DIGIS MAK
The American news the American way
Sept 18 2021
- Norberto Paredes @norbertparedes
- BBC News World
At the beginning of the last century, a mainly Greek city bathed by the Mediterranean Sea lay on the western coast of what is now Turkey.
Smyrna was a prosperous city where the Turks were a minority and represented less than a third of the population, compared to a Greek and Christian majority. Both groups lived with smaller communities of Armenians and Jews.
At that time its inhabitants were unaware that the multiculturalism that characterized the metropolis would cease to exist a couple of decades later and that that ancient city would be renamed İzmir, the Turkish translation of the original Greek name.
In August 1922, after winning the final battle of Dumlupinar of the Greek-Turkish War, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s army – considered “the father of modern Turkey” – took a further step towards the goal of diminishing Hellenic influence. in Anatolia (now Turkey).
The Battle of Dumlupinar, in addition to marking the end of the bloody conflict that lasted from 1919 to 1922, represented the beginning of the end of the Greek presence in Asia Minor.
By removing the army from the then kingdom of Greece, Atatürk also began to expel a large number of ethnic Greeks, something that was later institutionalized and dubbed “the exchange of populations between Greece and Turkey.”
Thousands of refugees flocked to the waterfront in Izmir seeking shelter when the city was on fire.
Through this population exchange stipulated in the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, about 1.5 million Greek Orthodox Christians – many of whom had never lived outside of Turkey – were expelled from this country and fewer Muslims were deported from Turkey. Greece to Turkish territory.
One of the darkest episodes of what some controversially call “greek genocide“It was the burning of Smyrna, which happened shortly after.
“It was the biggest blow Hellenism has suffered and one of the biggest for Christianity,” Vasilios Meichanetsidis, co-author of the book, tells BBC Mundo “The Genocide of the Ottoman Greeks” (The genocide of the Greek Ottomans), an analysis on the “extermination campaign” of the Christians of Asia Minor “sponsored by the state”.
Despite the fact that Atatürk was an authoritarian leader, the majority in Turkey have a favorable opinion of his figure.
Meichanetsidis assures that the burning of Smyrna was an even more powerful blow than the fall of Constantinople, because with it “Hellenism and Christianity were exterminated” from the Ottoman Empire “completely and forever”.
The fire started the afternoon of September 13, -four days after Atatürk’s army entered Izmir after the withdrawal of the Greek troops-, in the Armenian quarter of the city (which is now called Basmane) and spread rapidly due to the strong wind that was blowing that day .
Furthermore, according to historians, the authorities made little effort to put out the fierce flames.
“One of the first people to notice the start of the fire was Minnie Mills (…) She had just finished her lunch when she noticed that one of the neighboring buildings was on fire. She stood up to take a closer look and was surprised because of what he witnessed, “notes the British historian Giles Milton in his book”Paradise Lost: Smyrna 1922“(Paradise Lost: Smyrna 1922).
Minnie Mills, who was the director of the city’s American Institute for Girls, told the author that saw a Turkish officer enter a house with small cans of oil or gasoline and that shortly after the house was on fire.
She was not the only witness at the institute: “Our teachers and girls saw the Turks in normal soldiers ‘uniforms and some in officers’ uniforms. They used long sticks with rags on the end that they dipped in a can with a liquid and then carried to houses that were burned shortly after, “Mills said.
The city of Smyrna caught fire on September 14, 1922.
The day after the fire started, thousands of refugees flocked to the pier on Izmir’s waterfront seeking refuge in a city that was on fire.
According to historians, the heat of the fire was so intense that many were concerned that the refugees would die.
“Throughout the morning you could see the glow and then the flames of burning Smyrna”, recounts US Lieutenant Aaron Stanton Merrill in the book “Fires of Hatred“(Fires of Hate) by Norman Naimark.
“We arrived about an hour before sunrise and the scene was indescribable. The entire city was on fire … Thousands of homeless refugees came and went on the scorching pier, panicking to the point of insanity. It was painful. listen the piercing screams of women and children”.
The fire lasted nine days and completely destroyed the neighborhoods inhabited by Greeks and Armenians; the Muslim and Jewish sectors were not harmed.
There are different accounts and reports that differ about who was responsible for the fire.
But today, most experts agree that Turkish soldiers set fire to homes and Greek and Armenian businesses. Some Proturkish sources maintain that it was the Greeks and Armenians who set fire in their own neighborhoods to damage the Turkish reputation.
Izmir was a prosperous and multicultural city before the fire.
“There is controversy on the subject, but most historians, be they Westerners, Greeks and even Turks, now admit that you were Atatürk’s troops. According to the Turkish ideology of the time, the city had to burn,” he says Vasilios Meichanetsidis.
“The Turks were determined to create a modern Turkish state, where there were no minorities, but everyone would be Turks, Muslim Turks. Even the Kurds lived that process of “turqueization” within that nationalist idea “he continues.
The Ottoman was a cosmopolitan, multi-ethnic and multi-religious empire and for many “Kemalists” (as the followers of Kemal Atatürk were called) that was one of the causes of its dismemberment.
The idea of Atatürk was to convince all these different ethnic groups and religious groups to continue being part of the Turkish Republic under the concept that there was only one ethnic group in the civic sense of the word, referring to “turkishness”: the quality of be Turkish.
According to Meichanetsidis, the burning of cities and towns had already been going on in Anatolia for 10 years.
“The Turks used to come to these places, they massacred the Armenians or the Greeks they found and then burned the place to prevent any refugee from returning. ”
Before its burning, Smyrna was one of the most cosmopolitan cities of the Ottoman Empire, with Greek, Armenian, Levantine, Jewish, Turkish, English, American and French Ottoman inhabitants, among other nationalities.
Era a city that no longer had a place within the Turkey that was to be born.
For more than 3,000 years, the Greeks had lived in the territory of what is now Turkey and until the last days of the Ottoman Empire there was still an important Hellenic community that dominated much of the trade in Asia Minor.
The process to “turkish” and Islamize a city the size of Izmir was by no means easy. However, the Greco-Turkish war gave the Kemalists a golden opportunity.
It is estimated that before the burning of Smyrna about 2 million Greeks lived in Anatolia.
But after the fire and especially after the population exchange in 1923 and the Istanbul riots of 1955, the Greek population was dramatically reduced.
“Currently there are less than 2,000 in the whole country. In Izmir there are a few who have settled in the city recently. After the events of 1922, the Greeks found it difficult to stay in Izmir,” details the historian Vasilios Meichanetsidis.
Many monuments and reminders of the heritage left by the Greeks in Turkey have disappeared or have been transformed over time.
“Today there are very few reminders of the Greek past in Turkey, especially in Izmir, because the fire consumed the entire neighborhood of the community in that city.”
Caption,
Atatürk transformed Hagia Sophia, which was an Orthodox church, into a museum in 1935. Last year Tayyip Erdogan’s government gave the green light to plans to convert it into a mosque.
