by Gina Perry
I watched the next stage of their journey on CNN in my hotel room: people crowded into rubber dinghies, the men pushing boats from the shore, the parents holding their children close, the boats veering in circles before straightening up and hopefully heading straight towards Lesbos. Down the coast, just a short distance from Izmir, bodies continued to wash up on the shore.
Interspersed with news of the refugee crisis were updates on the upcoming Turkish election and President Erdoğan continuing crackdown on journalists and intellectuals critical of the government. Of course few of the Turkish academics I had emailed had answered. I knew from the news headlines what was happening in Turkey before I travelled, but suddenly this project, wandering the streets of Izmir looking for echoes of the past, seemed shallow and frivolous in the face of what was happening in the present.
The mistrust between the Greeks and Turks that grew after Greek independence and Greece’s fight against the Ottoman Empire in the Balkan Wars reached new heights after Greece entered World War I on the side of the Allies in 1916. At the same time, Committee of Union and Progress leaders publicly blamed the supposedly traitorous Armenians for the disastrous Caucasus campaign. Underneath its cosmopolitan surface, the fault lines of race, nationality, and religion in Smyrna were widening.
At Sherif’s school, the student population had ebbed and flowed in concert with the tide of politics and war around it. By 1918, most of the Christian Armenian boys, who had made up the majority of pupils since the school was founded, had disappeared. Scapegoated for the Caucasus defeat, 600,000 to 1,000,000 Armenians were marched towards the Syrian desert, where most of them perished.
During World War I, the British promised Greece territorial gains in Turkey in exchange for entering the war on their side, and after the war they made good on the deal. After the armistice was signed in November 1918, Allied troops sailed into Constantinople and occupied the city, and Greece was granted the western regions of Anatolia, including Smyrna. An Englishwoman in Smyrna called Emily Holton kept a diary and wrote about the arrival of the first British ship in port after the armistice:
The people were frantically excited and caught the captain up when he stepped on shore and cheered the rest of the officers. The town was bedecked with flags mostly Greek & they were waved around by individuals … All the villagers sported little Greek flags and walked about the streets all night singing, cheering & shouting ‘Liberty’. The church bells rang at intervals and there was service in the churches and a procession with the pictures of the saints at nearly midnight. … Greek flags hang out of private houses. It is a wonder the Turks are so quiet with all this triumph flaunted in their faces.
At Muzafer’s school, the headmaster tried to keep politics outside the gate, but the faculty was divided along their support for the Greeks or the Turks, and feuds simmered between teachers. Among the students, former friends looked at one another through new eyes. Selma Ekrem described in her autobiography the tensions between Greek and Turkish girls at her college in Constantinople at news of the landing of Greek troops in Smyrna:
At college mournful groups of Turkish girls pored over the newspapers … The occupation of Symrna by the Greeks had revolted us … Turkey would cease to exist — a greater disaster than the Great War had fallen upon us … We could not bear to look at the other girls, those who were not Turks and who lived their happiest days in our blackest ones.
As a fourteen-year-old boarding-school student, Muzafer Sherif was there to witness the occupation of Smyrna. On 15 May 1919, he stood among the crowd, who had gathered to watch the arrival of Greek troops, on the quay in Smyrna. An observer described the quay as a sea of red fezzes, the headgear that identified the wearer as an Ottoman subject. Some of the crowd were sombre; others were celebrating. For Ottoman Muslims, the arrival of an invading army was a cause for bitter humiliation and anger. The Greeks in Smyrna were ecstatic at the troops’ arrival, waving pictures of Greek prime minister Eleftherios Venizelos and showering the soldiers with flowers. Church bells pealed in celebration and bands played the Greek national anthem. To the Greeks, it was an exhilarating first step towards recovery of the Byzantine heritage; to the Ottoman Muslims, it was clear the rejoicing Greek crowd would soon join their soldiers to fight the Turks. With Smyrna as the soldiers’ base, Sherif and his fellow students would be confronted daily with the sight of the white-skirted foreign army, the everyday reality of the occupation of their country, through interactions with the enemy and those who supported them. For many on the quay that day, the ecstatic reception by the Greek crowds stoked the fires of anger and nationalism.
The festivities didn’t last long. The troops began rounding up Turkish soldiers and citizens, marching them up and down the quay, forcing them to shout ‘Zito Venizelos’ (‘Long live Venizelos’). Sherif’s daughter Sue outlined Sherif’s experiences for me. ‘My father heard shots being fired, and he and his friends rushed to see what was happening. They were boys, it seemed like an adventure — a bit like your Aussie boys, who joined the army to see the world and when they got to Gallipoli, it was like, “Oh my God!” My father said it was horrible. No wonder he didn’t talk about it.’
Those who refused to cheer for the Greek prime minister were tortured and bayonetted in front of a large crowd of cheering locals, many of whom joined in. Caught up in the violence, Sherif stood frozen as soldiers murdered people all around him. He later told a journalist it was a ‘miracle’ that he wasn’t killed.
According to reports, a few hundred died on the Smyrna quay that day, and many were taken away and tortured. Almost immediately, the reprisals began, with violence, murder, and looting. The arrival of the Greek troops in May 1919 splintered the Empire and galvanised the Turkish resistance effort, the Turkish National Movement.
By June, the Greeks had pushed inland towards Sherif’s home town of Ödemiş.
On a hillside outside of present-day Izmir, a huge bust of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, seemingly carved from a mountain, Mt Rushmore–style, looms out of the rock, casting a shadow across the landscape. Atatürk’s spirit haunts the city. It was in this area that the first armed clash of the war took place. Six months before the Greeks landed in Smyrna, the Allies occupied Constantinople and met with no resistance. But in Smyrna, it was a different story. In a village near Ödemiş, a group of armed villagers organised themselves to fight the invaders. When I read this, I remembered the statue of the man with the rifle I’d seen in the street at Bozdağ, and I looked him up.
Poslu Mestan Efe was a brigand and a local hero who commanded an unofficial group of militia that attacked invading Greek forces in 1919. His actions allowed Mustafa Kemal time to secretly knit together resistance groups across Anatolia and organise and establish a regular army. These were the wild days — the Empire was crumbling but nothing new had yet taken its place. The brigand distributed arms to local villagers and, advancing on horseback from the foothills of the mountains, they ambushed Greek troops in a series of attacks in and around Bozdağ. The spark of the Resistance movement that would eventually oust the Greeks and threaten the occupiers of Constantinople was lit in the village where Muzafer Sherif was born.
It goes some way to explaining why, within a year of the Greek invasion, as a fifteen-year-old schoolboy Muzafer Sherif had joined the Young Turk movement and the nationalist cause.
When night came, the hotel corridor whispered: bags rustled, voices murmured, cell phones pinged. Outside, the streets were choked with people. Men and women clutched black plastic bags filled with belongings, held the hands of children old enough to walk and carried those too young. They swarmed across the busy roads, dodging traffic, heading purposefully towards their destination. The sight of them filled me with anxiety and dread. They were the ones who had received the call they had been hoping for. A boat was waiting. First stop, Greece. If they made it. Beyond that, who knew.
In between serving food, waiters in cafés engaged in protr
acted negotiations with patrons at the tables and then went to stand behind the counter, talking urgently into their phones. Barber shops, tobacconists, and newsstands did a brisk trade in fluorescent vests. I stopped at a former menswear shop, where mannequins of a man, a woman wearing a hijab, and a child in orange lifejackets were posed in the window. I pointed at one of the vests and asked the shopkeeper, ‘How much?’ but he waved his arms. ‘No journalists!’ he cried angrily.
On makeshift tables in the side streets around the neighbourhood of Basmane, children sold homemade waterproof pouches, each made from a sandwich bag, a balloon, and a piece of string, to keep passports and identity papers dry and buoyant in the water. I wanted to leave at the same time that I felt guilty I could.
A former carpet merchant’s house on the quay at Izmir had been converted into the Izmir Atatürk Museum. The museum’s rooms and displays told the official history of the birth of the Republic of Turkey. In one room stood eerily lifelike mannequins of Atatürk and his commanders in military uniform, poring over a map, presumably plotting their next move and discussing the progress of their war.
In another room, I was excited to see a photo in the museum of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk at a boys’ high school, surrounded by a large group of students. They were positioned in a triangle, with Atatürk at the head and the group fanning out on both sides of him. The foreground was crowded with boys who looked like they had shouldered their way in front of the camera to get a photo of themselves with their leader. I leaned in and peered at each boy’s face, but I didn’t recognise Muzafer Sherif among them. Kemal was Sherif’s hero, as he was for most Turkish boys of his generation. They wore a picture of him on an armband and followed the progress of nationalist forces with great excitement, despite the strictures of their school’s headmaster.
The Turkish nationalists finally repulsed the Greek army in 1922. Their revenge, when it came, was terrible.
By 9 September 1922, nationalist forces had successfully pushed the Greek troops back, and the last of those who had occupied Smyrna since 1919 withdrew. Those that were captured were forced to parade through the streets shouting ‘Long live Mustafa Kemal!’ amid jeering onlookers. Refugees fleeing both armies engulfed the city: Christian, Muslim, and Jewish families carried what belongings they had been able to salvage from the razing of their villages. Rape, looting, atrocities, and savagery were reported on both sides.
The city of Smyrna was in chaos. The streets were choked with refugees; the roads into town were littered with the bodies of dead and dying and the carcasses of animals. Smoke from burning villages smudged the skyline.
Meanwhile Mustafa Kemal and his cavalry escort drove into town on 10 September in an open car draped with olive branches. Mobs took over the streets. The Greek archbishop, who had welcomed the Greek troops to the city three years earlier, was lynched by a Muslim crowd.
As fleeing Greek troops fought last-ditch battles with Turkish soldiers nearby, Sherif’s headmaster heard ‘disturbing rumors’ of thousands of mounted Turkish brigands gathering near Ödemiş on their way to Smyrna. Some stopped just out of Smyrna, at Muzafer’s school in şirinyer, on Monday 11 September. Despite the American flag that flew from the tower of the hall signalling the school’s neutrality, the brigands began looting one of the school buildings. In his memoirs, Sherif’s headmaster Alexander MacLachlan wrote about how when he went to stop them, he was ambushed. As a crowd of anxious boys and staff watched with horror from an upper-storey window — was sixteen-year-old Muzafer one of them? — the men toyed with him, stripping, beating, and stabbing him. One student ran out, pleading for the headmaster’s life, but they ignored him, and were only stopped when a passing Turkish officer intervened.
Fearful of the retribution of the nationalist army, the tens of thousands of Greeks and Armenians who poured into Smyrna gathered on the waterfront, where they were likely reassured by the Allied warships at anchor in the harbour. Meanwhile, many of Smyrna’s foreigners — British, French, Italians, and Americans — were safely boarded onto twenty-one Allied battleships with orders to protect their own citizens.
By 13 September, different Christian parts of the city were on fire. The Armenian quarter was the first to go up. Other Christian districts quickly followed, and the fire merged into a wall of flame three kilometres long and thirty metres high. As the fire roared through the streets, buildings collapsed, and horses and camels screamed in terror. The shops and department stores, the churches, theatres, hotels, factories, coffee houses, and consulates were destroyed. Thousands of people fled to the waterfront to escape the advancing fire, joining the huge crowd that had been gathering there for days. But now they were trapped between the city and the water. When night fell, they were attacked and robbed by brigands. Some escaped by boat; many perished trying, murdered on the quayside or drowned in their attempts to reach the safety of Allied ships in the harbour. The smell of rotting carcasses and bodies that bobbed on the water was so overpowering that Mustafa Kemal — later to be known as Atatürk, or ‘Father of the Turks’ — moved from the waterside mansion where he had been staying to one downwind of the bay. The frantic screams of the people on the quay could be heard for miles. The wall of fire was so tall that it was said that it could be seen by the monks on Mount Athos, on the other side of the Aegean Sea.
Finally, on 16 September, Kemal allowed Allied ships to evacuate survivors, except for thousands of Greek men aged eighteen to forty-five, who were separated from their families and deported as forced labour to rebuild villages in the interior after the war. Over 200,000 people were ferried to Greece. One of the conditions of the peace settlement signed in Lausanne the following year was the forced exchange of remaining Greek Orthodox residents of Anatolia for Muslims living in Greece. Turkish-speaking people of Greek heritage whose affiliation and family history were rooted in Anatolia rather than Greece, and Greek-speaking people of Turkish heritage with strong links with Macedonia, were swept up in the exchange and forced to resettle in places where they were most often regarded as unwelcome strangers.
Sherif, who was in his final year of schooling in 1922, was likely safe from the worst of the atrocities, but he would have seen many of them first-hand. Smyrna was in ashes. Anatolia had been devastated by the War of Independence. The expectation was that Sherif and his generation would rebuild it.
The fire destroyed all reminders of Smyrna’s Ottoman cosmopolitan past. The mansions and clubs, hotels and cafés, were gone. The Levantine district, the Greek and Armenian quarters, were wiped away. In its place was a new city, now given its Turkish name: Izmir.
The fire that obliterated the multiethnic port city of the Ottoman Empire has been swallowed up in silence. In his victory speech to the Turkish Grand National Assembly just weeks later, Mustafa Kemal recounted how Turkish nationalists won the war but made no mention of the burning of Smyrna. Five years later, in his famous six-day speech in 1927 about the founding of the Republic, there was also no mention of the fire. Mustafa Kemal blamed the loss of the Ottoman Empire on the nationalisms and treachery of ethnic and religious minorities. For Kemal, a strong and unified country was one with a homogenous population and a new, shared history that helped people feel a sense of belonging. And that meant telling a new story of the vanquishing of a common enemy that stressed the liberation rather than the destruction of what was then Turkey’s second-largest city, and the triumph of Turkish nationalists over foreign powers.
Sociologist Biray Kolluoḡlu-Kırlı points out that the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 was equally catastrophic and produced an enormous number of literary, scholarly, and popular accounts of the event and its aftermath. Yet by 2005, when her paper was published, the Smyrna fire was still swallowed in silence, with ‘not a single Turkish novel, film or memoir’ referring to it. Any accounts of the Smyrna fire would mean moving into the dangerous territory of voicing who was responsible for setting it, and who was responsible for letting it burn.
At the museum I moved from photo to photo, from one glass case to another, peering into the rooms where Atatürk slept, read books, took baths, and had his daily shave with his personal barber. But nowhere in the building was there a reference to the event that caused its original owner, the carpet merchant, to ‘surrender’ the premises. The catastrophic fire that destroyed the city of Smyrna was represented by a single blurred photo without a caption that was part of a short film about the Republic, playing on a loop. The picture was taken from the sea, where black clouds of smoke billowed upwards from the city. The next frame showed Turkish soldiers standing in the ruined and still smoking remains of buildings as if surveying the damage. I kept looking to see how the fire would be explained, and importantly who would be blamed for it, but there was nothing of the sort. The gaps in the museum’s exhibit mirrored those in official histories of Turkey.
It’s one thing for official histories to be edited, but what does that silence do to people who were there? What do they do with the traumatic memories, emotions, and experiences, especially ones that might contradict official accounts?
Muzafer Sherif never talked about his experiences of this violent and traumatic ethnic conflict in detail with his family. Perhaps that’s not surprising — perhaps, like so many others, he didn’t want to remember. But he did write about it once, when he was sixty-one. In a 1967 book of essays about his work, he foregrounded his childhood as the inspiration for his intellectual development:
I will say something about this personal background. As an adolescent with a great deal of curiosity about things, I saw the effects of war: families who lost their men and dislocations of human beings. I saw hunger. I saw people killed on my side of national affiliation; I saw people killed on the other side. In fact, it was a miracle that I was not killed along with hundreds of other civilians who happened to be near one of the invasion points the day Izmir (Smyrna) was occupied by an army …