Customer Reviews

Paradise Lost: Smyrna, 1922

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

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.

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!

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.

4.5 stars, rounded up.

In September, 1922, a world came to an end; the last vestiges of (usually) peaceful coexistence between Greeks, Armenians, Jews, Turkish Muslims and the Levantine merchants (descendants of European families living in Asia Minor) in the bustling cosmopolitan enclave of Smyrna ended in a bloodbath, the legacy of which echoes today in the political tension between Turkey and its European neighbors. Milton, a British writer who specializes in shining light on overlooked corners of history (Nathaniel's Nutmeg recounts the history of the spice trade and the fate of what would become known as the Dutch East Indies and later Indonesia), has combined narratives from those who lived through the terrible days of the sack and destruction of the city and wholesale murder and deportation of perhaps 100,000 or its Greek and Armenian citizens to tell a chilling tale of the demise of both a city and a dream.

The book opens with the dream: that of a wealthy city, with "the climate of southern California, the architecture of the Cote d'Azur and the allure of nowhere else on earth", Milton writes. On the quayside that later saw such horrors, fig merchants once haggled to buy crops from the Turkish interior; gypsy bands played, and the Greek, Turkish, Armenian and European communities mingled effortlessly with the members of the ultra-rich Levantine families who lived in their opulent villas a few miles outside Smyrna itself. Thanks in part to the incredible manipulations of the Ottoman Turkish governor of the city, this unique community managed to ride out the years of the First World War relatively unscathed, even as the Allies and the Turks were fighting each other only hours away by horse in the bloody conflict of Gallipoli. But Smyrna, which rejoiced at the end of the war, was to fall victim to the peace process that followed, as Woodrow Wilson's pledge to give nationalities the right of self-determination and British prime minister David Lloyd George's personal bond with Greek leader Eleftherios Venizelos set the stage for an ill-fated attempt to rebuild in Asia Minor the kind of Greek (Byzantine) empire that had been lost with the defeat of Constantinople in 1453.

Milton darts back and forth between recounting the lives of those who inhabited Smyrna - the apparently willful obliviousness of the Levantine merchants to the wider world they inhabit is particularly striking, as is the provocative and poorly-planned nature of the Greek incursions into the Anatolian plateau in the pursuit of their elusive dream - and the broader political context in which those lives played out. He weaves in everything that can give the reader a better understanding of Smyrna's downfall, from the Armenian genocide of 1915 and growing Turkish nationalistic fervor, to the bureaucratic or narrow-minded behavior of the American and British commanders who refused to save the hundreds of thousands of terrified citizens of Smyrna trapped on the quayside with a burning city in front of them, the ocean in front of them, and Turkish troops murdering and assaulting them constantly. On the British ships, meanwhile, "when the screams from the distant quayside grew too loud to be ignored, the captain ordered the ship's band to strike up tunes."

Milton's research has resulted in such a gripping read that, once I had picked it up, I found it impossible to put down until I had read the final pages at 3.30 a.m. There is a horrible fascination to the narrative, of the same kind that exists when we read today of the lives of Germany's Jewish population in the 1920s - the kind of bewildering, terrifying kind of downward spiral. My comparison isn't adequate, however, since the Jewish Holocaust of the Nazi era took shape over many years, while Smyrna's bloody end arrived almost overnight. Much of the force behind Milton's narrative comes from his ability to create in the reader a sense of gathering tension, a sense that long-held rivalries and religious and political battles are about to reach an explosive end. Indeed, the contrast between the inexorable downward spiral that culminates in Smyrna's destruction and the way in which its citizens continued to lead their lives almost oblivious to the horrors they were about to face, is surreal and jarring.

This book is full of villains, of all stripes. Callous naval officers, unimaginative or careless politicians, over-ambitious Greek politicians, racist Turkish leaders and the unspeakable atrocities committed by the Turkish troops in Smyrna - even the laissez-faire attitude of those, such as the Levantine merchants, who might have played a role in saving many of the lives of their workers by being more aware and responding more promptly. A few heroes emerge, such as Asa Jennings, a redoubtable five-foot-tall Methodist minister who bullies and shames the Greek and other governments into launching a rescue mission at the eleventh hour, and others, like English nurse Grace Williamson and Alexander Maclachlan, president of the American College, who preserved the lives of many in their care.

Milton relies on the narratives of many of these individuals, as well as Armenian and Turkish sources, to tell his story of the downfall of Smyrna, its causes and aftereffects. His single largest source of material, however, comes from the Levantine community - a fact that appears to be controversial in some quarters although perhaps has been made inevitable because of what appears to be a wealth of primary material about life in Smyrna prior to the events of September 1922. Moreover, Milton seems to regard those Levantines - descendants of families from many European countries, who had intermarried with Greeks, Venetians and other Europeans and lived in Asia Minor for generations - as symbolic of the city as a truly cosmopolitan place, akin to Alexandria of the same time, or New York today. To him, the loss of Smyrna is not about the loss of a Greek dream or even the humanitarian horrors; it is about the end of the possibility of coexistence, symbolized by his use of the motto of the Ionian University at the front of the book: Ex Oriente Lux (out of the Orient, light.) The university was set to open its doors to all - regardless of race or religion - in September 1922.

Highly recommended to anyone trying to understand issues of race, ethnicity and nationality and the ways they endure for generations, as well as anyone interested in the region, the history of the Byzantine empire and its component parts, or the aftermath of World War 1. Also recommended as books about cities that once played a similar cosmopolitan role in the region - Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews 1430-1950 and (although it's not a Greek city) Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere. Those interested in what remains of the ancient Byzantine Christian heritage in the Anatolian heritage should look at the first third of William Dalrymple's excellent travel book, From the Holy Mountain: A Journey among the Christians of the Middle East

Giles Milton turns out a lot of books by repeating what is in other books without also independently verifying what he is reporting. This book is about the rescue of 350,000 Greeks, Armenians and Jews in 11 days by Asa K. Jennings, my Grandfather. He is the highest decorated person in modern Greek history. Milton credits, for example, Asa Jennings along with a nurse who cared for the refugees and later wrote a book as though she was the saviour. However, there is no support in official records of the US Navy, Greek Government, etc. The Milton book is not a scholarly work. Those who are interested in the subject of Smyrna should read the best work written which is Ships of Mercy by Christos Papoutsy. The book Twice a Stranger by Bruce Clark does a great job explaining the conditions in Turkey at the time,but does not deal specifically with Smyrna. I did offer Milton access to boxes of original records of the rescue, but he declined being in a rush to publish. Roger Jennings

Giles Milton's sentence in page 180 of this book in fact is the root of the Smyrna tragedy. Book clearly summarizes the behind the scenes war taking place between the victors of the WWI, as well as the war between the invading Greeks -hoping to reach their Great Ideal- and the Turkish Nationalist forces to deffend their home country.
This book could have been a better one if Mr. Milton had referred to the following book and magazine articles:

The Struggle For Power In Muslim Asia, E(dward) Alexander Powell, 1923

Actualities at Smyrna by Mark Prentiss, 1924, His report can easily be read from the following link : [...]

G. Ercole's article in Fench L'Illustration magazine dated 30 September 1922.

These articles would have added to the book a great deal. Finally for those readers who wish to know more about similar 'Paradises' lost earlier in the Levant, I highly recommend the following books:

Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews 1430-1950

The Lavender Seller by Nicholas Stavroulakis

These two books will shed a light to the readers who really want to have in depth knowledge to the events leading to occupation of the most fertile and richest city in the orient and the biggest trading hub.
Happy reading.
Basar Eryoner

The book was delivered in a timely fashion.Aditionally this book was difficult to put down.It evoked feelings of sadness,anger and disgust.I love thi book and the author eloquently articulated the theme and plot.

Giles Milton does a thorough job in giving the reader an insight into life in Smyrna prior to and after the destruction of the city. The first half of the book tells of the life of many different people and goes somewhat into the events leading up to the torching of the city. For some reason (possibly because of the information available) Miles speaks extensively about the Levantine families. This seems to be out of place considering the majority of the population were Greek, Armenia, Turkish and Jewish. The general context is the lead up to the First World War, and then the Greco-Turkish war which ended in disaster for the Greeks.

The second part of the book comes alive with a step by step chronological description of the events leading up to, during and after the torching of the city. He goes into some detail regarding the atrocities carried out by the Greeks against Turks, in their retreat throughout the Anatolia. Then the reprisal atrocities carried out by the Turks on firstly the Armenians, which then quickly spread to the Greeks. These atrocities have been lost in the fabric of time and adjusted history.(by governments in France, US, Italy & Turkey)

Generally speaking this is a good book for those who wish to gain an insight in one of the least spoken acts of "ethnic cleansing" that happenned in the 20th Century. But as I mentioned in my title, Good, but not great, book. I would still recommend it.

This history of the Turkish city Smyrna in the early 20th century makes for compelling reading. I could not put it down once I had started. I had previously been unaware of this horrible story -- the death of over 100,000 people in less than a week, and the dislocation of so many more. I was unaware that Greek forces had invaded Turkey in the 1920's and pushed well into Turkish territory. When the Turkish army was able to repel this attack, it is little wonder (tho horrific) that they vented their rage on this primarily Greek city (more Greeks in Turkish Smyrna than in Athens at the time). The city is basically destroyed.

Poignant are the descriptions of the British, French, etc communities that had lived their lives of extreme priviledge for almost 200 years. While they still felt the bond with, for example, Great Britain, the British didn't much return the favor. These families had gone to Turkey during the reign of George III, made fortunes, and lived in luxury. Then, for many of them, everything was lost in a matter of days.

Poignant also are the descriptions of the brutality of the army: the looting, rape, murder, and the fire that destroyed the city.

But, to be honest, I didn't walk away from this book with any hatred for the Turkish army. First, we are talking about almost 90 years ago. Second, they were at the rag end of repelling a foreign invasion. Third, armies do awful things sometimes.... and Turkey was in the midst of its own post-Ottoman upheavals. Still, it was very sad and didn't need to have happened. There is never any excuse for ethnic cleansing.

I was saddened by the review that mentioned primary sources that weren't used. I still strongly recommend this book to anyone interested in 20th century history.

This book was exactly what I was seeking - the perfect blend of history, facts, research but intertwined with real people's stories and experiences. Giles Milton has spared no effort in presenting the events leading up to the great fire which destroyed the city of Izmir, and his writing is subtle enough for the reader to come to their own conclusions about the events and decisions which were made which brought this disaster forth.