From The Lost Boys (Gina Perry, 2018) pp56-61
The Turkish nationalists finally repulsed the Greek army in 1922. Their revenge, when it came, was terrible.
By 9 September 1922, nationalist forces had successfully pushed the Greek troops back, and the last of those who had occupied Smyrna since 1919 withdrew. Those that were captured were forced to parade through the streets shouting ‘Long live Mustafa Kemal!’ amid jeering onlookers. Refugees fleeing both armies engulfed the city: Christian, Muslim, and Jewish families carried what belongings they had been able to salvage from the razing of their villages. Rape, looting, atrocities, and savagery were reported on both sides.
The city of Smyrna was in chaos. The streets were choked with refugees; the roads into town were littered with the bodies of dead and dying and the carcasses of animals. Smoke from burning villages smudged the skyline.
Meanwhile Mustafa Kemal and his cavalry escort drove into town on 10 September in an open car draped with olive branches. Mobs took over the streets. The Greek archbishop, who had welcomed the Greek troops to the city three years earlier, was lynched by a Muslim crowd.
As fleeing Greek troops fought last-ditch battles with Turkish soldiers nearby, Sherif’s headmaster heard ‘disturbing rumors’ of thousands of mounted Turkish brigands gathering near Odemis on their way to Smyrna. Some stopped just out of Smyrna, at Muzafer’s school in Sirinyet, on Monday 11 September. Despite the American flag that flew from the tower of the hall signalling the school’s neutrality, the brigands began looting one of the school buildings. In his memoirs, Sherif’s headmaster Alexander MacLachlan wrote about how when he went to stop them, he Was ambushed. As a crowd of anxious boys and staff watched with horror from an upper-storey window was sixteen-year-old Muzafer one of them? – the men toyed with him, stripping, heating, and stabbing him. One student ran out, pleading for the headmaster’s life, but they ignored him, and were only stopped When a passing Turkish officer intervened.
Fearful of the retribution of the nationalist army, the tens of thousands of Greeks and Armenians who poured into Smyrna gathered on the waterfront, where they were likely reassured by the Allied warships at anchor in the harbour. Meanwhile, many of Smyrna’s foreigners – British, French, Italians, and Americans – were safely boarded onto twenty-one Allied battleships with orders to protect their own citizens.
By 13 September, different Christian parts of the city were on fire. The Armenian quarter was the first to go up. Other Christian districts quickly followed, and the fire merged into a wall of flame three kilometres long and thirty metres high. As the fire roared through the streets, buildings collapsed, and horses and camels screamed in terror. The shops and department stores, the churches, theatres, hotels, factories, coffee houses, and consulates were destroyed. Thousands of people fled to the waterfront to escape the advancing fire, joining the huge crowd that had been gathering there for days. But now they were trapped between the city and the water. When night fell, they were attacked and robbed by brigands. Some escaped by boat; many perished trying, murdered on the quayside or drowned in their attempts to reach the safety of Allied ships in the harbour. The smell of rotting carcasses and bodies that bobbed on the water was so overpowering that Mustafa Kemal – later to be known as Ataturk, or ‘Father of the Turks’ -moved from the waterside mansion where he had been staying to one downwind of the bay. The frantic screams of the people on the quay could be heard for miles. The wall of Fire was so tall that it was said that it could be seen by the monks on Mount Athos, on the other side of the Aegean Sea.
Finally, on 16 September, Kemal allowed Allied ships to evacuate survivors, except for thousands of Greek men aged eighteen to forty-five, who were separated from their families and deported as forced labour to rebuild villages in the interior after the war. Over 200,000 people were ferried to Greece: One of the conditions of the peace settlement signed in Lausanne the following year was the forced exchange of remaining Greek Orthodox residents of Anatolia for Muslims living in Greece. Turkish-speaking people of Greek heritage whose affiliation and family history were rooted in Anatolia rather than Greece, and Greek-speaking people of Turkish heritage with strong links with Macedonia, were swept up in the exchange and forced to resettle in places where they were most often regarded as unwelcome strangers.
Sherif, who was in his final year of schooling in 1922, was likely safe from the worst of the atrocities, but he would have seen many of them first-hand. Smyrna was in ashes. Anatolia had been devastated by the War of Independence. The expectation was that Sherif and his generation would rebuild it.
The fire destroyed all reminders of Smyrna’s Ottoman cosmopolitan past. The mansions and clubs, hotels and cafés, were gone. The Levantine district, the Greek and Armenian quarters, were wiped away. In its place was a new city, now given its Turkish name: Izmir.
The fire that obliterated the multiethnic port city of the Ottoman Empire has been swallowed up in silence. In his victory Speech to the Turkish Grand National Assembly just weeks later, Mustafa Kemal recounted how Turkish nationalists won the war but made no mention of the burning of Smyrna. Five years later in his famous six-day speech in 1927 about the founding of the Republic, there was also no mention of the fire. Mustafa Kemal blamed the loss of the Ottoman Empire on the nationalisms and treachery of ethnic and religious minorities. For Kemal, a strong and unified country was one with a homogenous population and a new, shared history that helped people feel a sense of belonging. And that meant telling a new story of the vanquishing of a common enemy that stressed the liberation rather than the destruction of what was then Turkey’s second-largest city, and the triumph of Turkish nationalists over foreign powers.
Sociologist Bitay Kolluoglu-Klrli points out that the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 was equally catastrophic and produced an enormous number of literary, scholarly, and popular accounts of the event and its aftermath. Yet by 2005, when her paper was published, the Smyrna tire was still swallowed in silence, with ‘not a single Turkish novel, film or memoir’ referring to it. Any accounts of the Smyrna fire would mean moving into the dangerous territory of voicing who was responsible for setting it, and who was responsible for letting it burn.
At the museum I moved from photo to photo, from one glass case to another, peering into the rooms where Ataturk slept, read books, took baths, and had his daily shave with his personal barber. But nowhere in the building was there a reference to the ‘ event that caused its original owner, the carpet merchant, to ‘surrender’ the premises. The catastrophic fire that destroyed the city of Smyrna was represented by a single blurred photo without a caption that was part of a short film about the Republic, playing on a loop. The picture was taken from the sea, where black clouds of smoke billowed upwards from the city. The next frame showed Turkish soldiers standing in the mined and still smoking remains of buildings as if surveying the damage. I kept looking to see how the fire would be explained, and importantly who would be blamed for it, but there was nothing of the sort. The gaps in the museum’s exhibit mirrored those in official histories of Turkey. It’s one thing for official histories to be edited, but what does that silence do to people who were there? What do they do with the traumatic memories, emotions, and experiences, especially ones that might contradict official accounts?
Tgk1946's Blog 