Through Levantine eyes

The corniche at Izmir had a magic atmosphere. Lined with cafés and orchestras playing every kind of music — Western, Greek, Turkish, Armenian — it had the reputation for making the gloomiest laugh. Though ‘terribly chee-chee’ (i.e., they spoke with a sing-song accent), the women were famous for their allure. The trade in figs, raisins and opium made the city the richest in the Levant; it had the first cars, first cinemas and first girls’ schools. Nowhere else, it was said, did East and West mingle in so spectacular a manner.

In 1919, as Giles Milton describes in this indictment of nationalism, Izmir Greeks welcomed a Greek army with flowers and an outbreak of looting and killing Turks. Turkish revenge was pitiless. After the entry of Mustafa Kemal’s triumphant Turkish army in September 1922, Izmir became hell on earth. Milton believes ‘the Turkish army deliberately set fire to Smyrna’ (the Greek name for the city, where Greeks, Turks, Armenians, Jews and Western Europeans had lived together for centuries).