Turks retake Smyrna

On the morning of 9 September 1922 the first squadron of Turkish cavalry rode into Smyrna from the northern end of the quay and took over the government building, the Konak. The last Greek units had left the city the evening before. After three years and four months the Greek occupation of western Anatolia was over, and the Greco-Turkish War was drawing to a close. Smyrna, the largest centre of Greeks in Asia Minor, called “infidel Smyrna” (Gâvur İzmir) by the Turks, went through massacre and fire in the following days, which destroyed its Christian part.

The defeat of the Greek army

After the Battle of the Sakarya the Greek army had held for a year a line from Eskişehir to Afyonkarahisar. The powers had agreed that the Treaty of Sèvres had to be revised, and Greece was left without support. On 26 August 1922 the Turks, after a heavy artillery bombardment, attacked near Afyonkarahisar. The Greek commander, General Nikolaos Trikoupis (PL), realised too late where the Turkish forces were concentrated, and his group was destroyed at Dumlupınar by 30 August. The Greek army fled towards the coast. The retreating units burnt everything in their path. The Greek population of the occupied lands fled behind the soldiers, fearing Turkish revenge. Crowds of refugees poured into Smyrna, and the troops were evacuated by ship.

British, French, Italian and American warships lay in the harbour. They landed sailors to guard the consulates and institutions of their countries, but they were under orders to remain neutral and did not take refugees on board.

Massacre and fire

The first hours were quiet, but on 9 September discipline among the Turkish soldiers was already beginning to break down. Armenians were attacked and their shops and homes looted. Command in the city was taken over by the commander of the First Army, Nureddin Pasha. On 10 September Turkish soldiers brought the Orthodox Metropolitan of Smyrna, Chrysostomos, to him from the cathedral. According to Greek accounts and French witnesses, Nureddin handed him over to a mob waiting outside the building, which murdered him before the eyes of French soldiers. Their commanding officer forbade them to intervene. For the Greeks Chrysostomos became the symbol of the destruction of Greek Smyrna.

On 13 September a fire broke out in the city and over several days consumed whole quarters: the Greek, the Armenian and the European. The Turkish and Jewish quarters survived. Tens of thousands of refugees crowded onto the quay, between the fire and the sea. Who started the fire remains disputed. Western witnesses, including staff of the American consulate, and most historians blame Turkish soldiers. The Turkish side claimed from the start that the city had been set on fire by retreating Greeks and Armenians. The Turkish historian Elçin Macar writes that the causes of the fire are still controversial, and the authors of a University of Michigan exhibition point out that the bias of contemporary accounts and Kemalist control of the Turkish press make it difficult to establish the truth. Estimates of the victims of the massacre and fire vary widely, from several tens of thousands to more than a hundred thousand dead. Christian men aged 18 to 45 were deported into the interior of Anatolia to labour battalions, from which many never returned.

The end of the war

By November 1922 some 800,000–900,000 Greeks had left Asia Minor. On 11 October an armistice was concluded at Mudanya, under which the Greeks also gave up Eastern Thrace to Turkey. In Greece the defeat, called the “Asia Minor Catastrophe”, cost Constantine I his throne: an army revolt soon forced him to abdicate in favour of his son, George II. Several politicians and generals held responsible for the defeat were executed. Peace was concluded at Lausanne on 24 July 1923, and before that Greece and Turkey had agreed on a compulsory exchange of populations. For the Greeks, as Macar writes, it was the end of Hellenism in Asia Minor.