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Email a friendThe ravaged pearl of the Aegean
THE total annihilation of Smyrna, the modern Izmir, by Kemal Ataturk's Turkish forces triumphing over the defeated Greek army in 1922 was described by one eyewitness as having "scarcely a parallel in the history of the world for hideousness and danger."
The grotesque record of the rest of the 20th century surely makes the claim appear extravagant. Nevertheless, Giles Milton's detailed, day-by-day account, largely compiled from personal diaries and contemporary reports of the ravaging of this cosmopolitan "pearl of the Aegean" which, even through the first world war, had remained an Edwardian enclave of summer balls, tea dances and family picnics - at least for the privileged Levantine, Greek and Armenian merchants - depicts a modern Pandemonium, outrivalling that of the author's classic namesake.
The turning of blind eyes to the human tragedy on the part of the great European powers, busily weighing up their own interests in the face of a rising Turkish nationalism, comes as no surprise in the light of recent history.
The Turkish government, still today denying the earlier Armenian genocide, will not welcome this forensic revelation of the barbarity of their national hero who saw his way to power and the destruction of the Greek dreams of a greater Greece that hoped to encompass large portions of Asia Minor "with the great city of Smyrna at its heart."
GORDON PARSONS