Smyrna, September 1922: When Paradise turned into Hell

Introduction

The Smyrna 1922 burning and butchery is a tragedy.

Tragedies cannot be described adequately.

But the statements of eyewitnesses help.

In what follows I have tried to use a compilation of eyewitness’s statements to give a feeling of what happened.

Quite naturally, it is incomplete.

But it is powerful and cannot be ignored.

The statements and views of the eyewitnesses indicate that the massacre of the Christians by the troops of Kemal Ataturk and the burning of the city of Smyrna were not in any way necessary from a military operations point of view and could have been prevented by Ataturk.

The Greek Army left Smyrna on the 8th September. The Turkish army entered Smyrna on the 9th September, facing no enemies whatsoever.

The fact that they massacred the Christians and burned the city has nothing to do with military operations.

1917

May 1917

I was in Smyrna in May of 1917, when Turkey severed relations with the United States, and I received the oral and written statements of native-born American eye-witnesses of the vast and incredibly horrible Armenian massacres of 1915-16 — some of which will be here given for the first time; I personally observed and otherwise confirmed the outrageous treatment of the Christian population of the Smyrna vilayet, both during the Great War, and before its outbreak. I returned to Smyrna later and was there up until the evening of September 11, 1922, on which date the city was set on fire by the army of Mustapha Khemal, and a large part of its population done to death, and I witnessed the development of that Dantesque tragedy, which possesses few, if any parallels in the history of the world.

George Horton, The Blight of Asia

1918

The Moudros (island of Lemnos) Armistice, concluded on 30 October 1918, put an end to the Ottoman Empire’s involvement in World War One.

1919

18 January 1919: Peace Conference opens in Versailles.

3 February 1919: Greek Prime Minister Eleftherios Venizelos demands the entire East Thrace and the Aegean shores of Anatolia including Izmir to be annexed to Greece.

8 February 1919: French General Franchet d’Esperey, commander of the Allied Army, enters Istanbul mounted on a white horse.

4 March 1919: Damat Ferit Paşa, brother-in-law of the Sultan, appointed as the new Grand Vizier.

8 April 1919: British Foreign Minister, Lord Balfour, proposed Istanbul to become a neutral zone under the administration of the League of Nations.

29 April 1919: Italian warship Caio Duilio anchors at Izmir.

30 April 1919: Sultan Vahidettin sends Mustafa Kemal to Anatolia as inspector general.

6 May 1919: Allied nations agree to allow Greek occupation of Izmir.

15 May 1919: Izmir occupied by the Greek army. Journalist Hasan Tahsin shoots a Greek flag bearer, firing the first bullet of the Turkish resistance.

The landing of the Greeks in Asia Minor as actually carried out was the great mistake of Venizelos. Though undoubtedly asked by the representatives of all the allies to go to Smyrna, he should not have done so without an actual treaty, with a written statement of what support they would give. To avoid the horrible catastrophe which has followed, which is exciting the fanaticism and daring of the entire Mussulman world, involving both France and Italy in untold dangers, only two plans were possible: (1st) Never to have sent the Greeks to Asia Minor; (2nd) Once having sent them there, to support them in a loyal manner. What really happened was immediate dissension among the allies as always in history among Christians. Italy, which had practically been promised Smyrna, started a port at New Ephesus to draw the trade if possible away from the former city and began to sell arms to the Turks and to flatter them. The French, to undermine Great Britain in the Near East, took up an attitude towards the Turks which finally resulted in the Treaty of Angora and the recognition by the French of that government.

I have the honor to call the attention of the (US State) Department to the fact that immediately after the Greeks landed in Smyrna (1919), I telegraphed that this would prove a second “Syracusan Expedition”, referring to the war against Syracuse in 413 B.C. which led to the complete depletion of the Athenian treasury and the effacement of Athens as the leading power of the ancient world.

George Horton, extract from the report written on September 26th and 27th, 1922

16 May 1919: Mustafa Kemal leaves Istanbul.

19 May 1919: Mustafa Kemal arrives in Samsun. Turkish War of Independence begins.

24 May 1919: Demonstration at Sultanahmet in Istanbul against the occupation of Izmir.

1920

June 1920

In June 1920, the Greek Army carried out an offensive move, towards the Büyük Menderes River (Meander) Valley, Karşıyaka (Peramos) and Alaşehir (Philadelphia).

10 August 1920: Treaty of Sevres

At the ceremony on 10 August 1920 (Treaty of Sevres) the Ottoman signatories agreed on behalf of their countrymen that Thrace be ceded to Greece, and that Greece would be sovereign in the Izmir (Smyrna) area for five years – after which the League of Nations would decide whether it became a full part of Greece; the frontiers of an independent Armenian state were to be determined by the US President Woodrow Wilson; the Kurdish areas of south-eastern Anatolia were to remain under Ottoman sovereignty for the present, with the question of whether the Kurds might become independent left to the decision of the League of Nations; and so on. The empire had shrunk to comprise Istanbul and northern Anatolia – large swathes of which were presently under occupation. 

“The shadow of Sèvres [i.e. of the humiliating Sèvres treaty of 1920, which left much of Anatolia’s fate in the hands of Greece and the League of Nations] hangs over Turkey to this day in the lingering fear that foreign enemies and their collaborators inside Turkey may again seek to divide the state which was defended with such tenacity and at such cost.  Attitudes in some quarters of Turkish society to the possibility of entry to the European Union are also colored by the specter of Sèvres, and European intentions are closely scrutinized for signs of duplicity.” 

Caroline Finkel, Osman’s Dream

November 1920: Venizelos loses the national elections

Another thing that has greatly handicapped the Greeks is their pernicious and corrupt politics. The amount to which politics is played in Greece and the extent to which the Greek politician will go, even to the sacrifice of his country and of many lives in order to keep his party in power for a few weeks can hardly be believed. The overthrow of Venizelos, Greece’s great advocate in Europe and America, and the bringing back of its discredited king, was the beginning of the end. Politics is played to such an extent that even now, in the face of this tremendous tragedy to Greece, it is not lost sight of, and the Royalist party will not even allow Venizelists to distribute money which they are receiving from Europe or to establish soup kitchens.

George Horton,  extract from the report written on September 26th and 27th, 1922

November 1920: After Venizelos lost the elections, King Constantine returned  to power. The Greek Army in Turkey carried out offenses towards the East, moving in the direction of Ankara.

1921

18 July 1921: The Greek Army advances to Eski Shehir (Dorylaeum).

1922

8 September 1922: The Greek Army leaves Smyrna.

9 September 1922

THE TURKISH cavalry presented a magnificent spectacle as it cantered along the waterfront. The horsemen sat high in their saddles, their scimitars unsheathed and glinting in the sun. On their heads they wore black Circassian fezzes adorned with the crescent and star. As they rode, they cried out, ‘Korkma! Korkma! ‘Fear not! Fear not!’

Their entry into the city of Smyrna on 9 September 1922 was watched by thousands of anxious inhabitants. On the terrace of the famous Sporting Club, a group of British businessmen rose to their feet in order to catch a better view of the historic scene. From the nearby Greek warehouses, the packers and stevedores spilled out onto the quayside. ‘Long Live Kemal,’ they cried nervously, praising the man who would soon acquire the sobriquet Ataturk. (9th September 1922)

Giles Milton, Paradise Lost, Smyrna 1922: The destruction of Islam’s city of tolerance

Within hours of Ataturk’s victorious entry into the beautiful, thriving and predominantly Greek city of Smyrna (now Izmir), Turkish soldiers began the killing and raping of Greeks and Armenians, and the looting and pillaging of their homes and shops. Over 100,000 Greek and Armenian civilians were killed by the Turks…

Marjorie Housepian Dobkin

The strange thing was . . . how they screamed every night at midnight. I do not know why they screamed at that time. We were in the harbor and they were all on the pier and at midnight they started screaming.
. . . The worst . . . were the women with dead babies. You couldn’t get the women to give up their dead babies. They’d have babies dead for six days. Wouldn’t give them up. Nothing you could do about it.

Ernest Hemingway, “On the Quai at Smyrna,” The Short Stories

The people on the quay were panic-stricken. The Allies had forsaken them. The Turks were going to deport them to the interior on the thirtieth of September. What country would help them? Greece had signified her willingness to receive them, but how could they get there without ships? For twelve terrible days and nights they had watched, waited and prayed. The stones of the quay were hard, but not so hard as the hearts of nations! The sun was blistering during the daylight hours, and the nights were full of horror, but the time was passing so fast, so fast. Only five days more to the thirtieth of September and deportation.(3). Even if ships should come, how could they all embark in so short a time? Besides, Greece was poor and overcrowded, and since the strong countries, indirectly responsible for their suffering, had definitely refused to admit them, perhaps Greece would change her mind. Why should one nation accept all the Anatolian Christians fleeing for their lives, including the Armenians?

Most of them called themselves Greek, but were they Greek? They had never lived in Greece and many of them could not speak the Greek language. On the other hand, they were not Turks, it seemed, although they had lived under the Turkish Government, generation after generation, for five hundred years. They were people without a country, and the Armenians among them were sorry they had not turned toward Russia and joined the Soviet.

Nationality and religion to the people on that quay was a hopeless muddle. Two hundred years before the colonization of America the Turks had taken Smyrna, but Turk meant religion to most of the Christian people in Asia Minor. They had seen too many Christians turn Turk by accepting the Mohammedan faith. Before accepting the Faith they were Armenians or Greeks perhaps, and the next day they were Turks, with all the privileges of Turks.

This confusion of nationality and religion was very well shown in the strange case of a certain man who had been in the service of an American tobacco company for so many years that he looked, acted, talked and no doubt felt like an American. He told me quite simply that he was a man without a country, and that that was the status of most of the Christian people in Turkey. His father was German, his mother English, and he was born in Smyrna. Naturally, they were cosmopolitan in thought and language, but he had always considered himself of German nationality. He had married a German girl and he thought his children were Germans. They were all members of the Lutheran Church.

Esther Lovejoy, Certain Samaritans

13 September 1922

I remember the exciting time I had on the morning of September 13 (1922), when I was on my way to the office. I was coming through the Armenian quarter, and as ill luck would have it, fell in with a mob. There was firing on both sides, for of course, Turkish soldiers were everywhere.

I had long since taken the precautionary measure of arming myself with an American flag, for that little bit of bunting was of more potential defense than any Colt automatic. Finding myself in this pleasant little party, I pulled out my flag, pinned it on, and made for the nearest wall.

I finally reached it and then walked sideways for quite a distance, for I had always been told that if you must be shot by all means avoid being shot in the back.

Asa Jennings

Wednesday, the 13th …I see a Turk who approached me say, ‘We did what was due; you turn back.’ The Turk, who obviously had assumed an active role in the arson, takes me obviously for his compatriot and accomplice and advises me not to advance, but to turn back. I answer, “Very well,” with the attitude of someone who understands the situation and I stop for a moment to distance myself from the Turk and to avoid conversation….

Garabed Hatcherian

14 September 1922: Smyrna is burning

More recently a mutual friend arranged for me to interview Nino Russo of Freeport, Long Island; I was happy to obtain an Italian view. A youthful eighty years old when I spoke with him, Russo had been ship’s engineer on the Italian battleship Vittore Imanuele, which had sailed into Smyrna har­bor just as the fires were beginning to break out at various points in the city. Russo spoke with the same intense feeling as had most of the Ameri­can seamen I interviewed. The heat at one point was so strong, he con­firmed, that even though his large ship stood at considerable distance from the shore, it had to move back. The Italians had come in to pick up their own nationals but they sent out twenty lifeboats and picked up anyone within range without asking who was or was not Italian. “There were so many bodies in the water you couldn’t count. Everybody, … all the big-shots, the Captain, all those people going back and forth to shore, they knew and they reported that the Turks were burning Smyrna . All the crew, we all knew it was the Turks.” None of his testimony is new, but it is noteworthy considering that Italian policy strongly and openly supported the Turks. Russo’s account also confirms the victims’ reports concerning the kindness of Italian ships and corroborated other reports of the intense heat on the waterfront at the height of the fire.

Marjorie Housepian Dobkin

The retreating Greek Army left Smyrna on September 8, 1922; the Turkish Army occupied the city on September 9, and the fire was started on September 13. From that date, the Christian population, Turkish subjects of the Greek Orthodox religion, and Armenians, had been without shelter. During the fire with its attendant murders, robberies and other outrages, men, women and children swam from the quay, and every boat, raft and floating bit of timber was utilized in a desperate effort to reach the ships in the harbor.

The mothers with families were not able to swim and take their little ones on their backs, but the strong, who had the luck to board the ships in the beginning while the fire was raging, were not put ashore. They were taken away and saved from the additional anguish and suffering experienced by those who remained on the quay, after the representatives of the different nations had been officially instructed to maintain neutrality.

There were approximately 300,000 people huddled together on the cobblestones of the Smyrna waterfront and hiding in the ruins, when we reached that port. For ten days and nights, they had held their places. The quay, within view of the warships of the Allied nations in the harbor, and within range of their searchlights at night, was the zone of greatest safety, the least likely place for a wholesale massacre.

City-dwelling human beings, suddenly deprived of the conveniences of civilized life, are utterly unable to care for themselves. They are far more offensive than animals can possibly be. The people squatting on that quay were filthy. They had no means of keeping clean. They dared not go back into the ruins of the city for any purpose, lest they lose their lives. In less than two weeks the quay had become a reeking sewer in which the refugees sat and waited for deliverance. When that crowd stirred, the stench was beyond belief.

Esther Lovejoy, Certain Samaritans

24 September 2024

“In Smyrna on September 24, 1922, the Hatcherian family managed to escape to the Greek island of Mitilini, leaving behind in Akhisar ten members of the extended family on both sides. All ten family members including the mothers and brothers with their families, were massacred after the occupation of Akhisar [original Greek name was Thyatira 80km/50miles NE of Smyrna] by the Kemalist army. Another positive outcome of reading the diary was that I was once again filled with gratitude toward Greece, the country of my birth, for its humanitarian act of giving shelter, along with thousands of Greeks, to so many Armenian refugees. Among them was my grandfather with his family who was given the opportunity to restore not only a normal and happy family life, but also his faith in humanity. Reading the pages of my grandfather’s ordeal, I also realized how fortunate we are to be living in a free humanitarian country like Canada, a country which espouses the humanitarian principles in which my grandfather believed.”

Dora Sakayan

26 September 1922

I have also the honor also to point out to the Department that all massacres on a large scale perpetrated by Turks, and the history of the Turkish empire is largely a history of massacres, are always ordered by higher authorities. Anyone who believes that the forces of Mustapha Kemal got out of hand at Smyrna and that he controlled them as soon as he could, knows nothing about the history of Turkey or events in the Near East. I believe also if the Allied fleets in Smyrna harbor, the French, Italians, British and Americans, had emphatically told Mustapha Kemal that there must be no massacring, none would have taken place. If they told him today that he must cease carrying off the men between eighteen and forty-five into the interior, he would stop, but when he sees the great powers of the world sitting by in security on their battleships watching his fearful procedures, he is emboldened to greater and still greater excesses. The sight of a massacre going on under the eyes of the great powers of Europe and with their seemingly tacit consent, is one that I hope never to see again.

I believe that when the real truth is known of what happened in Smyrna and what has been happening in the Near East, all decent people in Europe and the United States will feel as I do.

George Horton, extract from the report written on September 26th and 27th, 1922

The last view of the ill-fated town by daylight was one of vast enveloping clouds rolling up to heaven, a narrow water-front covered with a great throng of people—an ever-increasing throng, with the fire behind and the sea before, and a powerful fleet of inter-allied battle-ships, among which were two American destroyers, moored a short distance from the quay and looking on.

As the destroyer moved away from the fearful scene and darkness descended, the flames, raging now over a vast area, grew brighter and brighter, presenting a scene of awful and sinister beauty. Historians and archeologists have declared that they know of but one event in the annals of the world which can equal in savagery, extent and all the elements of horror, cruelty and human suffer­ing, the destruction of Smyrna and its Christian population by the Turks, and this was the demoli­tion of Carthage by the Romans.

Certainly at Smyrna, nothing was lacking in the way of atrocity, lust, cruelty and all that fury of human passion which, given their full play, degrade the human race to a level lower than the vilest and cruelest of beasts. For during all this diabolical drama the Turks robbed and raped. Even the rap­ing can be understood as an impulse of nature, irresistible perhaps, when passions are running wild among a people of low mentality and less civiliza­tion, but the repeated robbing of women and girls can be attributed neither to religious frenzy nor to animal passions. One of the keenest impressions, which I brought away with me from Smyrna was a feeling of shame that I belonged to the human race.

At the destruction of Smyrna there was one fea­ture for which Carthage presents no parallel. There was no fleet of Christian battle-ships at Carthage looking on at a situation for which their govern­ments were responsible. There were no American cruisers at Carthage.

The Turks were glutting freely their racial and religious lust for slaughter, rape and plunder with­in a stone’s throw of the Allied and American battle-ships because they had been systematically led to believe that they would not be interfered with. A united order from the commanders or from any two of them—one harmless shell thrown across the Turkish quarter—would have brought the Turks to their senses.

And this, the presence of those battle-ships in Smyrna harbor, in the year of our Lord 1922, im­potently watching the last great scene in the tragedy of the Christians of Turkey, was the saddest and most significant feature of the whole picture.

George Horton, The Blight of Asia

11 October 1922: Armistice of Mudanya signed between Turkey, Italy, France and Britain. Greece accedes to the armistice three days later. East Thrace as far as the Maritsa River and Edirne are handed over by Greece to Turkey. Turkish sovereignty over Istanbul and the Dardanelles is recognized.

20 October 1922: Peace Conference opens in Lausanne.

1 November: The Sultanate is abolished.

17 November 1922: Sultan Vahidettin leaves Istanbul on board the British warship Malaya.

1923

4 February 1923: Talks in Lausanne interrupted due to Turkish protest.

23 April 1923: Talks in Lausanne resume.

24 July 1923: Treaty of Lausanne signed between Turkey, Greece and other countries that fought the First World War and the Turkish Independence War. Turkey recovers full sovereign rights over its territory.In one of its most controversial clauses, the Lausanne treaty barred the return of the refugees who had left Anatolia during the war and stipulated the exchange of the remaining Greek Orthodox residents of Turkey for the Muslims of Macedonia and western Thrace. A few months following the signing of the Lausanne Treaty, by which the Allied powers and the world recognized the independence and sovereignty of Turkey, the Republican People’s Party was established on 9 September 1923 and Mustafa Kemal was elected as its chairman.

6 October 1923: Occupation forces leave Istanbul.

13 October 1923: Ankara declared as the capital of the new Turkish State.

29 October 1923: The Republic of Türkiye is proclaimed.

Epilogue

I firmly believe from my observations in Smyrna and from information which I have received from various sources, that the terrible disaster which has happened to the inhabitants of Asia Minor was the result of a contemptible political move. The party in power believed they could not get the help of Europe without turning out Constantine and bringing back Venizelos. Without that help, they could not stay in Smyrna, they could not announce that they were willing to withdraw their armies from the Smyrna district, and they therefore deliberately provoked the debacle which the world has seen. For months there has been a steady withdrawing of Venizelist officers and their replacing by trusted Royal-ists, many of whom have been deserting their troops, leaving whole regiments without officers. I am credibly informed that the Greek army, even at the last moment, could have made a stand and retrieved the situation as the Turkish forces which entered Smyrna were insignificant. But even the Greek officers who desired to make a stand and expressed their ability to do so were ordered to retire. 

George Horton,  extract from the report written on September 26th and 27th, 1922

“The total number of Christians who fled to Greece was probably in the region of 1.2 million with the main wave occurring in 1922 before the signing of the convention. According to the official records of the Mixed Commission set up to monitor the movements, the “Greeks’ who were transferred after 1923 numbered 189,916 and the number of Muslims expelled to Turkey was 355,635 [Ladas 1932, 438-439; but using the same source Eddy 1931, 201 states that the post-1923 exchange involved 192,356 Greeks from Turkey and 354,647 Muslims from Greece.”

Matthew J. Gibney, Randall Hansen. (2005). Immigration and Asylum: from 1900 to the Present, Volume 3. ABC-CLIO. p. 377.

In the aftermath of the First World War, Greece again paved the way for Europe’s future. Only now it was democracy’s dark side that came to the fore. In a world of nation-states, ethnic minorities like Greece’s Muslim population and the Orthodox Christians of Asia Minor were a recipe for international instability. In the early 1920s, Greek and Turkish leaders decided to swap their minority populations, expelling some two million Christians and Muslims in the interest of national homogeneity. The Greco-Turkish population exchange was the largest such organized refugee movement in history to that point and a model that the Nazis and others would point to later for displacing peoples in Eastern Europe, the Middle East and India.

Mark Mazower: Democracy’s Cradle, Rocking the World

For several years after the Smyrna debacle, American interests in Turkey conducted an intensive campaign to revise public opinion at home. This was no small task, for in the course of massive fund appeals the American Protestant leadership had created a certain amount of antipathy toward Turkey and sympathy for her minori­ties. Yet the Lausanne Treaty constituted a victory for Turkey on the question of the Christian population and a triumph of political and economic considerations for the West. Not the least of these was the matter of oil. According to Standard Oil Company his­torians, “there were many issues of importance at Lausanne but oil usurped the center of the stage”.

In varying degrees every Western nation involved had to defend this order of priorities. But the greater the discrepancy between a nation’s professed and actual motives, the greater its need to justify its policies. Political scientists might wave “morality” aside as irrele­vant to the national interest. American historians might proclaim the triumph of American diplomacy; but spokesmen for America had been denouncing the ignominious motives of her rivals too loudly and for too long to let the nature of her triumph speak for itself. In 1924 the Near East desk at the State Department was still busily enlisting co-operative writers to its cause.

Marjorie Housepian Dobkin

Sources

Marjorie Housepian Dobkin, a Professor at Barnard College of Columbia University, NY , NY , USA.

Caroline Finkel, a British historian and writer, has a doctorate in Ottoman history

Dr Garabed Hatcherian, Senior Physician at the Armenian National Hospital in Smyrna.

Ernest Hemingway, American Journalist and Writer

George Horton, American Consul in Smyrna.

Asa Jennings, employee of the YMCA in the city of Smyrna, and director of the rescue operation.

Esther Lovejoy, an American doctor who played a leading role in the humanitarian rescue.

Mark Mazower, British historian

Giles Milton, English historian

Dora Sakayan, granddaughter of Garabed Hatcherian, a Professor in Armenian Studies.