The literature in the English language on various long-established communities eradicated by the horrors of the 20th century is largely dominated by the Jewish holocaust. Accounts of other disappeared communities—of Italians in today’s Croatia, the Poles of Galicia, the Serbs of the former Habsburg Military Border, or Germans everywhere east of the Oder-Neisse line—are available in the languages of the victims, but seldom in reliable English.
Over the past decade competent authors have started to fill the gap. Pamela Ballinger’s History in Exile: Memory and Identity at the Borders of the Balkans is a scholarly yet readable account of the Istrian-Dalmatian exodus of Italians after 1945. In A Terrible Revenge: The Ethnic Cleansing of the East European Germans, Alfred-Maurice de Zayas provided a comprehensive treatment of his subject.
The destruction of the Greek and other non-Muslim communities in Smyrna and the rest of Asia Minor in 1922 was the worst exodus in history hitherto, affecting up to two million people. The event is now largely forgotten outside Greece and Turkey, but good historical sources regarding it have long been available. U.S. Consul George Horton’s gripping, highly personal eyewitness account, The Blight of Asia, was republished in paperback in 2003. Marjorie Housepian Dobkin’s The Smyrna Affair and Smyrna 1922: The Destruction of a City are near-definitive studies, conclusive on the Turks’ culpability for the great fire. Michael Llewellyn Smith’s Ionian Visions: Greece in Asia Minor, 1919-1922 deals with the diplomatic and military background to the great powers’ rivalry that tempted Greece to go va banque with the Megali Idea. A.J. Hobbins’ long essay “Paradise Lost: The Merchant Princes and the Destruction of Smyrna, 1922” offers an insight into the life of the European-descended Levantine haute bourgeoisie of the city on the eve of its destruction.
English journalist Giles Milton centers his account of Smyrna’s demise on the same numerically insignificant but influential group, using similar sources under the same title as Hobbins’ essay. (Curiously, Milton provides but a single passing reference to his predecessor in scholarship.) This focus makes the book commercially viable, while undermining its historical accuracy. The people of Smyrna provide a roughly sketched backdrop. The momentous political and military events leading up to the catastrophe are compiled from secondary sources, with undue emphasis on the importance of David Lloyd George. The broader social, cultural, and religious context of the Pontic tragedy is absent, or merely hinted at. The book’s title should have been The Charmed Life and Demise of Smyrna’s Merchant Dynasties.
The author’s account of the Levantine elite’s attitudes and way of life in the early 20th century oozes with sentimentalism. The descriptions of the “rambling villas and pleasure gardens” of the exclusive suburb of Bournabat, of the inhabitants’ lavish parties, yacht races, and rigidly hierarchical mores, are pure Gone With the Wind. One villa had
scores of reception rooms as well as a gilded ballroom, vast dining room, drawing room and library . . . a spectacular view of the Magnesia Mountains . . . the great entrance hall [was] mounted with scores of trophies and stuffed animals.
Another “most lovable house” had “the unstudied charm and graciousness which comes from the daily use of beautiful things” and required “a regiment of servants to keep it going.” Yet another was famous for its opulent interior, with 38 rooms, two spectacular crystal chandeliers in the great atrium, an imported iron stair balustrade (“one of the marvels of the colony”), and four grand pianos in the ballroom.
The life of the occupants, as lovingly reconstructed by Milton, focused on a never-ending sequence of “gala extravaganzas,” tea parties, yachting, hunting, clubbing, and charitable events. Their noblesse oblige entailed wiring electricity to some fishermen’s cottages here, endowing an orphanage there. Their broad-mindedness included employing workers “regardless of race or nationality”—presumably unlike their fellow capitalists in other lands and in other times.
Between the lines of Milton’s admiring account, these Levantine plutocrats come across as somewhat vulgar philistines, indifferent to the suffering of their fellow Christians, and haughtily convinced of their own invincibility. He does not mention whether they took note of the massacre of “more than 200,000 Armenians . . . between 1894 and 1896”; but when thousands of Greeks were massacred and tens of thousands summarily evicted from their homes in Adramyttium and all along the coast between May and August 1914,
they remained surprisingly sanguine in the face of such violence. Although these events were occurring less than an hour’s ride from the city, they were confident that they would be safe.
After Turkey entered the fray in October 1914, the Bournabat dynasties suffered some “minor alterations to their daily routines” (such as not receiving daily newspapers from London and Paris) while continuing to live “in their own little private Raj.” Milton mentions in passing the abolition in 1914 of the “Capitulations,” the trading privileges extorted from the Turks by Britain and France that enabled untaxed expatriate merchants to grow immensely rich. He glosses over the fact that their wealth did not reflect any particular entrepreneurial flair: It depended entirely on the submissive decrepitude of the declining Ottoman Empire. It is a measure of Milton’s lack of understanding of the city’s ethnic and social divisions that he terms the gloating of the Turks at this news “a strange reaction,” and faults them for failing to “consider the many benefits the Levantines had brought to Smyrna.”
During the Armenian genocide of 1915—which Milton too tactfully refers to as “deportations”—Smyrna “remained untouched” thanks to the Ottoman governor, Rahmi Bey, who appears to have been well looked after by the rich. Also in 1915, their British, French, and Italian citizenships notwithstanding, the wealthy Smyrniots were present “at a glittering party hosted by the Austrian consul” to honor the German inspector-general of the Ottoman army, Liman von Sanders. In 1916, as more than 200,000 Greeks endured the horrors of deportation from the Aegean coast to windswept inner Anatolia, “Smyrna itself was once again spared . . . [none] of the Levantines of Bournabat were sent to the interior.” In 1917, “the year of Passchendaele and stagnation in the mud of Flanders,” the rich were “assembled in the Smyrna Opera House—all in black tie and tails—for the premiere performance of Verdi’s Rigoletto.” After the Armistice in 1918, the released Allied POWs plunged into the city’s lively nightlife; one noted that “the feminine element from the age of about thirteen overdresses like a professional.” The arrival of the Greek army in May 1919 was “a time of heady excitement” for the Levantine rich, with tennis parties, bathing expeditions, and outings by moonlight.
Even when the Ottoman sultanate began to metamorphose into nationalist Turkey in 1920,
[t]he fact that eastern Anatolia had erupted into violence did not impinge on the way they lived their lives . . . They turned a blind eye to everything that was happening in the hinterlands of the country.
During the dark winter (for everyone else) of 1920-21, “[t]he inherent gaiety of the Levantine families continued to suggest that all was well” as the Girauds, one of the most prominent among them, “toasted the New Year at their spectacular fancy-dress ball.” Even on the eve of the disaster, the news of the Greek army’s collapse was “dismissed as idle gossip in the city’s brasseries and clubhouses.” After all, “[t]rade had picked up since the dark days of 1921 and the port was once again busy.” One week and 100,000 Smyrniot lives later, the merchant elite was safely on board Allied warships—or else providing hospitality to Mustafa Kemal and his fellow architects of the city’s disaster.
The character of the community becomes clear from its attitude during the three months between the outbreak of the war in Europe and Turkey’s fatal decision to join the Central Powers. Before the war, one British vice consul described the Levantine expatriates as “more exuberantly patriotic than we allow ourselves to appear at home”—yet only 18 young men from the passport-holding community volunteered to fight for the cause of their presumed mother country. As for the rest, “[t]he offspring of the Levantine families displayed less willingness to volunteer immediately, preferring to bide their time and see how events evolved.” Their biding went on until the war’s end. When push came to shove, the Whitalls, Patersons, Woods, Girauds, and Van der Zees showed that—far from having “divided loyalties”—they had none, except to their own wealth, safety, and unearned privileges.
The subtitle to the book’s British edition, “The Destruction of Islam’s City of Tolerance,” is a politically correct misnomer: Milton (thankfully) does not attempt to advance any claim that Smyrna’s unique pre-1922 mix and way of life owed anything to Islam as such. He does make a feeble attempt, however, to place Paradise Lost in the context of the Ottomans’ supposed spirit of diversity. He approvingly quotes an “Austrian savant” who left the city in 1874 with the conviction that, “in matters of religion . . . [the Turks] are the most tolerant people of the Orient.” He claims that, after the fall of Smyrna, Greeks and other Christians “were often tortured and killed in revenge for the excesses committed by the Greek army,” much as Western journalists described the destruction of the Serb community in Kosovo and its priceless churches as “Albanian revenge” for the supposed outrages of the Milosevic regime.
In reality, Smyrna’s prosperity and polyglot diversity were an exception to the dreary, brutal Ottoman rule everywhere else. It was allowed to exist because it was profitable to a chronically bankrupt state based on an institutionalized discrimination against non-Muslims and the unfriendly coexistence of its many races. Devoid of administrative or commercial talent, the Ottomans had long used the services of educated Christians and awarded them certain privileges. Greek tax collectors and administrators were essential to the running of the empire, but the safety and long-term status of these Phanariots were never guaranteed, as witnessed by the hanging of their patriarch on Easter Day, 1822. The Smyrniot mix of Turkish, Greek, Jewish, and Levantine cultures and practices was always tenuous and unable to forge a distinct local or regional identity.
The final third of Paradise Lost deals with the tragic week that started on September 6, 1922, as the battered remnants of the Greek army passed through Smyrna heading for the ships that would take them back to Greece. Hundreds of thousands of Greek and Armenian refugees came next. The ensuing disaster could be and was forecast, but—as Milton points out—Mustafa Kemal and his cohorts quite deliberately decided not to prevent it, while the governments of Britain, France, Italy, and the United States preferred not to get involved. Five centuries of persecution culminated in the Christians’ final expulsion, not under a sultan-caliph, but under the founder of the Turkish republic, who abolished the caliphate and separated the mosque and state. A horrifying massacre ensued, on par in ferocity, but on a far greater scale, with that inflicted on Constantinople after its fall to the Turks in 1453. Milton’s account, while unoriginal, is comprehensive and accurate. The nobility and bravery of such individuals as Asa Jennings, which Milton reveals, were redeeming sparks in a very dark night.
The aftertaste of Paradise Lost is bitter. The parvenue glitter of the Levantine elite could not conceal that, to survive and prosper, the Smyrniots had to learn how to be obsequious to their political masters, insincere with each other, and unfeeling with their less fortunate coreligionists. Together with a polyglot Constantinople community of Ottoman officials, Greek and Armenian merchants, South Slav dragomans, Albanian bodyguards, and Young Turk conspirators, they formed the core of the urban “Ottoman culture” in the final decades of the caliphate. It had a certain charm, but it was neither pleasant nor creative. Its demise became inevitable when raw Turkish nationalism arose from the ruins of Ottoman collapse. The final chapters of Giles Milton’s book come across as a long-overdue indictment of the murderous character of that nationalism.
Paradise Lost should be treated as an historical novel rather than history. Its many faults notwithstanding, it is an easy and interesting book to read. To paraphrase Marshal Bosquet, C’est magnifique mais ce n’est pas l’histoire.
[Paradise Lost: Smyrna 1922— The Destruction of a Christian City in the Islamic World, by Giles Milton (New York: Basic Books) 464 pp., $27.95]
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