hotly debated by Turkish
and Greek historians. Witnesses’ accounts claim the events that
unfolded amounted to ethnic cleansing of the worst order.

Afterwards most of the city was in ruins and up to 100,000 people,
mostly of Greek and Armenian background, were dead.

A few escaped on the fleet of Allied ships riding at anchor in the
harbour.

Crews witnessed the unfolding tragedy, but largely did nothing to stop
it.

The Levantine families’ connections meant they did not suffer the
ravages inflicted on the Greeks and Armenians.

But they left behind their fabulous villas and belongings as well as a
way of life.

Paradise Lost: Smyrna 1922 — The Destruction Of Islam’s City Of
Tolerance is a gripping, thoroughly researched chronicle of a
little-known chapter from the darker annals of human history.

PARADISE LOST
* Giles Milton
$35l, Hachette Livre