Paradise Lost: Smyrna 1922 - The Destruction of Islam's City of Tolerance (23 page)

One of the British officers posted to Smyrna was Sir Tom Bridges, whose working hours were spent keeping a watchful eye on the Greek army. Nevertheless, he found plenty of time to relax and socialise, quickly striking up friendships with several of the Levantine dynasties living on the outskirts of the city. ‘Most of our friends belonged to the old Levantine families – English, French and Greek, who lived
en prince
in the beautiful suburbs of Boudja and Bournabat,’ he wrote.

These houses were fully staffed within weeks of the armistice and soon recovered the gaiety of the pre-war years. ‘One of them I remember naming “The House of the Fruitful Vine” for its procreative atmosphere,’ wrote Bridges. ‘There was a large family of charming people and always a new baby, new puppies, kittens or perhaps the ancient parrot would lay an egg.’

Eldon Giraud, a lad of nine at the time, remembered the months that followed the end of the war as a time of endless tea parties for the adults, followed by uproarious evenings involving alcohol, music and extravagant dancing. Among the regular visitors to Bournabat was the Allied commander, General Hanbury, whose magnificent car was a source of constant fascination to young Eldon. ‘I was especially impressed with [this],’ he later recalled, ‘a dark green Sunbeam, with carbide headlights that used to stink like hell. I always used to sit and admire the cars and get pieces of rubber tubing from the drivers to make catapults.’

Another source of amusement was the activity in the skies above Bournabat. Eldon’s sister, Joyce, was an attractive nineteen-year-old at the time and quickly gained the notice of the newly arrived Greek troops. One of them – a young lad named Skouze – took a particular fancy to her and demonstrated it in extravagant fashion. ‘[He] used to fly over our garden and drop sweets for my sister,’ wrote Eldon. ‘These never managed to land in our garden, however, but he provided me and my pals with great sport.’ The young lads used to get out their airguns ‘and try to shoot him down . . . it was lucky for him that we did not hit our target as he would have ended up on one of the cypress trees.’

Helena van der Zee, daughter of one of the largest and wealthiest Levantine families, also remembered the Greek occupation as a time of heady excitement. ‘At our house in Cordelio, the doors were always open to all. There were tennis parties, bathing expeditions and outings by moonlight, and the tradition of serenading began once again,’ she wrote. ‘Often the little landing craft of the warships, both Greek and Allied, came to collect us so that we could spend the rest of the evening in the city. The house was full of marine officers of every nationality.’

The van der Zees’ mansion was spectacularly large and required a veritable army of servants to keep it in order. As more and more people returned to Smyrna, the van der Zees were once again able to employ a full complement of Greek domestics: several maids, a chef, sous-chef, dressmaker and ironer, as well as a German governess and two English nurses. In addition, they took on a new team of gardeners and boatmen.

These servants enabled life to resume its unhurried rhythm, even when there were visitors constantly coming and going. Sunday breakfast was one of the high points of the week and all fifteen members of the immediate family were expected to attend. ‘We would assemble around a large table laid out in the shade for breakfast,’ recalled Helena. ‘A famous Greek baker in Cordelio, Adami, was particularly renowned for its
katimeria
(large pastries dusted with sugar and cinnamon) and for its
loucoumades
(honeyed doughnuts) which he only made on Sunday mornings.’

The table was presided over by the family’s attendant bodyguard, an Albanian by origin, who cut a most resplendent figure. ‘He was magnificently attired in puffed breeches, fez, a bolero specked with gold and a huge belt coiled around his belly, into which he stuck daggers and pistols.’

When breakfast was finished, the older members of the family would retire to hammocks and chaises longues, while the children headed to the jetty in order to swim in the bay. It was an idyllic time for the younger van der Zees. ‘The house was always exciting . . . all the children were allowed to invite friends for meals without first having to ask permission. There was always enough food for everyone.’

For the older children, the post-war years saw a revival of tennis parties on the family courts. Helena and her brothers would challenge young officers of the Dutch, Italian, English and French marines to games of doubles; bottles of iced lemonade would be provided by the family’s maids.

The van der Zees were particularly friendly with the many Greeks who lived in Cordelio and everyone in the family was brought up speaking fluent Greek, as well as English, French, Dutch and German. Helena was a particular favourite with the local Greek lads, who spent their evenings serenading local beauties under the windows of their houses. She recalled being wooed one night by a group of boys from Cordelio. ‘It was wonderful to be woken at night by the sound of the songs drifting in through the open windows. One of my best memories was being suddenly woken by the soft music of these songs.’

If life was benign for the Levantines of Smyrna, it was even better for the Greeks. During the war years, they had lived in fear of persecution, deportation and worse. Now they were masters of their own domain. Petros Brussalis, a seven-year-old boy at the time of the Greek landing, still has clear memories of the first Easter under Greek rule. ‘The Greek army invited thousands of people to a field near to Cordelio and they cooked large numbers of lambs.’ Everyone partied until late into the night, ‘and I remember some soldiers giving me sweet wine to drink’.

The speed with which Smyrna recovered its vitality was entirely due to the ever-energetic Stergiadis, who overcame numerous hurdles in the first weeks of his administration. Some 250,000 Greek refugees wanted to return to the city and surrounding countryside. Stergiadis ensured that this was managed with military precision. Makeshift camps were set up to provide accommodation for the 41,000 families whose houses had been destroyed and a judicious deployment of police officers prevented any clashes between Turks and Greeks.

Stergiadis also imported scores of tractors and ploughs from America as he wished to introduce mechanical farming to the rich land around Smyrna. He established an experimental farm at the village of Tepe Keui, which was to provide instruction in the use of this new machinery. The farm was one of Stergiadis’s pet projects. Another, on an altogether grander scale, was the foundation of the Ionian University of Smyrna. Its aim was to provide education for all – irrespective of race or nationality – and demonstrate that ‘Greece did not go to Asia Minor to conquer alien populations but to bring them to her superior civilisation.’

Stergiadis had no doubt as to whom he wished to run the university. He hired Professor Karatheodoris, the modern-minded professor of mathematics at Göttingen University. The professor launched himself into the project with great gusto, putting into practice all of Stergiadis’s ideas. The university’s motto was ‘Ex Oriente Lux’ and it was to offer an impressive range of disciplines. Among the languages to be taught were Turkish, Arabic, Farsi, Hebrew, Greek and Armenian. Stergiadis hoped that it would open its doors to the first year’s students in September 1922.

The American consul, George Horton, had nothing but praise for the work of Stergiadis and his advisors. In a report to the American Secretary of State, he described the Greek administration as ‘the only civilised and beneficient regime which that country has seen since historic times’. He added, ‘I was in close touch with Mr Sterghiades [sic] through it all, I have travelled widely through the country, I have talked with scores of native-born Americans who have travelled over the region and I absolutely know of what I am talking.’ He was particularly impressed by the impartial judicial system that had been established and the fact that Stergiadis had managed to restore law and order to the streets of Smyrna.

‘Brigandage was practically suppressed, security very generally reigned and, insofar as the means of the Greek government permitted, Mr Stergiadis supported and originated civilised institutions and progress and promoted agriculture and industry.’

But while Smyrna was prospering under Stergiadis’s governorship, the countryside around the city was increasingly troubled by unrest. ‘The dark side to this seemingly idyllic picture,’ wrote Horton, ‘is that quite frequently the two or three Greek officials [of an outlying village] would be found some morning with their throats cut.’

It was even more dangerous in the villages farther along the coast. The return of refugees within the Greek-controlled zone had been orderly and well managed. The same could not be said for the thousands of Greek refugees pouring into towns still under Turkish control. Furious to find their family homes occupied by Turks, they began taking the law into their own hands.

This tense situation was made even more volatile by the fact that the Turkish resistance was growing stronger by the day. One of those helping the irregulars in the countryside around Smyrna was Colonel Bekir Sami, commander of the 17th Army Corps. Unable to dislodge the Greeks from the centre of the city, these forces vowed to harass and kill any Greek soldier who was foolish enough to stray into the countryside. ‘With technical help from the regular officers who kept themselves behind the scenes,’ wrote one, ‘they made the region too hot for the Greeks.’

Stergiadis found himself in a terrible dilemma. He had to decide whether to stand back and watch his compatriots being attacked by Turkish brigands, or risk sending his own troops into former Greek villages, which were now riven with sectarian violence. The danger of the first option was to risk alienating still further the Greek population of Smyrna; the danger of the latter was to provoke all-out war.

Stergiadis weighed up the pros and cons before deciding to despatch troops into dozens of towns and villages, including Aidin and Aivali. He hoped that the drive outwards into the countryside would bring order and stability with little loss of life. This quickly proved to be wishful thinking. Turkish regulars and irregulars were waiting for the Greek army and forced them to fight their way into many of the towns and villages.

The town of Aidin was a case in point. It had survived the First World War almost intact and was little changed from how it had been in 1914. ‘It had its finely placed church, its well equipped hospital, its school, its theatre, its cinema, its electric light, its flour mills, its factories for crushing olives and making soap.’ So wrote Toynbee, who had visited Aidin before the war. Now, as the Greek army forced its path into Aidin, it was met by a scene of devastation. The Turkish irregulars had gone on the rampage and their slaughter was total and indiscriminate. ‘Women and children were hunted down like rats from house to house and civilians caught alive were slaughtered in batches – shot or knived or hurled over a cliff.’

The Greek quarter had been razed to the ground. ‘The houses and public buildings were plundered, the machinery in the factories wrecked, safes blown or burst open and the whole quarter finally burned.’

Witnesses to the massacre disagree as to why the Turks behaved with such brutality. Some blamed the conduct of the Greek troops as they advanced up the Maeander Valley, claiming that they torched Turkish villages en route. Others assert that the Greeks advanced in an orderly fashion in the face of extreme provocation. Whatever the truth of the matter, the episode in Aidin only served to inflame a very tense situation. One unnamed English eyewitness reported that the recapture of the town was followed by a new outbreak of patriotic fervour on the part of the Greeks.

‘One cannot help remarking that the Greeks are doing their level best to make themselves obnoxious, unpopular and hated by the Turks . . . Their continual processions with flags, portraits of Venizelos in all the houses, shops and cafés, their ridiculous patriotic songs, sung all day long by the street scum and by the soldiers under the very nose of the Turks cannot but create ill-feeling and a wider breach between these two races.’

This same witness went on to report that a new batch of Greek troops had recently arrived in Smyrna. ‘Whilst marching through the town . . . [they] were singing as follows: “Now that the
foustanella
[Greek kilt] has come to Smyrna, the fez will disappear and the blood of the Turks will flow. Now that we have taken Smyrna, let us fly to Aghia Sophia. The mosques will be razed to the ground and the Cross will be erected thereon.”’

By the end of the summer, Stergiadis had a whole new crisis on his hands. He had dramatically increased the amount of territory controlled by the Greek army but in doing so he had further inflamed tensions between the two communities. As he attempted to seize control of the situation, he was brought news that Allied leaders were having serious doubts about the wisdom of sending the Greek army into Smyrna. They were also dramatically rethinking their own position in Constantinople. In the eyes of many in the Allied senior command, it was time to be far more bullish in their attitude towards the vanquished Turkish nation.

The Shattered Vase