Paradise Lost · Smyrna 1922 - The Destruction of Islam's City of Tolerance

On Saturday, September 9, 1922, the victorious Turkish

cavalry rode into Smyrna, the richest and most cosmopolitan city in the Ottoman

Empire. The city’s vast wealth created centuries earlier by powerful Levantine

dynasties, its factories teemed with Greeks, Armenians, Turks, and Jews.

Together, they had created a majority Christian city that was unique in the

Islamic world. But to the Turkish nationalists, Smyrna was a city of infidels.

In the aftermath of the First World War and with the support

of the Great Powers, Greece had invaded Turkey with the aim of restoring a

Christian empire in Asia. But by the summer of 1922, the Greeks had been

vanquished by Atatürk’s armies after three years of warfare. As Greek troops

retreated, the non-Muslim civilians of Smyrna assumed that American and

European warships would intervene if and when the Turkish cavalry decided to

enter the city. But this was not to be.

On September 13, 1922, Turkish troops descended on Smyrna.

They rampaged first through the Armenian quarter, and then throughout the rest

of the city. They looted homes, raped women, and murdered untold thousands.

Turkish soldiers were seen dousing buildings with petroleum. Soon, all but the Turkish

quarter of the city was in flames and hundreds of thousands of refugees crowded

the waterfront, desperate to escape. The city burned for four days; by the time

the embers cooled, more than 100,000 people had been killed and millions left

homeless.

Based on

eyewitness accounts and the memories of survivors, many interviewed for the

first time, Paradise Lost offers a vivid narrative account of one of the most

vicious military catastrophes of the modern age.

 

From Publishers

Weekly

Smyrna was a prosperous, cosmopolitan port on Turkey's

Aegean coast where Greeks, Turks, Armenians, Jews and other nationalities lived

in harmony. In his searingly vivid account of Smyrna's destruction by the Turks

in 1922, acclaimed popular historian Milton (Nathaniel's Nutmeg) begins with a

fairy tale–like description of the city focused lopsidedly on the wealthy

European dynasties known as Levantines. But Milton renders an astute account of

the clash of Greek and Turkish nationalisms and the unhelpful meddling of

Western powers, particularly Britain, which supported a Greek incursion into

Turkey. When the defending Turkish troops under Mustafa Kemal (aka Ataturk)

took Smyrna in September 1922, a horrific killing spree of Greeks and Armenians

began, and hundreds of thousands of refugees were trapped on the quayside

between the sea and a city willfully torched by the Turks as a score of foreign

vessels looked on. Milton draws on eyewitness accounts to render these events

in all their horror, and ends with an almost incredible rescue led by an

unlikely hero. Milton powerfully renders this tragic tale of an army that came

to liberate Smyrna and instead massacred its citizens and burned their prize to

the ground in a vengeful frenzy. (Aug.)

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From The New Yorker

In September, 1922, after the Turkish forces of Mustafa

Kemal defeated a Greek army that had recklessly occupied the Anatolian city of

Smyrna, members of Smyrna’s Greek, Armenian, and expatriate communities were

killed, raped, and robbed. Soon, a half million people were trapped on the

port’s narrow wharves, the city in flames behind them; "The streets were

stacked with dead," a British officer wrote. Milton weaves the Armenian

genocide, the birth of modern Turkey, and the tragic inanities of Versailles

into his story, but his focus is the destruction of the multi-ethnic,

religiously diverse cosmopolis of Smyrna (now the Turkish city of Izmir). He

has a tendency to idolize the Levantines, dynasties of European "merchant

princes" who remained oblivious as Greeks and Turks committed atrocities

closer and closer to their enclave. Milton’s more compelling hero is Asa

Jennings, a five-foot-tall Y.M.C.A. administrator who, by bluffing, begging,

and desperately improvising, single-handedly saved tens of thousands of lives.

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