The Ruined City of Smyrna: Giles Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’

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It is a measure of the sheer darkness of history in the last century that one of its darkest episodes — the 1922 destruction of the Ottoman city of Smyrna, in present-day Turkey — is practically forgotten. Forgotten by American readers, that is, even though American missionaries and sailors played a heroic role in the catastrophe. But to the Greeks and Armenians who were driven from the city, and to the Turks who conquered it with fire and sword, the name of Smyrna still raises fierce passions. Google it and you will find dozens of Web sites disputing what really happened there, from both the Greek and the Turkish points of view. As with the Armenian genocide, the arguments over Smyrna are so rancorous, more than 85 years after the event, that it is clear the city is one of those places where, in Faulkner’s words, the past isn’t dead — it isn’t even past.

In “Paradise Lost” (Basic Books, 426 pages, $27.95), the British journalist Giles Milton tells the story of Smyrna’s fall in vivid and sometimes lurid terms. The title telegraphs his fairly sentimental approach to the subject; indeed, Mr. Milton views Smyrna through the same kind of romantically blurry lens that Margaret Mitchell brought to the antebellum South. His primary focus is on the “Levantines,” the families of European descent who dominated the city’s commercial life, using their terrific wealth to create a bubble of graceful living in a sea of poverty, violence, and ethnic tension. Though the rich, well-connected Levantines suffered much less in 1922 than the vast majority of Smyrniots, Mr. Milton dwells on their dispossession and exile as though it were the heart of the story. In part this is because he is following his sources — he makes good use of the unpublished memoirs of Levantine exiles — and in part it is because the contrast between their gilded lives and their sudden ruin is dramatically irresistible.

For the Whitalls, Girauds, Woods, and other Levantine clans, Smyrna — in particular, the rich suburb of Bournabat — was indeed a paradise. They traced their descent from English, French, and Italian merchant families, and were legally citizens of home countries many of them never saw. But by the time of World War I, they had created a virtually self-sufficient aristocratic world. Members of the leading Levantine dynasties did business together, raced yachts together, admired one another’s mansions and gardens, and above all, intermarried. “We called everyone aunt or uncle to be on the safe side,” one of the Whitalls remembered.

Mr. Milton writes about their lifestyle in the frankly ogling tone of a Near Eastern Robin Leach. The Paterson family’s mansion, for instance,

had thirty-eight rooms … and was famous throughout Smyrna for its opulent interior. Two spectacular crystal chandeliers hung in the great atrium and the imported iron stair balustrade was one of the marvels of the colony. There were four grand pianos in the ballroom and each bedroom had a marble washbasin and running water.

The travel writer Gertrude Bell, visiting the stately homes of the Whitall cousins, recorded how “the big gardens touch on one another and they walk in and out of one another’s houses all day long, gossiping and laughing. I should think life presents itself nowhere under such easy and pleasant conditions.”

In Mr. Milton’s account, the Levantines and their fortunes were a source of nothing but good to the city at large. He writes that “they more than any other community had helped to shape Smyrna in their own image — rich, cosmopolitan and of mixed blood and heritage. Their factories and mines employed all, regardless of race or nationality. And they had a concern for their workforce that was patrician in sentiment and philanthropic in outlook.” He cites the example of Edward Whitall, a fanatical horticulturalist, who, when World War I forced the closure of his factories, continued to pay employees “to scour the mountainside for new rarities of bulbs.”

Yet it is not hard to see why the privileges of the Levantines might have rankled the other Smyrniots. The foundation of their fortunes, as Mr. Milton notes, was the so-called Capitulations — the right to trade without paying duties to the Ottoman government, which made their exports of figs, licorice, and other commodities immensely profitable. As their name makes clear, however, these capitulations were signs of Turkish weakness, extorted from a feeble Ottoman state by its European rivals. The very fact that an exclusive foreign colony monopolized the trade and resources of the Turkish Empire was a standing reminder that Turkey had fallen far behind the West in the race to modernize. Mr. Milton does not tell us what the ordinary Greek or Turk, who could have gained admittance to Bournabat only as a servant, really thought of these interlopers, but it is not hard to guess.

In any case, the Levantines, large as they loom in “Paradise Lost,” had only a peripheral role to play in the fate of Smyrna. During World War I, Mr. Milton shows, they were in a precarious legal position. Because they were subjects of Britain or France, countries at war with Turkey and her German allies, the Levantines could technically be considered enemy nationals. But thanks to the protection of Rahmi Bey, the cosmopolitan governor of Smyrna, they were shielded from the punitive edicts issued by the Young Turk regime in Constantinople.

Rahmi Bey, in fact, emerges as one of the few heroes of “Paradise Lost.” According to George Horton, the American consul in Smyrna and one of Mr. Milton’s prime sources, Rahmi was “one of those more intelligent Turks who thinks that war with France and England is a piece of folly in which Turkey is sure to lose.” Running Smyrna practically as an independent fiefdom, he actually tried to surrender the city to the British in the middle of the war. When British warships bombarded the fortifications in the harbor, Horton recalled, Rahmi would sit at a waterfront café enjoying the sight with a glass of ouzo. His reward from the British, after the Ottoman surrender in 1918, was to be imprisoned on Malta, like all other members of the wartime government, until the intervention of the Levantine magnates helped to win his release.

Such high-handed blundering was sadly typical of the way the British government dealt with the whole Middle East after 1918. Even as they were sowing the seeds of confusion in Palestine and the Arab countries, the British committed themselves to a disastrous policy of support for the expansionist Greek government of Eleftherios Venizelos. Venizelos was the father of the “Megali Idea,” the Great Idea of a revived Greek Empire. He hoped to take control of vast swathes of the former Ottoman Empire, where the Greek Christian population was still substantial.

Above all, he coveted Smyrna, the only majority Christian city in Turkey, where Greeks outnumbered Turks by two to one. The British prime minister, David Lloyd George, had fallen under Venizelos’s spell and firmly believed that Greece would be the future hegemon in the eastern Mediterranean. As a result, he threw Britain’s support behind the Greek claim to Smyrna, and on May 15, 1919, Greek troops disembarked in the city’s harbor to take possession of their prize.

It was a scene of rejoicing and revenge, dramatically evoked by Mr. Milton. The local Greeks, who had long nurtured a grievance against the Ottoman state and had been severely persecuted during the war, welcomed the Greek army as liberators. In the ensuing tumult, a riot erupted that claimed the lives of some 400 Turks and 100 Greeks. But this was just a small foretaste of the violence to come. For the occupation of Smyrna catalyzed the Turkish nationalist movement of Mustafa Kemal, who vowed to liberate the city. Over the next three years, in a war sketched in very brief outline by Mr. Milton, Greeks and Turks fought over the future of eastern Anatolia. Atrocities were committed by both sides, and the level of hatred was such that no compromise peace could be reached. Whoever lost the war, it was clear, was going to suffer atrociously.

In the end, it was the Greeks who lost, and Smyrna that paid the price. The heart of “Paradise Lost” comes in its final third, as Mr. Milton gives a day-by-day chronicle of the fall of the city to the victorious Turkish armies. The trouble began on September 6, 1922, as the retreating Greek army entered the city, heading for the ships that would take them home to mainland Greece. With them went the local Greek administration, leaving Smyrna ungoverned and defenseless. As the city began to fill up with hundreds of thousands of Greek and Armenian refugees, fleeing the inevitable Turkish reprisals, it was clear that a humanitarian disaster was in the making. Henry Morgenthau, the former American ambassador to Turkey, warned that “unless Britain asserts herself by showing that she … has an interest in protecting these Christians, the Turks will be as merciless as they were with the Armenians.”

But as Mr. Milton damningly shows, the British, the Americans, and the other Western powers refused to act, fearful of getting mixed up in the Greek-Turkish war. As a result, when the Turkish armies arrived on Saturday, September 9 — both regular troops and the brutal, much-feared irregulars, or chettes — there was no one to stand between them and the defenseless population of Smyrna.

The result was a horrifying massacre — all the more horrifying because it was entirely predictable and, indeed, often predicted. Drawing on the memoirs of survivors, most of whom were just children at the time, Mr. Milton conjures the nightmarish scene. Turkish troops killed Greek and Armenian civilians with absolute impunity. Girls were repeatedly raped before having their breasts cut off.

But the real disaster came when the Turkish forces — deliberately, according to numerous eyewitnesses — set the city ablaze, after dousing the Armenian quarter with gasoline. Desperate to escape the fire, hundreds of thousands people crowded the narrow waterfront, where they were penned in by Turkish soldiers and kept without food or water. Thousands dropped dead of hunger and disease, or committed suicide by leaping into the sea, where the corpses soon formed a thick mass. All the while, American and British battleships rode at anchor in the harbor, but refused to intervene.

Even as he delineates this hell, Mr. Milton pays homage to the righteous men and women who risked their lives to help save others’. Several American citizens — mostly ministers and missionaries — tried to use their diplomatic status to shield refugees. The American International College took in 1,500 Greeks and Armenians, while thousands more camped out at the American consulate. But it was finally a single individual who did the most to stop the catastrophe. Asa Jennings, a Methodist pastor from New York who worked for the Smyrna YMCA, used a combination of moral suasion and sheer trickery to convince the Greek government to send a fleet to Smyrna under American protection. On September 23, two weeks after the massacre began, the rescue ships arrived, and within a week, some 300,000 people had been evacuated to Greece.

The death toll in the fall of Smyrna remains disputed, Mr. Milton writes, but “approximately 100,000 people were killed and another 160,000 deported into the interior,” most of whom perished on the way. In the face of a tragedy of such dimensions, it is hard to feel too sorry for the Levantine aristocrats. As Mr. Milton writes, “they had not been raped or killed — that had been the fate of their servants.” Most of them managed to escape Smyrna with their lives, though they lost their possessions.

Above all, what they lost was the city itself — the luxurious, cosmopolitan society that could not survive an age of uncompromising nationalism. After a century of ethnic cleansing, Smyrna deserves to be remembered as, if not a paradise lost, at least a martyr to the human capacity for hatred. As George Horton wrote on leaving the burning city, “one of the keenest impressions which I brought with me from Smyrna was a feeling of shame that I belonged to the human race.”

akirsch@nysun.com


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