Paradise Lost: Smyrna 1922 - The Destruction of Islam's City of Tolerance Read Free Page A

Greeks had left their mark on every walk of life. Smyrna boasted scores of Orthodox churches and almost as many schools. The young Aristotle Onassis was one of the many local Greeks who attended the famous Aronis School.
    Many of the city’s best hotels, brasseries and cafés were also run by Greeks, establishments like the Acropoli, Luxembourg and North Pole. Yet Greek ownership did not lead to an exclusively Greek clientele. The Frenchman, Louis de Launay, passed one café and recalled seeing ‘green turbans, red fezzes, embroidered Armenian hats, pink on a black backing, and the gleaming glass of the hookah pipes’.
    The centre of Greek business was on the waterfront, where the wealthiest merchants had their trading houses. One of these was Petros’s godfather, a fig exporter who sold his fruit to merchants from far and wide.
    ‘You’d hear every language under the sun on the quayside,’ recalls Petros, ‘and see ships from everywhere in the world. There were so many of them that they’d have to moor with their sterns to the quay.’
    The harbour was indeed one of the great sights of Smyrna. There were thirty-three steamboat companies catering for passenger liners arriving almost daily from London, Liverpool, Marseilles, Genoa, Brindisi, Trieste and Constantinople, as well as all the principal ports of the Levant.
    As merchandise and fruit was loaded onto the merchant ships, Petros’s godfather would select the ripest and stickiest figs and present them to his young charge. ‘I also remember him choosing one special crate which he presented each year to the King and Queen of England.’
    Greeks could be found living right across the city; the European community congregated in their own quarter just behind the quayside. Alfred Simes, a sprightly ninety-seven when I met him, recalls street festivities taking place almost every night of the week. ‘In the evenings, the maids would sweep the dust from the street and place armchairs outside the houses,’ he says. ‘Of course there were very few cars in those days. Everyone came out into the street after their supper and offered cakes and sweets to their neighbours and friends. At Christmas, we’d all sing carols in French, Greek, English and Italian.’
    Frank Street was the principal artery that ran through the European quarter. It had been laid out long before the advent of the motor car and was very narrow – too narrow, even, to cope with the human traffic. Yet in spite of the bustle, heat, noise and collisions with donkeys and camels, it remained the city’s most popular street for shopping. When Marcel Mirtil came here on his world tour in 1909, it was the hair salons that caught his attention. ‘In sheer size, they were reminiscent of ballrooms.’
    Here, too, were the city’s principal banks – the Imperial Ottoman, Credit Lyonnais, the British Oriental and the Bank of Vienna. No fewer than seven countries had their own postal systems that worked alongside the Ottoman system. And there were several dozen maritime insurance companies.
    One of Alfred Simes’s earliest memories is standing on tiptoes at his bedroom window and watching a daily procession of bowlers, fezzes and homburgs passing along Boulevard Aliotti, the street where his family lived. ‘The gentlemen of business were always so impeccably smart,’ he recalls. ‘They wore the finest tailored suits and hats.’
    The European quarter’s most ostentatious building was the Grand Hotel Kraemer Palace, with its gigantic foyer and capacious dining rooms.
    In the first salon, [wrote one French hotel guest] there was a group of English visitors, crimson with sunburn (it was a Thomas Cook tour, just returned from Jerusalem) . . . There were Young Turks from an operetta, fezzes on their heads; an open bed spread out in a corner; exotic rugs from Turkestan and Persia hanging on the walls; on a small table inlaid with mother-of-pearl were placed dirty plates, and one could hear constantly one of