The Great Fire (5 page)

The army of Greece plunged deeper into Anatolia to defeat the nationalists, but it was soon mired in a grueling and brutal fight east of Smyrna on the high plains of the Anatolian interior. It won battles, but proved unable to finish off the nationalists. The country was too vast, and popular support for the nationalists among Anatolia’s Moslems was too deep. Soon, Greece’s only real ally in the war, Britain, walked away from its support of Greece, assuring its eventual defeat.

Emboldened by Allied indecision and infighting, the nationalists attacked the French, who had occupied the zone in southern Anatolia assigned to them in the Sevres Treaty. Lacking the stomach for a war against the nationalists, the French departed, leaving the Armenians who had returned to the region to the nationalists. Thousands of Armenians were slaughtered. Satisfied with their possession of Syria, the French split from the British and essentially negotiated a separate peace with the nationalists. The nationalists also attacked Armenia, the new nation in the northeast corner of Anatolia. The Allies and the United States, which had encouraged the Armenian nation, failed to respond, and an independent Armenia disappeared.

Meanwhile, the Greek army had successfully fought its way east, but nationalist forces stopped it nearly within artillery-firing distance of Ankara in the summer of 1921. The Greek army retreated to a line near the Sakaria River on the Anatolian plateau. It was exhausted, and the nation of Greece was broke and isolated. Greece prepared for a unilateral withdrawal, but Britain counseled delay until an armistice was arranged. Desperate to improve its position, Greece concocted a plan in the summer of 1922 to seize Constantinople, which would have altered the military situation in its favor, but the British and French objected. It was checkmate for the Greek army.

And there matters stood until the hot late summer of 1922—the Greek army was spent and out of options and allies; the Turkish nationalists,
who had resumed the slaughter of Greek and Armenian civilians, were rested and amply supplied with guns, artillery, and planes by their recently acquired friends, Italy, France, and a new troublemaker on the scene, Soviet Russia. The stage was set for triumph of the nationalists and a final bloody act. It would occur in a matter of weeks.

I
n mid-August 1922, Asa Kent Jennings, a forty-four-year-old minister from upstate New York, was traveling with his wife and three children to a new job as the boys’ work secretary of the Young Men’s Christian Association in Smyrna. Standing together on the deck of the steamer, they could have been mistaken for a mission family dispensing religious leaflets on a street corner of an American city—Chicago, New York, or Kansas City.

Jennings was a small man in wire-rimmed glasses, barely over five feet tall. He stood not quite straight: his back was hunched, an artifact of tuberculosis, which had struck him in his twenties. To conceal his deformity, he always wore a suit with a loose jacket, two sizes too big, that covered the bump on his back. He wore it even now in the Mediterranean summer heat. He was slightly jowly, the thick lenses of his spectacles gave his eyes a strange magnification, and he seemed always to be smiling. “The YMCA smile,” some said mockingly. There was something elfin about him—the enforced miniaturization from his disease, the cock of his head when he turned to look up at a taller man to show his smile, and his pleasant appeal to the spirit. He seemed not quite of this world. Jennings had grown up in a religious family on a farm in upstate New York on the south shore of Lake Ontario.

Jennings’s wife, Amy, forty-two years old, was the picture of a proper
church wife: hair parted in the middle, then up and gathered in two buns on each side of her head in the convention of the Gibson girl, but with a Sunday-school decency, a modest dress tight at the neck, and glasses. The children were two boys, Asa Will and Wilbur, also in glasses and jackets, though tighter fitting, and a girl, Bertha, with a bow atop her head.

Leaving Constantinople, their steamer had slipped out of the Bosporus and plied westward across the Sea of Marmara, squeezed through the Dardanelles, and churned down the Aegean coast of Anatolia, that long rhinoceros head of subcontinent whose foreshortened horn is the isthmus that connects Asia to Europe. Jennings’s assignment in Smyrna would be to engage boys of different faiths and ethnicities—Greeks, Turks, Armenians, and Jews—in sports and healthy outdoor activities to teach tolerance, responsibility, and Christian virtue. Jennings didn’t know it, but he was headed to a job where the boss didn’t want him. The YMCA director in Smyrna had asked headquarters to send someone else—a person he knew to be smart, athletic, and handsome; his preferred candidate had been a member of the Syracuse crew team and president of the student body. He had the robust physical presence that would make a strong positive impression on potential donors in Smyrna. Instead, Smyrna’s YMCA was getting a funny-looking, crooked, and pious little man sent by higher-ups who had been impressed with the work he had done in Czechoslovakia, managing a YMCA hut for decommissioning Czech soldiers and starting an athletic program for boys. “Jennings has a most attractive personality,” his boss had written to Smyrna’s YMCA director in consolation. Jennings liked to sing and laugh, and this had made him a hit with the soldiers.

Even if he had known about the behind-the-scenes opposition, Jennings was not a person who worried much about the condescending views of others. For a little man, he had a big spirit. As he would later write to his son about his impairments, “I do not despair of handicaps. Unless one has a weak desire to master them, they may be able to contribute to our success and the development of a stronger character.” The bigger problem was Jennings’s ignorance of the violent forces that were converging on his destination. For this he could be excused: even
at this late moment, Smyrna itself was not fully aware of the danger it faced. As usual, Smyrna was busy having fun.

On that sweltering August day, as his ship plied southward, passing the island of Lesbos on the right, Jennings approached Smyrna with a proud missionary history, but with an indifference to his safety that was nothing short of breathtaking. Smyrna was a city occupied by a foreign army (Greece) engaged in a brutish war with an indigenous enemy (Turkish nationalists). Here was a man of uncertain health with a wife of uncertain nerves (she soon would suffer a nervous breakdown) and three young children traveling to a city that was only two hundred miles from a rugged plateau where two armies—with a combined strength of 450,000 men—faced each other across a field of arid and rugged ground with blood in their eyes. Both armies had been conditioned by five hundred years of conquest, revolt, and religious hatred.

Some of Jennings’s lack of caution may have been his American can-do spirit and faith in a beneficent God. Some of it may also have been due to Smyrna’s reputation—it was widely known as a place unlike anywhere else in the Ottoman Empire, well governed during World War I by a liberal and pro-Western Turkish
vali
named Rahmi Bey and now by a stern and even-handed Greek governor, Aristides Stergiades. Even during the deportations of 1915 and 1916, Armenians in Smyrna had lived mostly free of intimidation and death.

The Greek army and civil administration were firmly in control; Allied warships were present in the harbor. There were also Americans in Smyrna—an American consulate, missionary schools and an orphanage, the staffs of the YMCA and the YWCA, and American businessmen, buying tobacco leaf and selling kerosene, sewing machines, farm tractors, cars, and even ice from a factory owned by an Armenian American. Ice was in big demand in Smyrna during this torrid summer.

Jennings seemed not at all worried about what lay ahead. He was eager to encounter it, and he enjoyed the cucumber smell of the sea. Like his Protestant countrymen back home, he was obsessed with the geography of the Bible, and now, as the tawny hills of Anatolia slipped by the left side of the ship, he was entering that holy land as if in a Sunday-school storybook.

Jennings had grown up in a family of ministers and faithful Methodist churchgoers. The family farm was in New York’s “burned-over district,” so-called because it had been so Bible thumped and evangelized decades earlier that there was no more fuel for human conversion.

In his late teens as a student at Syracuse University, Jennings had been swept up in the Protestant enthusiasm that was running strong on American college campuses in the late 1800s. Already a devout Methodist, Jennings was further inflamed by the religious fervor at Syracuse that was stirred and channeled into missionary service by the YMCA’s Student Volunteer Movement. Forced to drop out of college by lack of money, Jennings went to nearby Utica, where he got a job as an assistant secretary for boys’ athletics at the local YMCA. The following year, he married Amy, also a devout upstate Methodist. Jennings moved to a better job with the YMCA in Carthage, New York, and that same year Amy had a child, a girl named Ortha, who died in infancy.

Jennings, then twenty-seven years old, contracted typhoid fever, recovered, then relapsed, and, in poor health, returned to Utica. He suffered through a long and difficult period of convalescence. At about the time he turned thirty years old, he had tried and failed to make a living as a minister. He had served as the traveling pastor at Methodist churches in the small farm hamlets of Barneveld, Cleveland, Trenton, Forestport, Panama, and Chateauguay. Asa and Amy’s next three children were born in the years that Jennings was moving from one white wood-framed church to the next, never quite making a living, and in 1911 he returned to the steady pay of the YMCA in Utica, which always seemed to take him back, then he went to another pastorate in Richfield Springs, New York. It was an itinerant and insecure life, and it further preyed on Amy’s nerves, but she accepted that Asa was cut out for a life of religious service.

In each of his assignments, Jennings had applied the earnest manner and simple Christianity that were the products of his upbringing, and while he remained a confirmed Methodist, he was irreverent enough, by Utica (and current Prohibitionist) standards, to risk Amy’s ire by drinking the occasional glass of sherry. Hadn’t Christ (he reminded her mischievously) taken wine at dinner? America in 1920 was still very much a
rural Protestant nation, and Jennings reflected the American Protestantism of the day—a practical religion drained of mystery, animated by a spirit of social reform, and defined by a personal relationship with God, good works, and a clean white shirt.

SMYRNA WAS ONE OF THE SEVEN
churches of the Book of Revelation, and the thought of its past thrilled Jennings. Smyrna had been home to St. Polycarp, who had preached with St. John, the last of Jesus’s twelve apostles. Jennings could recite the words John had written from the nearby island of Patmos about Smyrna. “Be thou faithful until death and I will give thee a crown of life.” Not far to the south of Smyrna was Ephesus, another one of the seven founding churches and the ancient city where Mary, the mother of Jesus, had lived out her life, St. Paul had disputed with its residents over their worship of Artemis, and some years earlier Antony had spent a lively summer with his Greek queen of Egypt, Cleopatra. For Jennings, the assignment to Smyrna was an answered prayer—it was getting him closer to his dream, a chance to see Jerusalem.

As Jennings’s steamer approached Pelican Point at the entrance to Smyrna’s harbor and churned its way through the blue-green water, he saw Smyrna bustling and gleaming along its two-mile waterfront, its Quay lined with mansions, hotels, cafés, theaters, and private clubs. Many of the buildings along the Quay were constructed of white marble, and from the water they shimmered like sugar cubes in the intense light of the summer sun. The names along the Quay, as Jennings would soon find, read like a lyric to the city’s
joie de vivre
: Café de Paris, Club Hellenique, Club de Chasseurs, Theatre de Smyrne, Hotel Splendid, Sporting Club, and Pathe Cinema.

IN THE NINETEENTH AND
early twentieth centuries, Smyrna was the richest and most cosmopolitan city of the eastern Mediterranean, a busy trading center of a half-million people—Turks, Greeks, Armenians, Jews, and Levantines, the long-settled and fabulously wealthy European
merchant families that had come seeking their fortunes in the 1700s. It was mostly a Greek city—it had more Greeks than Athens, and its principal languages were Greek and French—fused with a dash of Turkish to create a Smyrniot argot not always understandable to the Greeks of old Greece. A Smyrniot might begin a joke in Greek and finish it in Turkish.

Situated midway down the westward prominence of Asia Minor where the Turkish peninsula splinters into a confetti burst of Aegean islands, Smyrna was a multicultural aggregation of merchants and entrepreneurial adventurers. Blessed with sunshine in summer and rain in winter, Smyrna had a deep harbor and an industrious population that possessed a genius for commerce. The business of Smyrna was business. At the western end of one of history’s most famous trade routes, the Silk Road, it provided a gateway to the wider world for farmers whose expert and intensive cultivation yielded an enormous variety of fruits, vegetables, tobacco, and fiber along a fertile coastal plain drained by rivers with echoes of classical mythology, Meles, Hermus, and Meander.

Those who lived in Smyrna in its best years remembered it as a dream of lavender-scented breezes, garden parties, dancing, and parasols along the harborfront. Smyrna was an emporium and a seaport and a kind of polyglot city-state inside the Ottoman Empire; it was marble mansions, tobacco leaf and opium cake; it was a long table set with grapes, lamb, eggplants, artichokes, red fishes, caviar, oysters, pomegranate, and cheeses; it was rows of busy cafés and coffeehouses; it was folded carpets on the backs of sleepy-eyed camels; it was the sound of the Anatolian lute, the smell of jasmine, and the taste of anise from its favorite liquor,
raki;
it was Italian opera and Greek operetta and the call to prayer of the muezzin and the ringing of the Russian-cast bells of Agia Photini. For the Greeks, Smyrna was wealth; for the Armenians, it was wealth; for the Levantine Europeans, it was even greater wealth; for the Ladino-speaking Sephardic Jews, expelled from their Iberian homes by Ferdinand and Isabella, it was the safety of not Spain; and for the Turks, it was “
Giavour Izmir,
” Infidel Smyrna. Smyrna was an enchantment, an emotion, and an idea that in the end could not close the circle of its own aspiration toward religious tolerance.

Smyrna grew rich from its carpets, silk, tobacco, opium, raisins, fragrant oils, and figs, considered the best in the world. When Americans in California wanted to develop a fig industry in the late nineteenth century, they traveled to Smyrna to learn its secrets. They discovered growing a fig was a complicated business, requiring the husbandry of wasps.

The city was also a principal source of Turkish tobacco—the region grew a small and aromatic leaf that commanded high prices. The American cigarette industry would not have been possible without Turkish tobacco. Virginia burley had a harsh taste so the industry, just getting started in the early twentieth century, blended Turkish tobacco with homegrown burley, and cigarette sales soared. R.J. Reynolds created a new cigarette blended with Turkish tobacco and called it Camel. It became the first national cigarette brand in America—one of the first national brands for any consumer product.

Smyrna was home to the Oriental Carpet Manufacturing Co., the world’s biggest purveyor of oriental carpets. The company was a cartel, created by Levantine and Armenian merchants, and it controlled 90 percent of the Ottoman Empire’s carpet trade. The company brought Turkish carpet production to astonishing heights, employing more than a hundred thousand women as piece workers weaving carpets on home looms. It took four weavers six weeks to make a single eight-by-twelve-foot rug, which would sell in the United States for 275 dollars, which was about half of the annual wage of an American industrial worker in 1910. The company sold its carpets by the thousands in London, Paris, and New York. It had a showroom at 160 Fifth Avenue in New York, and many a Turkish carpet graced the best town houses of Manhattan.