Paradise Lost: Smyrna, 1922 [Hardcover]

Giles Milton (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 8, 2008 | ISBN-10: 0465011195 | ISBN-13: 978-0465011193 | Edition: 1st US Printin

On Saturday, September 9, 1922, the victorious Turkish cavalry rode into Smyrna, the richest and most cosmopolitan city in the Ottoman Empire. The city’s vast wealth created centuries earlier by powerful Levantine dynasties, its factories teemed with Greeks, Armenians, Turks, and Jews. Together, they had created a majority Christian city that was unique in the Islamic world. But to the Turkish nationalists, Smyrna was a city of infidels.

In the aftermath of the First World War and with the support of the Great Powers, Greece had invaded Turkey with the aim of restoring a Christian empire in Asia. But by the summer of 1922, the Greeks had been vanquished by Atatürk’s armies after three years of warfare. As Greek troops retreated, the non-Muslim civilians of Smyrna assumed that American and European warships would intervene if and when the Turkish cavalry decided to enter the city. But this was not to be.

On September 13, 1922, Turkish troops descended on Smyrna. They rampaged first through the Armenian quarter, and then throughout the rest of the city. They looted homes, raped women, and murdered untold thousands. Turkish soldiers were seen dousing buildings with petroleum. Soon, all but the Turkish quarter of the city was in flames and hundreds of thousands of refugees crowded the waterfront, desperate to escape. The city burned for four days; by the time the embers cooled, more than 100,000 people had been killed and millions left homeless.

Based on eyewitness accounts and the memories of survivors, many interviewed for the first time, Paradise Lost offers a vivid narrative account of one of the most vicious military catastrophes of the modern age.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Smyrna was a prosperous, cosmopolitan port on Turkey's Aegean coast where Greeks, Turks, Armenians, Jews and other nationalities lived in harmony. In his searingly vivid account of Smyrna's destruction by the Turks in 1922, acclaimed popular historian Milton (Nathaniel's Nutmeg) begins with a fairy tale–like description of the city focused lopsidedly on the wealthy European dynasties known as Levantines. But Milton renders an astute account of the clash of Greek and Turkish nationalisms and the unhelpful meddling of Western powers, particularly Britain, which supported a Greek incursion into Turkey. When the defending Turkish troops under Mustafa Kemal (aka Ataturk) took Smyrna in September 1922, a horrific killing spree of Greeks and Armenians began, and hundreds of thousands of refugees were trapped on the quayside between the sea and a city willfully torched by the Turks as a score of foreign vessels looked on. Milton draws on eyewitness accounts to render these events in all their horror, and ends with an almost incredible rescue led by an unlikely hero. Milton powerfully renders this tragic tale of an army that came to liberate Smyrna and instead massacred its citizens and burned their prize to the ground in a vengeful frenzy. (Aug.)
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From The New Yorker

In September, 1922, after the Turkish forces of Mustafa Kemal defeated a Greek army that had recklessly occupied the Anatolian city of Smyrna, members of Smyrna’s Greek, Armenian, and expatriate communities were killed, raped, and robbed. Soon, a half million people were trapped on the port’s narrow wharves, the city in flames behind them; "The streets were stacked with dead," a British officer wrote. Milton weaves the Armenian genocide, the birth of modern Turkey, and the tragic inanities of Versailles into his story, but his focus is the destruction of the multi-ethnic, religiously diverse cosmopolis of Smyrna (now the Turkish city of Izmir). He has a tendency to idolize the Levantines, dynasties of European "merchant princes" who remained oblivious as Greeks and Turks committed atrocities closer and closer to their enclave. Milton’s more compelling hero is Asa Jennings, a five-foot-tall Y.M.C.A. administrator who, by bluffing, begging, and desperately improvising, single-handedly saved tens of thousands of lives.
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Product Details

• Reading level: Ages 16 and up
  
• Hardcover: 464 pages
• Publisher: Basic Books; 1st US Printin edition (July 8, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0465011195
• ISBN-13: 978-0465011193
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.3 x 1.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (24 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #582,218 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

45 of 53 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Written from an unusual viewpoint - and the publisher doesn't warn you, July 27, 2008

By 

B. J. O'Brien (Rotterdam Netherlands) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Paradise Lost: Smyrna, 1922 (Hardcover)

The last third of this book is about the terrible days of September 1922; the larger part before that is an account of events during the preceding decade. As such, the book has no direct competitors. There is considerable material available for the dedicated researcher into the Smyrna tragedy, but only a few other books in English - Horton's book of 1926, for example, and one by Housepian Dobkin of 1971; and these are primarily about the September days. It was an excellent idea to design a book in the structure Milton has chosen and to write it in a style to appeal to a broad readership.

But the next most important thing about the book's design is more debatable. Smyrna was a city with an extraordinary ethnic mix. One element was tiny in number but great in economic and social power: a group of rich families called the Levantines. Rather disgracefully the publisher's blurb doesn't mention this, but a fundamental feature of the book is that, as far as he possibly can, the author tells his story from the viewpoint of the Levantines. This is a new approach: Horton and Housepian Dobkin say little about the Levantines. (Even so, Horton gives a much clearer definition than Milton of the term `Levantine'. Milton sometimes prefers fluency to clarity of explanation. But that is an aside.)

The book certainly makes a contribution to Smyrna studies, by drawing on hitherto unknown Levantine source material, but it is obviously intended for the general reader. If the author concentrates on the viewpoint of one tiny minority, can he give the reader, who may well start with little or no knowledge of the subject, an intelligently balanced understanding of the whole complex tragedy? That is the issue that Milton and his publishers had to consider when they conceived this book.

I don't want to accuse Milton of taking the Levantine side and being biased against some other group on some controversial issue or other. The real difficulty with his approach can be shown by a couple of examples. We are told that when the future of Smyrna was discussed at Versailles in 1919, the Levantines attempted to influence the deliberations, and did so. Well then, what about all the other ethnic communities of Smyrna? Did they also attempt to influence the outcome at Versailles? The author doesn't say whether they did or not. Soon after, we hear that Allied forces land at Smyrna and their commander talks to some of the leading Levantines before he decides how to dispose his troops. Did he talk to any leaders of any of the other communities? Did they try and talk to him and get turned away? We don't know. The author doesn't say.

There is another balance issue within this main one. You might easily get the impression from this book that most of the Levantines of Smyrna had British nationality, which, as far as I can tell from other sources, was not the case. The British Levantines were a minority within a minority.

The writing is fluent and, if you read without thinking too hard, you may not notice points like those above and so get an unbalanced view of the story. If, on the other hand, you do read carefully, you frequently have to observe: "Of course, although the author doesn't say so, that is only one aspect of the story. Maybe it looked different to some of the other people in Smyrna. Or maybe not. I can't tell." This rather reduces the pleasure of reading the book.

A slightly different issue is this. In September 1922 most of the Levantines, being rich and often having foreign passports, managed to escape fairly easily, while the ordinary citizens of Smyrna and the refugees from the countryside were either massacred or rescued after experiences of appalling desperation. Throughout the book the reader is encouraged to identify with the lucky Levantines and observe the main victims of the impending tragedy through Levantine eyes. Isn't this rather tasteless? After a hundred pages describing the sufferings of the Greeks and Armenians the book ends elegiacally with the author meeting an elderly member of a Levantine family that lost its wealth in the catastrophe. This is entirely consistent with the whole concept of the book, and yet the reader may feel: Are there no elderly Greeks or Armenians who lost their own flesh and blood that he could have met?

My assessment. If you already possess a small collection of books on the Smyrna catastrophe this one is worth having, since it does contain some interesting new material. If you just like the idea of a reliably balanced book about a little-known historical event, perhaps for a stimulating read on holiday, this book is not it; so find a book on some other historical subject. If you are midway between these two cases, get this book but remember all the time that you are reading a book that by its very design can only give an unbalanced view of the story.

29 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A major tragedy, but with elements of great humanity and courage., August 7, 2008

By 

Nicholas Warren (New York, NY USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Paradise Lost: Smyrna, 1922 (Hardcover)

This is a rare book I wanted to keep reading until the end. The author's style is both fluid and interesting.

Although the tragedy at Smyrna in 1922 is the denouement, the book takes a much longer, and broader, view of Turkey immediately prior to being on the losing side in World War 1, the war itself (including the Armenian genocide), the dismemberment of the last of the Ottoman Empire by the victors, the charismatic premier of Greece (Venizelos) and his "Great Idea" to invade weakened Turkey and bring the western parts, populated by many Greek-speaking people, back into a larger Greece, as if it were the Ancient Greek Ionian settlements. Greece has the support of the Western powers in that venture, but its forces are eventually defeated by a brilliant, and equally charismatic, Turkish general Mustafa Kemal, who later became the Turkish Republic's first premier as Kemal Ataturk. He was responsible for modernising Turkey and moving it rapidly into the twentieth century. The victorious Turkish soldiers reach Smyrna (now Izmir) on the western coast and force the evacuation of the Greek forces. Unfortunately, Kemal cannot maintain order among his victorious troops for long and the tragedy of the massacre of hundreds of thousands of Armenians and Greeks ensues (there were more Greeks living in Smyrna than in Athens itself and Aristotle Onasis was one of the fortunate survivors as a young boy), as well as the burning and looting of most of the non-Turkish parts of Smyrna. The victorious powers of World War 1 have warships just off the coast but refuse to intervene to save the people for fear of creating an international incident by being seen to favor Greece in a limited dispute. Immediately following, was an enforced migration of Turks in Greece to Turkey and Greeks in Turkey to Greece (nearly two million people, in total).

The story describes the horrors of warfare in graphic detail (beware, young girls are raped and have their breasts cut off before being killed)but, as in other stories of extreme tragedy, there are incidents of incredible humanity to others, at great personal risk, described. Why does evil have to be a catalyst for acts of great goodness?

I take issue with other reviewers who see this as a biased account from the perspective of the "Levantines" -- rich European families who had made Smyrna their home for more than one hundred years and were the backbone of a thriving trade economy. In one sense, that is true, as their sources were more available to the author but, in another and more significant sense, it is not. The story is still highly politically charged, according to whether you are a Greek or Turkish sympathiser. The author carefully avoids writing the story from either of those two perspectives. Writing it from the "Levantine" perspective, while not totally ideal, is probably far more objective than from either of the other two perspectives, and so, a measure of balance is achieved. I always felt the author was trying not to be overtly pro-Greek or pro-Turkish. He is balanced in describing appalling massacres committed by both sides (the Greeks during their invasion and the Turks after defeating the Greeks and, ultimately, at Smyrna). He presents a sympathetic, if not totally admiring, picture of both Venizelos and Kemal (Ataturk) and a favorable picture of the previous Turkish governor of Smyrna who went out of his way to promote harmony among the varied ethnic populations in Smyrna, in the interests of Smyrna's economic success, despite being heavily criticised by his central government in Istanbul.

If you are of Greek or Turkish ancestry reading this story, I hope its balance (in the sense of the above) will promote a greater understanding of the other side and help to heal the rift betwen these two historically great nationalities. If you are Armenian, I hope that your tragic story will be better known by everyone.

A wonderful book that made me fight back tears at times!

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars How the story is told (know this, and delve in), November 26, 2008

By 

S. Pitsirilos Boquin (New York, NY) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Paradise Lost: Smyrna, 1922 (Hardcover)

B. J. O'Brien's review is quite helpful and accurate in its critique. I am appreciative of Milton's work on this subject; it adds to the many accounts of Smyrna's tragedy. It also reads well. But I too think that the publisher and author have a historical obligation to clarify the perspective of the book in that the Smyrna we are told about is through the eyes and lives of the Levantines. Despite the horrific accounts told in the later half of the book of the average citizen of Smyrna, the narrative has us peering down from Bournabat as a Levantine, sipping tea, witnessing the tragedy mostly as an inconvenience of lifestyle. Because of this narrative, the millions of Armenians, Greeks and Turks seem distant to Smyrna, and if you are not verse in the other experiences of what happened, as a reader you may simply find yourself exclaiming, "Oh dear! Who will serve the tea?". I left this book with not only the horrific imagery of those September days (and years leading up to them), but also feeling that I was supposed to mourn the romantic lifestyles of the Levantines and feel it was an equal tragedy that there would be no more spring balls, maids, and gardens with wisteria. Of course it is valuable to have Smyrna's account from any group or individual, but without clarifying this to the reader it perpetuates a hegemonic pattern of viewing history and the experiences of minority groups as peripheral and invisible.