Street Roots • July 8-14, 2016
News
Page 7
A charred history
A n ancient city descends into flam es while ethnic
battles rage on, trapping the common m an in
between. Sound fam iliar? W hat lessons to be
learned from an event from 94 years ago.
BY SUSAN STORES CLARK
C O N T R IB U T IN G C O L U M N IS T
The Great Fire:
One American’s
Mission to
Rescue Victims
of the 20th
Century’s first
Genocide By
Lou Ureneck
“The Great Fire” reads like a fictional
thriller, with terrifying events unfolding too
fast for considered decisions and everyday
humans revealing their character under fire
as heroes or villains.
But it is not fiction. It is carefully
documented history.
The story could be in today’s headlines,
with thousands of people brutally murdered,
a proud and ancient city burned and
destroyed, and hundreds of thousands of
people displaced, desperately seeking a
place to flee, and finding every exit blocked.
But it all took place in 1922.
In 1922, World War I had ended almost
everywhere except in the remnants of the
Ottoman Empire, which had ruled many of
the lands around the Mediterranean Sea for
more than 500 years, from its capital
Constantinople, in Turkey. It was already
referred to as “the sick man of Europe”
when the sultan chose to enter World War I
in 1914 on the German side.
Ethnic Greeks had lived along the coast of
Turkey for at least two thousand years. The
city of Smyrna was founded by Greeks, with
a town now called “Old Smyrna” established
a thousand years before the birth of Jesus,
and with a newer city established by
Alexander the Great in the third century
B.C. For centuries, Smyrna was a great city
and a prosperous port, populated mostly by
ethnic Greeks. In the closing days of World
War I, the Greek government, which had
fought on the winning side in World War I,
declared Smyrna to be Greek territory. As of
1922, there was no treaty ending World War
I between Greece and Turkey, partly because
the winning European powers considered
Turkey too weak to bother with.
The government might have been weak,
but the Turkish National Movement was
gathering enormous power, with anti-
Christian sentiment already creating the
genocide of Armenians in Turkey during
World War I and sweeping all of Turkey in
1922. Greek and Armenian refugees were
starting to pour into Smyrna, when, on Sept
9,1922, Turkish troops seized the city. They
were led by Ghazi Mustapha Kemal, who
would later be known as Kemal Ataturk, the
father of modem Turkey. The soldiers, and
other Turks who had followed them, began a
rampage of killing, robbery and rape, driving
many Christians into hiding and others to
the city’s docks in a desperate attempt to
escape.
Fire broke out in the Armenian quarter of
the city on S ept 13. Not only was there too
much confusion in the city to effectively fight
a fire, b u t according to eyewitness reports,
Turkish troops poured kerosene into the
streets. In the harbor were American,
British, French and Italian ships, but they
were under orders to evacuate only their
nationals. For eight days the city burned,
PUBLIC D O M A IN
with one American eyewitness writing that
the screams of the people were the only
sound louder than the roar of the fire.
The ships left, leaving the desperate
people on the shore. Some tried to swim
after the ships, only to drown in the harbor.
Turkish troops threatened to shoot them if
they left the docks, but they had no place to
go. And so the situation remained for several
days.
Who would help them? Where was the
international outrage that would send ships,
send food, send aid of any kind? There was
no aid on its way at this point, and Lou
Ureneck’s book paints a fascinating picture
as to why. Part of it was that information was
not getting out to the Americans and
Europeans. Reporters had been sent to the
area, with specific instructions to send back
stories about atrocities committed by the
Greeks. The U.S. High Commissioner in
Constantinople, who was the highest-ranking
American in the area, despised the Greeks
and steadfastly insisted that the reports from
Smyrna were exaggerations. Business
interests had to be protected. While there
were still thousands of refugees on the dock,
foreign ships put in at Smyrna, would load
only the cargoes of tobacco they had orders
for — no refugees.
And then an unlikely hero emerges: The
only American civilian to remain in Smyrna
when the ships departed was Asa Jennings,
a 45-year-old minister from upstate New
York. Jennings was a small man whose back
had been made crooked and weak by a bout
with tuberculosis. He arrived in Smyrna as
the boys’ work secretary at the YMCA.
Jennings had been hiding pregnant women
and small children at two safe houses in the
city, and he realized that if nothing was
done, and done quickly, tens of thousands of
people would die.
Over the course of two weeks, Jennings
and a gutsy American Naval captain would
exceed any authority they had, negotiate for
the charter of Greek merchant vessels —
holding onto their charters even though the
Greek government was falling in a coup —
and use American combat vessels, plus a
variety of half-truths and bribes, and rescue
more than 250,000 people from the docks at
Smyrna. It was an amazing feat, and Ureneck
BENAKI M U S E U M
documents it closely and spins out the
tension even to the end of the book.
Lou Ureneck has used a fascinating
variety of primary historical sources, not
only letters and accounts from the
Americans and Europeans involved, but also
first-hand accounts from sources as diverse
as an Armenian doctor and a 12-year-old
Greek girl, who escaped with her two
younger siblings. Many of the most hideous
details surfaced not from some international
inquiry, but from a lawsuit filed in London
concerning commercial damages suffered by
a British company. Ureneck includes those
details while outlining the importance of the
commercial tobacco industry interests, as
well as those of the burgeoning oil industry.
It is a complex story, and Ureneck tells it
in a vivid way, keeping the story driving
forward. It would have perhaps been easier
to write as fiction, because in fiction he
could have used fewer characters, but many
characters played critical parts, and the
author makes their contributions clear.
Some famous people appear almost as
cameos: Ernest Hemingway as a young
journalist; Aristotle Onassis as a teenager;
and Allen Dulles, who would later head the
CIA, as a young State Department clerk who
receives a critical cable on a weekend. Some
of the passages are horrifying to read, and
this is not a book for the reader who knows
nothing about the history of the area or the
time. For those who do, it is an interesting
and illuminating read.
Reprinted from Street Roots sister paper Real
Change News, Seattle, Wash.
Top, the burning of
Smyrna as seen
from the H M S
K ing George V.
Above, residents of
Smyrna overcrowd
boats along its
fam ed shorefront to
escape the flames.