Choosing the Best Song to Play at a Mass Drowning

When Nikolaos, the cross-dresser of Skala Sikamineas, described your conversation, he said you kept balling your fists and digging your fingernails into the palms of your hands, as if trying to not lose yourself. Tales of the Smyrna fires were what upset you. I was intrigued by the fact that he said you knew the history of the area better than he, that you’d researched the subject extensively, yet you still couldn’t control your temper, particularly when he told you what his grandmother, a young girl at the time, witnessed while she was stranded among the terrified crowd at the port of Smyrna.

His grandmother was seven as the Ottoman Empire imploded at the end of the First World War. Her Greek family lived in Smyrna, Izmir now. She was happy in the cosmopolitan city. Christians, Muslims, and Jews lived and worked there, Armenians, Greeks, Turks, Arabs, Kurds. But then the Greek army invaded at the behest of the Western allies, specifically the British prime minister, David Lloyd George. Get your land back, the Greeks were told, the land that the Turks thought of as Turkey, the one the Greeks thought of as Greater Greece. Oops.

She was ten or eleven when the Greco-Turkish War ended in 1922. Turkish nationalists drove the Greek forces all the way back to the city where she lived. And her idyllic life shattered. Her entire family was killed except for her and one sister, two years older. You empathized with the young girl’s tragedy, but what captured your imagination was the Great Smyrna Fire.

Three days after the Turks took back control of Smyrna, a devastating fire erupted and destroyed at least half the city—the Christian and Armenian neighborhoods but not the Muslim or Jewish ones. Depending on who was writing the history or who was telling the tale, anywhere between ten thousand and a hundred thousand Greeks perished.

But that was not what upset you, was it?

Most of the Armenians and Greeks who survived ended up suffering a bit more than death by fire. Many of the women were raped. Most of the refugees were sent into the interior of the country, where they died an even harsher death. Thousands of deaths, some historians claimed as many as one hundred thousand.

Definitely upsetting, but that was not what made your blood percolate in its veins.

When the fire started, Nikolaos’s grandmother and her sister ran to the port along with thousands of Greek refugees. They crammed the waterfront. Many ended up jumping into the water to escape the flames even though they could not swim. Allied ships docked at the harbor refused to pick them up. The allies were supposed to be neutral. They could not get involved.

No, even that was not what made you as angry as Achilles.

To alleviate the discomfort of the sailors who had to listen to the cries for help from drowning refugees, the British ships played loud music on their speakers. Refugees wailed while listening to popular tunes of the time.

Nikolaos told me you kept asking him in your bad French if his grandmother recalled any of the songs that were played. She didn’t. He wasn’t sure she remembered, but he was sure that she didn’t tell him before she died. Nikolaos said you were hoping that it wasn’t Al Jolson singing “Swanee.” You wanted to know, desperately wanted to, as if knowing what song thousands of refugees were forced to listen to as they drowned could help ease your suffering.