How the trading hub was destroyed
Washington Times—Sunday, November 2, 2008
PARADISE LOST:
SMYRNA 1922
By Giles Milton; Basic Books, $27.95, 426 pages, illus.
REVIEWED BY MARTIN RUBIN
On Wednesday, Sept. 13, 1922, the ancient city of Smyrna (now Izmir) on the Aegean Sea, which had long been a prosperous cosmopolitan trading hub, was a charnel house. Caught up in a 10-year cycle of war which had seen Greece and Turkey fighting for control of the region, the largely Greek city (its Hellenic population of more than 300,000 much larger then than Athens’) had been sacked by the Turkish forces under Mustafa Kemal, later known as Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern post-Ottoman Turkey.
Scenes of almost unimaginable brutality and horror ensued: Untold rapes and cruel assaults – limbs, noses and ears hacked off -and murders by scimitar, bayonet and club. Not content with mayhem on this scale, the invaders scattered gasoline throughout the city and set it alight. Desperate to escape the inferno, much of the city’s populace streamed down to the harbor, a scene that must have merited the term indescribable if ever one did. But Giles Milton, a British writer, has managed the difficult task of harrowing the hell that Smyrna must have been 86 years ago . . . .
For Martin’s full review, click here or visit www.washingtontimes.com.