Giles Milton - Paradise Lost: Smyrna 1922

Paradise Lost: Smyrna 1922 is Giles Milton’s sixth work of narrative history. It is a graphic account of the sack of Smyrna (modern Izmir) in 1922. . The bloody sacking of Smyrna in September 1922, and subsequent expulsion of 1,300,000 Orthodox Greeks from Turkey and 350,000 Muslims from Greece is recounted through the eyes of the Levantine community. The book won plaudits for its impartial approach to a contentious episode of history.

The story of the destruction of the second city in Ottoman Turkey and subsequent exodus of two million Greeks from Anatolia and elsewhere is told through the eyewitness accounts of those who were there, making use of unpublished diaries and letters written by Smyrna’s Levantine elite: he contends that their voices are among the few impartial ones in a highly contentious episode of history.

The book has won plaudits for its historical balance: it has been published in both Turkish and Greek. The Greek edition has received widespread coverage in the Greek press.It received publicity in the USA when the New York Times revealed that Presidential candidate John McCain was reading it while on the campaign trail in 2008. It featured on a 2008 list of books considered by David Cameron’s Conservative Party to be essential reading by any prospective Member of Parliament.

According to Milton, Smyrna occupied a unique position in the Ottoman Empire. Cosmopolitan, rich and tolerant in matters of religion, it was the only city in Turkey with a majority Christian population. Her unusual demographic had earned her the epithet ‘giaour’ or ‘infidel’. Tensions between Smyrna's Christians and Muslims had first been inflamed by the First Balkan War of 1912–1913. These tensions were to increase dramatically during the First World War. The majority of Smyrna’s population – including the city’s politically astute governor, Rahmi Bey – favoured the Allied cause. They hoped that Turkey, along with her Central Powers partners, would lose the war. The city's political position was to be a subject of intense debate at the Paris Peace Conference, 1919. Greece’s Prime Minister, Eleftherios Venizelos, had long dreamed of incorporating the city into a newly revived Greek Empire in Asia Minor – the so-called Megali Idea or Great Idea, and argued his case with considerable aplomb: American President Woodrow Wilson and Britain’s Prime Minister David Lloyd George eventually consented to Greek troops being landed in Smyrna.

Paradise Lost chronicles the violence that followed the Greek landing through the eyewitness accounts of the Levantine community. The author offers a reappraisal of Smyrna’s first Greek governor, Aristidis Stergiadis, whose impartiality towards both Greeks and Turks won him considerable enmity amongst the local Greek population.

The Greek army was despatched into the interior of Anatolia in an attempt to crush the fledgling army of the Turkish Nationalists, led by Mustafa Kemal. The book provides a graphic account of this doomed military campaign: by the summer of 1922, the Greek army was desperately short of supplies, weaponry and money. Kemal seized the moment and attacked.

The third section of Paradise Lost is a day-by-day account of what happened when the Turkish army entered Smyrna. The narrative is constructed from accounts written principally by Levantines and Americans who witnessed the violence first hand, in which the author seeks to apportion blame and discover who started the conflagration that was to cause the city’s near-total destruction. The book' also investigates the cynical role played by the commanders of the 21 Allied battleships in the bay of Smyrna, who were under orders to rescue only their own nationals, abandoning to their fate the hundreds of thousands of Greeks and Armenian refugees gathered on the quayside.

Many were saved only when a lone American charity worker named Asa Jennings commandeered a fleet of Greek ships and ordered them to sail into the bay of Smyrna. Jennings mission was, contends Milton, one of the greatest humanitarian rescue missions of the 20th century.

Paradise Lost: Smyrna 1922 ends with the exodus of two million Greeks from Turkey and the expulsion of 400,000 Turks from Greece – an exchange of population that was enshrined in law in the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne.