KEY POINTS:
Our tendency to assume that the society in which we live has some permanence is undone by history's testimony that even the mightiest civilisations crumble. But we never seem to absorb the message and in his account of the destruction of Smyrna (now Izmir) Giles Milton provides another poignant lesson.
Before the terrible, but now little remembered days of late 1922, Smyrna, a city on the coast of the Aegean Sea, was known as the Pearl of the Orient. It was in Islamic Turkey but was home to a great multi-cultural population including a substantial number of Orthodox Christian Greeks. It was also one of the most thriving and developed cities of the region, with a huge export trade based on figs, sultanas and apricots and boasting huge modern hotels, department stores and a spectacular opera house.
At the top of the heap were a group of Levantine trading families, mostly nominally British although many of them had never lived anywhere other than Smyrna for generations. They had lives of extraordinary privilege, living in homes of great splendour with vast gardens, owning yachts and employing huge domestic staffs as well as thousands in their trading enterprises. The Americans who had arrived rather later even lived in a colony called Paradise.
But in the space of a few days the whole edifice collapsed and if it was the end of a way of life for the upper crust, it was a total catastrophe for thousands of the more humble inhabitants.
The triggers for the calamity are all too familiar to the modern reader accustomed to the stories of Beirut, the Balkans and Iraq - ethnic rivalries spanning centuries underpinned by religious intolerance, big power ignorance, duplicity and indifference to humanitarian disaster.
Smyrna was an almost self-governing fiefdom in the decaying Ottoman Empire which the West wished to see dismembered at the end of World War I. But Smyrna's huge ethnically Greek population, many of whom had forgotten how to speak their mother tongue, provided a magnet both for politicians in Athens seeking to create a Greater Greece spreading into Asia minor and for Western statesmen, swayed by ambition, religion and the Hellenistic echoes of their classical educations. In 1919 the Greeks invaded and pushed into the Turkish interior. They were greeted in Smyrna with scenes of triumphalism and Turks were subjected to outrages by both the military and civilians.
But the Greeks could not maintain their presence and by 1922 the Turks, under the leadership of Kemal Ataturk who had provided the backbone for the heroic resistance at Gallipoli, had driven the invaders back to the sea. What started as the entry of a disciplined force into Smyrna turned into two weeks of terror, culminating in fires, almost certainly lit deliberately, which trapped thousands of refugees between marauding soldiery, blazing buildings and the sea where the navies of the great powers provided rescue only for their own citizens.
The events of those last two weeks were described by George Horton, the American consul in Smyrna, as lacking nothing "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 cruellest of beasts - 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".
Milton draws on an array of historical sources and interviews with the last survivors with memories both of the city's heyday and its destruction to provide a compelling and competent account, only slightly marred by his weakness for cliche.
The conflict ended with a treaty in 1923 which provided one of the more spectacular pieces of official ethnic cleansing with the relocation of 1.2 million orthodox Christians who remained in Turkey being shipped out while 400,000 Muslims living in Greece were uprooted. The legacy remains with us.
Paradise Lost
By Giles Milton (Sceptre $39.99)
* John Gardner is an Auckland reviewer.
