THE RUINED CITY OF SMYRNA: GILES MILTON’S ‘PARADISE LOST’
Adam Kirsch
The New York Sun
July 16, 2008 Wednesday
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unpublished memoirs of Levantine exiles – and in part it is because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 cafe 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."