Αφιερωμένο στην Σμύρνη

And unto the angel of the church in Smyrna write ... I know thy works, and tribulation, and poverty, (but thou art rich) ... Fear none of those things which thou shalt suffer ... ye shall have tribulation ten days: be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life.

-Revelation 2:8-11

Nothing is more easily distorted than the past, but here are the facts in this tragic and much contested episode:

Women were raped, tens of thousands of innocent civilians were slaughtered in their homes and in the streets, an entire city was reduced to ashes, while the warships of the Great Powers, including the United States, were anchored offshore and refused to intervene. A million and a half people were uprooted from the only home they had ever known, and a three-thousand-year Greek presence in Asia Minor came to an abrupt and violent end. It was one of the worst humanitarian disasters the world had ever known, and hardly anyone even remembers.


“The strange thing was, he said, how they screamed every night at midnight. I do not know why they screamed at that time. We were in the harbor and they were all on the pier and at midnight they started screaming. We used to turn the searchlight on them to quiet them down. That always did the trick. We’d run the searchlight up and down over them two or three times and they stopped it...

The worst, he said, were the women with dead babies. You couldn’t get the women to give up their dead babies. They’d have babies dead for six days. Had to take them away finally.”
-Ernest Hemingway, On the Quai at Smyrna

Recommended Reading:
Farewell Anatolia by Dido Sotiriou
Smyrna 1922: The Destruction of a City by Marjorie Housepian Dobkin
Ambassador Morgenthau's Story by Henry Morgenthau
Ionian Vision: Greece in Asia Minor, 1919-1922 by Michael Llewellyn Smith