Kindle Notes & Highlights
Smyrna, for all that it represents, ought to appear in the same list of place names that carry the burdens of history: Sarajevo and Yalta, for their failures of diplomacy; and Treblinka, Bosnia, and Rwanda for the scale of the killing.
The Greeks and the Turks were old enemies. Their animosity had been so cultivated, nurtured, and refined over hundreds of years that the word “enemy” seemed hardly sufficient to capture the mutual loathing.
In the Greek mind, Constantinople, not Athens, was the center of the Hellenistic firmament, and the Turks were Asiatic barbarians whose sacking of Greek Constantinople in 1453, ending the thousand-year Byzantine Empire, remained a fresh wound.
Greeks, in the Turkish view, wore their Hellenism with an air of superiority as if they had invented civilization,
a British officer recounted watching a Greek woman squat over a bayoneted Turkish soldier and piss in his mouth when he had begged for water.
A Smyrniot might begin a joke in Greek and finish it in Turkish.
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
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The American cigarette industry would not have been possible without Turkish tobacco.
Compared to Smyrna, Athens was a dusty village, Beirut a backwater, and Salonika an aging slum.
The first two missionaries assigned to the Near East departed Boston in 1819
The deep-seated hatreds of the two armies had brought a terrible fury to the battlefield.
“Greeks and Turks alike fought with reckless courage, threw themselves into the storms of lead in a white madness to get at each other with cold steel,”
At one, Chigiltepe, on the Turkish left flank, a young Turkish officer in command, shamed at his failure to achieve the summit, committed suicide. Kemal scorned the useless sacrifice.
left a scorched trail of burned villages on the way back to the sea.
it became clear that the Young Turks saw the expulsion of Christian minorities and creation of a homogeneous Moslem nation as the way to rescue the empire.
drinking the whiskey-and-sodas that were banned back home.
Indeed, many of America’s religious leaders already viewed American policy as favoring acquisition of oil over protecting Christians, and their argument would grow louder in the coming weeks and months.
Phillips received a second and more urgent cable from Horton expressing his fear that Smyrna might be destroyed by the Greek army as it exited the city. Some Greek officers, talking loosely, had threatened to burn the city rather than leave it and the munitions it contained to the Turks.
“Direct one or more destroyers as necessary proceed Smyrna/protect American interests/employment confined to American lives and property and not as naval or political demonstration.”
Under the auspices of the Missions Board back in Boston, MacLachlan had built the school into the best college preparatory school in the Ottoman Empire.
Prohibition was in force back in the United States, and navy rules forbade alcohol aboard its ships. A plank was laid between the Scorpion and Brown’s houseboat, and partygoers could move back and forth to get cocktails from a bartender who was detailed to serve drinks as navy musicians serenaded guests on the Scorpion’s deck.
villages set ablaze by the retreating Greek army or the advancing Turkish army. It was hard to know which.
The Passport Pier (where Jennings had landed with his family three weeks earlier) was nearly unapproachable for three hundred yards in either direction due to boxes, crates, and throngs of people seeking to depart.
Armenians jammed the courtyard of the city’s biggest Armenian church, St. Stephanos.
The collapse and curvature of his spine had reduced his height by five inches and left him with a hump on his back. It had also displaced and enlarged his heart. He would suffer near-constant pain, fevers, and a shortness of breath his entire life,
In many villages, Moslem civilians had turned to violence against their Christian neighbors.
two hundred thousand refugees in Smyrna and many tens of thousands more on the beaches along the Aegean and Marmara coasts,
The Missions Board had been sending missionaries to Turkey for nearly a century.
These detritus soldiers were stranded in Smyrna. They would have to either rouse themselves for the fifty-mile walk to Chesme or lose their uniforms and blend into the Smyrna population. They did both.
Below them, hundreds of people surged up Galazio Street toward the consulate. Looking toward the harbor, the two men saw a column of Turkish cavalry moving slowly southward and in good order along the Quay.
Someone threw a bomb, and Cherefedinne suffered a shrapnel cut to his face, but he remained mounted.
Almost immediately after the arrival of the cavalry, Turkish residents had begun leaving the Turkish Quarter and roved the Armenian Quarter with clubs, rifles, and shotguns.
the Quay, and the two or three streets parallel to it—Rue Parallele, the first street back; Quay Inglise, the second street back; and Frank Street, the third street back, which formed the heart of the shopping district.
Turkish snipers with long-range rifles had begun picking off refugees who had sought refuge at International College.
where they took what they wanted from shops and homes, including young women.
They then turned inland to the Panonios Football Field, which the committee had designated as a collection point for refugees.
“All accounts, nevertheless, agree that Smyrna has been turned into a charnel-house. Several streets were so littered with mutilated bodies that it was impossible to pass for the sickening stench.”
(Most were people who had never been to Greece, and most would be accounted as strangers when they arrived. Many would not be understood when they spoke.)
Villages from Vourla, just south of Smyrna, to the tip of Chesme peninsula were emptying out.
The London Daily News called for the intervention of the League of Nations to rescue the refugees.
It was as if the nationalist generals—in the old Ottoman tradition of warfare—were giving poorly paid soldiers and camp followers three days to sack a conquered city.
AT ABOUT 5 P.M., Mustapha Kemal rode into the city in the backseat of a 1911 Mercedes-Knight 1640.
“Did King Constantine ever come here to drink a glass of raki?” They said no he had not. “Then,” Kemal responded, “why did he bother to take Smyrna?”
Turkish soldiers fired on a group of Greek women and children, killing forty-eight.
Post would later say that Noureddin had told him, “You have a saying in your country, ‘America for the Americans.’ We say ‘Turkey for the Turks.’ You have another saying, ‘The good Indian is a dead Indian.’ Well, we believe that the good Armenian is a dead Armenian.”
