HOW THE TRADING HUB WAS DESTROYED
By Martin Rubin
The Washington Times
November 2, 2008 Sunday
On Wednesday, Sept. 13, 1922, the ancient city of Smyrna (now Izmir)
on the Aegean Sea, which had long been a prosperous cosmopolitan
trading hub, was a charnel house. Caught up in a 10-year cycle of war
which had seen Greece and Turkey fighting for control of the region,
the largely Greek city (its Hellenic population of more than 300,000
much larger then than Athens’) had been sacked by the Turkish forces
under Mustafa Kemal, later known as Kemal Ataturk, the founder of
modern post-Ottoman Turkey.
Scenes of almost unimaginable brutality and horror ensued: Untold
rapes and cruel assaults – limbs, noses and ears hacked off -and
murders by scimitar, bayonet and club. Not content with mayhem on this
scale, the invaders scattered gasoline throughout the city and set it
alight. Desperate to escape the inferno, much of the city’s populace
streamed down to the harbor, a scene that must have merited the term
indescribable if ever one did. But Giles Milton, a British writer,
has managed the difficult task of harrowing the hell that Smyrna must
have been 86 years ago and is capable of painting such scenes thus:
"The Smyrna quayside had indeed become a scene of abject human
misery. Almost two miles long – and wider than a football pitch –
it was large enough to accommodate hundreds of thousands of homeless
people. … By the time dusk fell on that terrible Wednesday, the
quayside was crowded with almost half a million refugees[Smyrna had a
large Armenian as well as Jewish and European populations.] They stood
in real danger of being burned alive for the fire had by now reached
the waterfront – a scalding, pulsating heat that was transmitted from
building to building by the liberal use of benzine. … The heat was
soon so intense that the mooring lines of the ships closest to the
waterfront began to burn All the vessels moved 250 yards out from the
quayside, yet the heat was still overwhelming. … The flames leaped
higher and higher The screams of the frantic mob on the quay could
easily be heard a mile distant. There was a choice of three kinds
of death: The fire behind, the Turks waiting at the side streets and
the ocean in front … in modern chronicles, there has probably been
nothing to compare with the night of September 13 in Smyrna"
If there was one thing that could make this hellish scene worse,
it was the fact that Smyrna harbor was packed with warships from
Britain, France, Italy and the United States, their crews witness to
what was taking place but under strict orders not to intervene. (It is
interesting to note that it has been reported that this book was on
John McCain’s reading list and that he has singled it out as having
resonated strongly with him.) The descriptions of these scenes of
desperation as people struggled to reach the ships and were beaten
back physically by the crews shamefully under strict orders to do so
are literally sickening to read: What must it have been like to be
the participants beggars even the most vivid imagination.
Milton tells his story unflinchingly and does not disguise his
outrage. He is very good at providing the historical context for
this dreadful episode: A complicated tale involving World War I and
its aftermath, great power politics and adventurism, and a wildly
expansionist Greece dedicated to restoring the lost grandeur of
the Byzantine Empire. But although his goal is understanding the
underlying causes for this incident, never does he fall into the
trap of allowing any of this knowledge in any way to mitigate the
unpardonable atrocities of those September days in Smyrna. He tries
to find heroes and sometimes succeeds: Asa Jennings, a Methodist
minister from New York newly arrived in Smyrna, managed eventually
to overcome callous policy and bureaucratic hurdles to rescue many
of those who managed to survive the fire but still faced deportation
and certain death.
The book justifies its title by summoning up the lost world of Smyrna,
with its worldwide trade in dried apricots and the figs that bore its
name. A bustling town where Jews, Christians and Muslims had lived in
peaceful harmony for many centuries, Smyrna was also home to a group
known as the Levantines: merchant families from Europe who had lived
there for generations and made great fortunes from trading. Smyrna’s
lost world of opera houses, luxurious hotels and splendid villas does
seem paradisal in Mr. Milton’s account, although he may perhaps have
been overly credulous in accepting the understandably rose-tinted
accounts of those few eyewitnesses still living whom he assiduously
tracked down. Still, he is not wrong in pointing out how so much can so
quickly be destroyed in an orgy of destruction like this, no matter its
origins: A cautionary tale indeed for John McCain – and for all of us.
* Martin Rubin is a writer and critic in Pasadena, Calif.