Ionian Vision

"Smyrna, or Izmir as it’s now called, is a large port city on the western coast of Anatolia. It was a natural export outlet for figs, carpets and all the other products of Anatolia and beyond. It was a huge commercial city from about 1650, full of Greek, Turkish and foreign merchants. Although there were terrible riots and massacres in 1770 and in 1821, on the whole the different communities got on pretty well. After Greek independence in 1830, lots of Greeks moved to Smyrna because business and life was so much better there. In addition to being a commercial city, it was also a centre for Greek culture and learning. It was the city the Onassis [shipping] family came from, as well as the designer of the Mini car, Alec Issigonis. It had amazing French and American schools where Turks went, including a future prime minister, acclaimed writers and Atatürk’s wife. The disaster that befell the city shows what can happen when people only think in terms of their own nationality, their own race and their own needs. In 1919, encouraged by British Prime Minster Lloyd George, Greece landed an army in the city. Yes – inspired by the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the Great Idea was to revive the Byzantine Empire not just in Constantinople but also in northeast Turkey and along the western coast of Anatolia. It was not based on geographical or military reality. They were in control of Smyrna for three years. It began badly with a massacre of Turks, and then Britain withdrew its support for Greece. It’s an object lesson in the danger of relying on a foreign ally. Turkey produced a military genius in the form of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, who from within Anatolia drove back the Greek armies and took Smyrna in September 1922. It was a warning sign of the horrors that were to come in the 20th century, when nationalism goes mad. It’s very hard to tell, but from Smyrna itself about 100,000 people. The Greek army fled, and abandoned the Greek civilians in the city. After the Turkish soldiers took control, the Greek and Armenian quarters were set on fire. Lots of men were massacred. Women and children were allowed to leave. Again about 100,000 are estimated to have died. The great city with its clubs, cinemas, commercial offices and consulates burned for three days. It was said that you could see the wall of fire from the other side of the Aegean. It certainly has an independent outlook. It’s one of the last major cities in Turkey not to be controlled by a religious mayor. But it is no longer the commercial heart of Turkey – that’s Istanbul now. Ambitious young Izmiris move to Istanbul, and Izmir’s share of the export and import trade is going down. Izmir lost most of its finest buildings in the fire. Alexandria has kept most of its buildings but has become a stronghold of the Muslim [Islamist] parties. It is now far less cosmopolitan than Cairo, and you can hear the Quran being chanted in shops and taxis. But it has lovely architecture, and a new library where people are trying to keep alive interest in the city’s history."

"It’s quite an old book – it has been reissued but it originally came out about 1973. It’s about the attempts of the Greeks to take over Anatolia in 1919. This was his doctorate, and it’s terribly well written. He’s been through all the British and the Greek documents, which can’t have been easy. At the end of World War I , a lot of people wrote off the Turks and said they’ve had it, and Anatolia was going to be partitioned with the French, the Italians and the Armenians, and possibly even the Kurds as well. The [Ottoman] Sultan would have been left with a tiny state, and would have been groomed to become a kind of Aga Khan [spiritual leader], representing Islam on the world level with the patronage of the British. He went along with the partition of Anatolia. To stop the Italians, Lloyd George encouraged the Greeks to land in Smyrna. They landed on the 15th of May 1919 and there was more or less trouble at once. Over the next two years, they spread out in the general direction of Ankara, trying to get hold of the European part of Istanbul. The twists and turns of that campaign are quite extraordinary. Atatürk started off with a broken-down German staff car. He kept being shooed away because he wasn’t Islamic, but then he turned up in Ankara, which has a telegraph office which he used with genius. Then once he had his small army, the Bolsheviks picked him up – and that’s another side of things which is known about but which has never been prominently written about. The Bolsheviks kept him going, and essentially did a deal that the Turks got Armenia and the Bolsheviks got Azerbaijan. Sarkozy has just visited that area of the world, read about the history, and made a complete ass of himself. What does that little jerk know about it? Louis de Bernières’s novel Birds Without Wings dealt with all this very well, by the way, but he didn’t get terribly good reviews."