The Great Fire (48 page)
22
The names along the Quay
The basis for street descriptions throughout the book is the
Plan de Smyrne,
prepared as an insurance map by Ernest Bon in 1913.
22
In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
A rich source of information about Smyrna is
A Survey of Some Social Conditions in Smyrna, Asia Minor, May 1921,
a manuscript brought to publication in 2009 by Rıfat N Bali, Istanbul: Libra Kitapçılık Ve Yayıncılık.
Smyrna was a frequent stop for tourists traveling through the Near East in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and numerous letters and travel guides describe the city: John Cam Hobhouse Broughton,
Travels in Albania and Other Provinces of Turkey in 1809 & 1810
(London: Murray, 1858);
Guide to Greece, the Archipelago, Constantinople, the Coasts of Asia Minor, Crete and Cyprus, with Thirteen Maps and Thirty-three Plans
(London: Macmillan, 1908);
Handbook for Travellers in Turkey in Asia: Including Constantinople, the Bosphorus, Plain of Troy, Isles of Cyprus, Rhodes, &c., Smyrna, Ephesus, and the Routes to Persia, Bagdad, Moosool, &c.
(London: J. Murray, 1878);
Guide to Greece, the Archipelago, Constantinople, the Coasts of Asia Minor
(Macmillan & Co); Jerome Alfred Hart,
A Levantine Log-book
(New York: Longmans, Green, 1905); Bilge Criss,
American Turkish Encounters: Politics and Culture
, 1830–1989 (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2011); Mansel,
Levant: Splendour.
24
The city was also a principal source of Turkish tobacco
An encyclopedic description of the American tobacco business at the time appears in the record of the Hearings Before the Committee on Finance, United States Senate, Sixty-seventh Congress, First Session, on the Proposed Tariff Act of 1921 (H. R. 7456) 1922: American Valuation. 67th Cong., 1st sess. S. Doc. H. R. 7456. Vol. 7. (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1922). See also Allan M. Brandt,
The Cigarette Century: The Rise, Fall, and Deadly Persistence of the Product That Defined America
(New York: Basic, 2007); Howard Cox,
The Global Cigarette: Origins and Evolution of British American Tobacco, 1880–1945
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).
24
Smyrna was home to the Oriental Carpet
Antony Wynn,
Three Camels to Smyrna: Times of War and Peace in Turkey, Persia, India, Afghanistan & Nepal, 1907–1986: The Story of the Oriental Carpet Manufacturers Company
(London: Hali, 2008).
25
The servant staffs
For a portrait of the families and lives of Levantine families in Smyrna, see Giles Milton,
Paradise Lost Smyrna 1922
(New York: Basic Books, 2010). Also, Mansel,
Levant: Splendour.
25
A Greek soldier, evoking the city’s
The phrase comes from the memoir of Corporal Stamatis Hadjiyannis, an Ottoman Greek whose family was ejected from Asia Minor in the years immediately before World War
I. He enlisted in the Greek army, fought on the Bulgarian front, and after the war ended, traveled with his unit from Salonika to Smyrna in 1919. The memoir is in the possession of his grandson, George Poulemenos, coauthor of
A Lexicon of Smyrneika, Izmir Rumcasi Sozlugus,
Tarih Vakfi Yurt Kitaplari (2012). A memoir excerpt can be read at http://levantineheritage.com.
25
The first two missionaries
Hilton Obenzinger, “Holy Land Narrative and American Covenant: Levi Parsons, Pliny Fisk and the Palestine Mission,”
Religion & Literature
35, no. 2/3 (2003): 241–267.
26
Pliny and Fisk were the vanguard
There are many compelling memoirs by American missionaries who served in Turkey during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They include Grace H. Knapp, Grisell M. McLaren, and Myrtle O. Shane,
The Tragedy of Bitlis
(New York: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1919); Bertha B. Morley,
Marsovan 1915: The Diaries of Bertha B. Morley,
ed. Hilmar Kaiser (Ann Arbor, MI: Gomidas Institute, 2000); William Wheelock Peet and Louise Jenison Peet,
No Less Honor
(Chattanooga, TN: Priv. Print., 1939); Cyrus Hamlin,
My Life and Times
(Boston: Congregational Sunday School and Publishing Co.,1831); and Joseph Kingsbury Greene,
Leavening the Levant
(Boston: Pilgrim Press, 1916).
27
Ernest Otto Jacob, who
In a letter to his brother C. V. Hibbard, associate general secretary for the International Committee of YMCA, Darrel O. Hibbard, who worked for the YMCA in Athens, discusses Jacob’s difficult nature and indicates that Jacob had conflicts with other YMCA members in Smyrna and his previous assignment. “He has quarreled with every man he has had sent to Smyrna. Jennings the last one seems to have been too much for him according to all reports.” Oct. 8, 1922. KFYA.
CHAPTER 3: THE BEGINNING OF THE END
29
On the morning of August 26, 1922
This chapter and the subsequent chapter on Kemal are deeply indebted to the two major biographies in English of Mustapha Kemal: Patrick Balfour Kinross,
Atatürk: A Biography of Mustafa Kemal, Father of Modern Turkey
(New York: Quill/Morrow, 1992); and Andrew Mango,
Atatürk: The Biography of the Founder of Modern Turkey
(Woodstock, NY: Overlook, 2000). Also see Hanns
Froembgen,
Kemal Ataturk; a Biography
. Translated by Kenneth Kirkness (New York: Hillman-Curl, 1937). Also, Smith in
Ionian Vision
on the Greek response to the attacks.
30
Among the poets
Mango,
Atatürk,
37.
30
“well-trained superior waiter”
Robert Steed Dunn,
World Alive: A Personal Story
(New York: Crown, 1956).
31
Only weeks earlier, British officers
Caffrey to State Dept., July 22, 1922. NA 767.68/313. “Fighting Qualities of Greek Troops,” Intelligence Report, STANAV, Oct 2, 1920, No. 190. MLB.
34
Nowhere had his courage
Kinross,
Atatürk,
87–112; Mango,
Atatürk,
156–158.
34
“Greeks and Turks alike fought . . .”
The passage is taken from H. C. Armstrong,
Gray Wolf, Mustafa Kemal: An Intimate Study of a Dictator
(New York: Minton, Balch & Co., 1933). Courtenay was a British officer serving in Turkey.
34
The Greeks had one friend
See Smith’s
Ionian Vision
, “Winter Disenchantment” chapter. See also I. A. Rose,
Conservatism and Foreign Policy during the Lloyd George Coalition, 1918–1922
(London: Frank Cass, 1999), 228–234.
Lloyd George in the House of Commons August 4, 1922 (Hansard Vol 157): “It is remarkable that she (Greece) has been able to accomplish what she has. She has maintained an army, and a large army. I am told there are men who have not been home to see their families for 12 years in Greece—peasants drawn from the soil—and they are prepared still to go on for the liberation of the men of their race. They have made financial sacrifices which are almost incredible. . . . A people who have done that are worthy of consideration at the hands of any country, and therefore I earnestly trust that, whatever happen, we shall see that the Christian populations of Asia Minor are adequately protected against a repetition of such horrible incidents as have disgraced the annals of that land.” See also: “The result of Mr. Lloyd George’s Speech on the Near East Question,” G-2 Report, STANAV, August 25, 1922. “The speech . . . was received by all Greeks as a positive assurance of strong British support for their cause . . .” Then in October, Lloyd George in the House of Commons: “I am not going into the question of who was responsible in Smyrna. I am not going to discuss whether the Greeks
provoked the Turks or the Turks the Greeks. It is enough for me to call attention to the fact that since 1914 the Turks, according to official testimony we have received have slaughtered in cold blood a million and a half of Armenians, men, women and children, and five hundred thousand Greeks without any provocation at all.”
CHAPTER 4: GEORGE HORTON, POET-CONSUL
36
At the end of August
George Horton,
The Blight of Asia: An Account of the Systematic Extermination of Christian Populations by Mohammedans and of the Culpability of Certain Great Powers
;
with a True Story of the Burning of Smyrna
(Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1926), 117.
36
He had pulled men
V. G. Balabanian to Horton, July 25, 1919: “Your happy return to Smyrna gives us the opportunity of expressing our best thanks for your paternal protection in favor of five of our comrades who were condemned to death by the court martial of Smyrna in July 1915 without any plausible accusation against them.” The letter is quoted in Nancy Horton’s unfinished biography of GH. GHP.
38
“The three big kinema . . .”
“Smyrna’s Last Days. A Manchester Man’s Experiences,”
Manchester Guardian,
Sept. 9, 1922, as quoted in Lysimachos Oeconomos,
The Martyrdom of Smyrna and Eastern Christendom: A File of Overwhelming Evidence, Denouncing the Misdeeds of the Turks in Asia Minor and Showing Their Responsibility for the Horrors of Smyrna
(London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1922).
38
The first, on August 30
Horton to State Department, August 30, 1922. NA 767.68/265.
38
“My opinion is that the situation . . .”
Horton to State Dept. NA 767.68/276.
39
Horton had been a consul
Geoge Horton,
Recollections Grave and Gay
(Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1927).
39
Horton’s first aspiration
The details of Horton’s early life come from an unpublished biography of him by his daughter Nancy Horton, as well as an unpublished memoir, collected in the GHP now at Georgetown University. (In my review of the materials, they were held by Miss Horton’s attorney at his office in Washington, D.C.)
41
Two years earlier, a group
Mango,
Atatürk,
76–77.
42
Horton watched
Horton,
Blight of Asia,
27–40.
42
Nearly thirty thousand Armenian and Assyrian Christians
Merrill D.
Peterson,
“Starving Armenians”: America and the Armenian Genocide, 1915–1930 and After
(Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2004), 28–29; “Brooklyn Man Saw Missionaries Shot,”
New York Times
, May 2, 1909.
43
By September 3, it had taken
Utkan Kocatürk,
Atatürk Ve Türkiye Cumhuriyeti Tarihi Kronolojisi: 1918–1938
(Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu, 1983).
44
The Asia Minor Defense League
Smith,
Ionian Vision,
238, 239; Solomonidis, “Greece in Asia Minor,” 229; Also, testimony in a trial in 1923 in which tobacco companies sought payment for losses. Rev. Dobbs Testimony, Day 8 49-53 (Trial summary),
Smyrna Conflagration, 13th–16th September, 1922: In the High Court of Justice, King’s Bench Division, and Court of Appeal: American Tobacco Company Incorporated v. Guardian Assurance Company Ltd., and Socieìteì Anonyme Des Tabacs D’Orient Et D’Outre Mer v. Alliance Assurance Company Ltd. . . . 1- December . . . 1924 and 22nd April to 1st May, 1925
(London: Printed by Wyman, Privately Printed) and Prince Andrew,
Towards Disaster,
ff.
43
He also encouraged his friend
Interviews with Vassily Skoulakis at his home in Athens, August 2011. Born in Smyrna, Mr. Skoulakis was a friend and an employee of Onassis (traffic director of Olympic Airlines) and traveled with him on his return to Smyrna. Nicholas Gage,
Greek Fire—The story of Maria Callas and Aristotle Onassis
(New York: Knopf, 2000), 114–128.
44
He wrote letters on consulate stationery
Interviews with Nancy Horton at her home in Athens, August 2011.
44
He tried without success
“Barry Domvile His Diary,” Sept. 4, 1922, Royal Maritime Museum, Greenwich.
CHAPTER 5: GARABED HATCHERIAN
45
Dr. Hatcherian’s diary stands alone as a sustained and detailed narrative of events in Smyrna by a resident of the city. Its importance as an insight into lives of Smyrniots before and after the fire would be difficult to exaggerate. The area that had been occupied by his neighborhood, as described in the diary, is now contained within the Izmir fairgrounds.
CHAPTER 6: ADMIRAL BRISTOL, AMERICAN POTENTATE
48
In Constantinople, Rear Admiral Mark Bristol
Bristol kept a “War Diary,” a daily record of his activities. The diary is collected in the Mark Lambert Bristol Papers at the Library of Congress.
48
The city was crowded, noisy
The description of Constantinople draws on several sources including the sociological study of the city by Clarence R. Johnson,
Constantinople To-day or, The Pathfinder Survey of Constantinople: A Study in Oriental Social Life
(New York: Macmillan, 1922). John Dos Passos provided a vivid description his travel book,
Orient Express
(New York and London: Harper & Bros., 1927). Dos Passos’s book was based on his trip to the Balkans, Turkey, the Caucasus, and the Middle East during the latter half of 1921. “Out of Turkish Coffee Cups,” the first six sections of “Constant’ July 1921,” appeared in the
New York Tribune
, October 2, 1921. Robert Shenk, ed.,
Playships of the World: The Naval Diaries of Admiral Dan Gallery, 1920–1924
(Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2008), ff.
The Russian Refugees,
Constantinople Scrapbooks, 1921–1923, Charles Claflin Davis Digital Collection, Harvard Law School, Cambridge, MA.