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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 May 2025
Analysing the imageries prevalent among the citizens of the young Turkish Republic in the post-Catastrophe Smyrna/Izmir, this article aims to shed light on the reflections of the destruction, forced migration, and economic provincialization of the ethnically-cleansed city. Aside from regular newspaper reports, travelogues and other popular literature accounts produced by local Muslims also recounted the haunting character of the ravaged region. The common word ‘loss’ in these post-Catastrophe narratives indicates what is apprehended by the imagery and discourse of mourning, trauma, sadness, and nostalgia from the victors’ perspective.
1 Gündüz, A., Dikmen Yıldızı (Istanbul 1943) 197–9Google Scholar. From the beginning of the novel, Yıldız's ambition, revanchism, and nationalism aim to legitimize past violence against Ottoman Christians.
2 Gündüz, Dikmen Yıldızı, 207.
3 For the ethnic cleansing in Western Anatolia during and after World War I and the post-war destruction of the social and economic networks, see Gingeras, R., Sorrowful Shores: violence, ethnicity, and the end of the Ottoman Empire, 1912–23 (Oxford 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Tusan, M., Smyrna's Ashes: humanitarianism, genocide, and the birth of the Middle East (Berkeley 2012)Google Scholar; Doumanis, N., Before the Nation: Muslim-Christian coexistence and its destruction in Late-Ottoman Anatolia (Oxford 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Ureneck, L., The Great Fire: one American's mission to rescue victims of the 20th century's first genocide (New York 2015)Google Scholar.
4 Hobsbawm, E. J., Nations and Nationalism since 1780: programme, myth, reality (Cambridge 1990) 131–2Google Scholar and Gellner, E., Encounters with Nationalism (Oxford 1995)Google Scholar. For one important case of a post-Ottoman city, see Mazower, M., Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims, and Jews, 1430–1950 (New York 2004)Google Scholar.
5 Morris, B. and Ze'evi, D., The Thirty-Year Genocide: Turkey's destruction of its Christian minorities, 1894–1924 (Cambridge MA 2019)Google Scholar.
6 See Georgelin, H., La fin de Smyrne, Du cosmpolitisme aux nationalismes (Paris 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Clark, B., Twice a Stranger: Greece, Turkey, and the minorities they expelled (London 2006)Google Scholar. The number of collections of essays dealing with specific themes such as minorities and forced migration also increased; e.g. Hirschon, R. (ed.), Crossing the Aegean: an appraisal of the 1923 compulsory population exchange (Oxford 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Pekin, M. (ed.), Yeniden Kurulan Yaşamlar: 80. Yılında Türk-Yunan Nüfus Mübadelesi (Istanbul 2005)Google Scholar; Smyrnelis, M-C. (ed.), Smyrne, la ville oubliée? Mémoires d'un grand port ottoman (Paris 2006)Google Scholar.
7 An Intimate History of Killing (New York 2000). A quarter of a century earlier Paul Fussell had explored such themes in The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford 1975), 310–35.
8 Maksudyan, N., Ottoman Children and Youth during World War I (Syracuse NY 2019)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
9 Kolluoğlu-Kırlı, B., ‘Forgetting the Smyrna Fire’, History Workshop Journal 60 (Autumn 2005) 25–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
10 See Georgelin, La fin de Smyrne. Its sources include the records of the Armenian delegation established in 1912 to defend the interests of the Armenian communities in the Empire and the oral testimonies of Greek refugees found in the Centre for Asia Minor Studies in Athens. For the testimonies from the Aegean littoral, see F. Apostolopoulos (ed.), Η Έξοδος: Μαρτυρίες από τις επαρχίες των δυτικών παραλίων της Μικρασίας [The Exodus: Testimonies from the districts of the western coast of Asia Minor] (Athens 1980).
11 Nichanian, M., Entre l'art et le témoignage (Geneva 2008)Google Scholar.
12 Prominent among these studies are Stroebel, W., ‘Distancing disaster: trauma, medium, and form in the Greco-Turkish War and population exchange’, Journal of Modern Greek Studies 32. 2 (2014) 253–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gedgaudaitė, K., Memories of Asia Minor in Greek Culture: an itinerary (London 2021)Google Scholar; and Eser, U., ‘Homeland as Terra Pericolosa: post-Catastrophe homecoming narratives of Smyrniote Greeks in Early Republican Turkey’, Journal of Modern Greek Studies 40.1 (2022) 169–93CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a recent survey and updated review of the historiography of the Greco-Turkish War, see Llewellyn-Smith, M., ‘The historiography of the Greek-Turkish War in Asia Minor: Britain, Greece, and others, 1915–1923’, Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies 47.2 (2023) 271–89CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
13 Kolluoğlu-Kırlı, ‘Forgetting the Smyrna Fire’, 31.
14 Foreign Relations of the United States, 1922, ed. J. V. Fuller II (Washington DC 1938) 420.
15 Centre des Archives Diplomatiques, Nantes (hereafter CADN), Smyrne/Izmir 643 PO/1, 97, Guerre Gréco-Turque, Occupation de Smyrne Suite, 11 September 1922.
16 Georgelin, La fin de Smyrne, 211–15. Mazower, City of Ghosts, 298–301 highlights how a catastrophic fire destroyed the urban fabric and erased the traces of the Ottoman past in another Aegean port city, Salonica, in 1917.
17 Beyanname Numero: 5’, Âhenk, September 18, 1922. This ruling on ‘deportation for the Ottoman Christian men as prisoners of war to the concentration camps in the interior’ also included Ottoman Christians working for the British and French railway companies despite the protests of the Allied representatives in Smyrna, Centre des Archives Diplomatiques, la Courneuve (hereafter CADC), 51CPCOM, P1402, S. s de la déportation à l'intérieur de l'Asie Mineure des employés chrétiens du chemin de fer Smyrne-Cassaba & Prolong., 11 December 1922.
18 Kolluoğlu-Kırlı, ‘Forgetting the Smyrna Fire’, 30.
19 The projected 1914 Ottoman census showed that Ottoman Christians constituted 36% of Smyrna, excluding European and Greek citizens residing in the city as well as some Ottoman Christians who evaded the census in order to avoid compulsory military service and tax obligations. For this census, see Karpat, K., Ottoman Population, 1830–1914: demographic and social characteristics (Madison 1985) 170–89Google Scholar, and for the attitudes of the Greek Orthodox communities towards the censuses in the Empire, see Alexandris, A., ‘The Greek Census of Anatolia and Thrace (1910–1912): a contribution to Ottoman historical demography’, in Gondicas, D. and Issawi, C. (eds), Ottoman Greeks in the Age of Nationalism (Princeton 1999) 46–69Google Scholar.
20 1927 Umumî Nüfus Tahriri Fasikül I: Mufassal Neticeler (Ankara 1929), LIV.
21 Note the per capita decline of Smyrna's Christian population from over 233,000 people according to the 1914 Ottoman census to less than 6500 in the first census of the Republic in 1927, the greatest decline for any city in Republican Turkey. Compare with three cities with different social structures: Adana (from 22,647 in 1914 to 477 in 1927), Ankara (from 9032 to 3287), and Erzurum (from 100,425 to 47): Karpat, Ottoman Population, 170-5 and 1927 Umumî Nüfus Tahriri, XLVIII-LIV. See also Mandel, M., In the Aftermath of Genocide: Armenians and Jews in twentieth-century France (Durham NC 2003)Google Scholar and Sjöberg, E., The Making of the Greek Genocide: contested memories of the Ottoman Greek Catastrophe (New York 2017)Google Scholar. Between 1922 and 1926, more than 80% of all migrants to France were Ottoman Christians, either Armenian or Greek Orthodox.
22 Fâlih Rıfkı, ‘İzmir'de Dört Gün’, Akşam, 22 September 1922, 1. (This and other translations from the Turkish are my own.)
23 Mehmet Şevki, ‘Dante'ye’, Âhenk, November 1, 1922, 1–2. Nonetheless, conclusive evidence of the May 1922 publication was not found in the newspaper collections of the various archives.
24 Hasan Tahsîn, ‘Arama Bulmayasın!’, Hukuk-ı Beşer, 29 March 1919, 1.
25 One of the prominent motifs in Olga Vatidou's visit to her hometown in 1952 is death: ‘our dead and dull church’, ‘lost dead cities’, ‘the dead abandoned in their places’, ‘graves saturated with the dismembered bodies of our poor brothers and sisters’; see Στη Σμύρνη, το πρώτο προσκύνημα [The first pilgrimage to Smyrna] (Athens 1952). The same themes resonate in George Seferis’ visit to Izmir and Urla: ‘like ghosts’, ‘a nightmarish immobility’, ‘incessant invitation of the dead’, ‘a grave's mouth of a dead plain: Μικρασιάτικα: Μέρες, 1948–1950 [Asia Minor: Days, 1948–1950] (Athens 2000).
26 Toumarkine, A., Les Migrations des Populations Musulmanes Balkanique en Anatolie (1876–1913) (Istanbul 1995), 61–2Google Scholar.
27 For a case of conversion of a church to a mosque in Tuzla, in the suburbs of Istanbul, immediately after the population exchange, see Clark, Twice a Stranger, 183–4.
28 National Archives, Kew, London (hereafter NA), ADM 137/ 2510: Henry George Thursfield, Captain Senior Naval Officer, to the Senior Naval Officer Afloat, Constantinople, 27 April 1923. This campaign of destruction was followed by further attacks on other Christian cemeteries and churches belonging mostly to the local Levantine populations of the city. The Dutch cemetery, located in the city centre, was desecrated by locals and the tombstones in the Anglican cemetery in Bornova, a north-eastern suburb of Smyrna smashed and overthrown, NA, FO 141/ 580/1, Vice-Consul H. W. Urquhart, to Sir Horace Rumbold, 3 October 1922.
29 CADC, 51CPCOM, P1402, Situation à Smyrne, 16 November 1922.
30 Atay, Falih Rıfkı, Çankaya, (Istanbul: Pozitif Yayınları, 2004), 351Google Scholar.
31 Correspondence from the Ministry of Finance located in Aziz Ogan Collection at Boğaziçi University, January 1925.
32 ‘Saat Kulesine Çan Takılmayacak Mı?’, Anadolu, August 2, 1929, 2.
33 It is difficult to estimate the number of Orthodox who converted to Catholicism. However, the fact that the Catholic population in the city doubled (from 2,598 to 5,196) during the period between the last Ottoman census in 1914 and the first census of the Republican era in 1927 could be explained by two different scenarios: some Orthodox Christians of British, French or Italian nationalities converting to Catholicism or some Catholic European subjects becoming Turkish citizens during the transition from empire to nation-state, an unlikely situation considering the difficulties of acquiring Turkish citizenship for foreigners, cf. Karpat, 174 and 1927 Umumî Nüfus Tahriri Fasikül I, LIV. Archival documents describe examples of people evading the population exchange by changing their religion just before the exchange are reflected in the archival documents. See The Prime Ministry Republican Archives (Başbakanlık Cumhuriyet Arşivi), Ankara (hereafter BCA), KDB (1920–28) 8.49.9, 20 January 1924 and BCA, KDB (1920–28) 9.14.16, 20 February 1924.
34 As proved by Turkish identity cards (nüfus hüviyet cüzdanı) and residence permits (ecnebilere mahsus ikamet tezkeresi) kept in French consular records after 1923, most of this tiny Orthodox community was made up of women. Certainly not all of them were women, however: see CADN, Izmir 643, PO/1, 11. Some of these women were able to obtain Turkish citizenship later on.
35 Some examples of these petitions are The Prime Ministry Ottoman Archives (Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi), Istanbul (hereafter BOA) HR IM 26/29, 4 January 1923 (Dukas Coroneos, Austrian national, Oil service director at Giraud, refusal of the right to return by the Ankara government); BOA, HR IM 26/30, 4 January 1923 (Harold Giraud, French national, director of Oriental Carpet Manufacturers); BOA, HR IM 26/39, 15 January 1923 (Francesco Musmus, Italian national); BOA, HR IM 26/40, 18 January 1923 (Richard Wilkinson, British subject, director at the C. J. Giraud Commercial House; and Richard de Cramer and his family, Czechoslovak national, director at the C. J. Giraud Commercial House); BOA, HR IM 29/86, 6 June 1923 (Ernest Pagy, French national); and BOA, HR IM 47/8, 8 February 1923 (Vincenzo Depolo, Italian national, Chief embarkation officer of the boats at the Ottoman Deutsche Orient Line Company).
36 BOA, HR IM 71/53, 13 April 1923.
37 Yıldırım, O., Diplomacy and Displacement: reconsidering the Turco-Greek Exchange of Populations, 1922–1934 (London 2006)Google Scholar, 107.
38 BCA, KDB (1920–28) 15.54.1, 24 August 1925.
39 BCA, TİGM (MF) UT 79.3.4, 22 April 1926.
40 Some examples are ‘Bıçakla Yaraladı’, Anadolu, March 2, 1930, 5; ‘Randevu Evleri Kapatılıyor’ and ‘Frengi’, Âhenk, March 5, 1929, 2; ‘Yeni Bir Cinayet: Umumhanede Birini Öldürdüler’, Anadolu, 7 April 1929, 1; and ‘Şehir içinde Haydutlar’, Anadolu, 12 December 1929, 2.
41 BCA, KDB (1928- ) 24.72.12, 3 November 1931. The local authorities complained that the surface levelling works—which meant the destruction of all the tombs left by the Orthodox Christian communities—had still not started.
42 For the construction of Kültürpark, see K. Amygdalou, ‘Modern ve Ulusal Bir Kimlik Arayışında Değişen Formlar ve Anlamlar: 1930’larda İzmir'in Kültürpark’ı ve Çevresi’, in İzmir Kültürpark’ın Anımsa(ma)dıkları: Temsiller, Mekânlar, Aktörler, ed. A. Yılmaz, K. Kılıç, and B. Pasin (Istanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 2015), 77–98.
43 For the discussions in the Grand National Assembly at Ankara on the abandoned properties of missing people, a statement implying the Ottoman Christians who were compelled to leave their hometowns, see E. Morack, The Dowry of the State? The politics of abandoned property and the Population Exchange in Turkey, 1921–1945 (Bamberg 2017), 161–169. Before Morack, the first detailed investigation into the nationalization of the property of missing persons is Onur Yıldırım's brief subsection on Greek deposits in French banks in Smyrna in his monograph, see Yıldırım, Diplomacy and Displacement, 122–4.
44 ‘İzmir İcra Dairesi'nden’, and ‘Nif Sulh Hukuk Hakimliği'nden’, Âhenk, April 1, 1923, 4.
45 Yıldırım, Diplomacy and Displacement, 94–103.
46 BCA, TİGM (MF) M 41.46.22, 31 March 1924, and BCA, TİGM (MF) M 62.185.22, 12 April 1924.
47 ‘Köylünün Hakkı Gidiyordu: Ermeni Malı olan Peştemalcı Çiftliği Kaşla Gözün Arasında Teffiz Edilivermiş’, Anadolu, 3 February 3 1930, 1.
48 TNA FO 286/853, 31 August 1923, Essayan to the General Assembly of the League of Nations. All of the unopened safes left in the rubble of these bank buildings belonged to Ottoman Christians. For example, in the Smyrna branch of Credit Foncier d'Algérie et de Tunisie, there were safes belonging to 35 Ottoman Christians (26 Greeks and 9 Armenians), 24 Greek nationals, and one Armenian of French nationality, CADC 51CPCOM, P1402, Liste de coffrets scelles par les autorités ottomanes au CFAT, Succursale de Smyrne, 9 May 1923.
49 Lozan Telgrafları, ed. Bilal Şimşir, II (Ankara 1994), 395–6 and 410–11. Earlier, on 16 January 1923, the high commissioners of Britain, France and Italy in Constantinople had sent Adnan (Adıvar), representative of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Ankara government, a diplomatic note addressing the insistence of local representatives of the nationalist government in Izmir to declare assets in the foreign banks of the city belonging to the citizens of Greece as well as to Ottoman Greeks and Armenians, see BOA HR. İM 16/106.
50 ‘Tuzakoğlu Fabrikası Yakında İşlemeye Başlayacak’, Anadolu, 2 August 1929, 2.
51 ‘Edremitte Ayı İninde Yaşıyan Bir Mübadil Ele Geçti’, Son Posta, February 19, 1932, 1.
52 Nonetheless, it is difficult to say that all such cases were fictional. It is curious that the story of a Turcophone Greek Orthodox who hid in this way and pretended to be a Muslim before finally escaping from Smyrna was recounted in 1929 by Stratis Doukas’ Ιστορία ενός αιχμαλώτου [A Prisoner of War's Story], one of the shortest and most dramatic accounts of the adventure of those who were unable to escape in time from the coast of Asia Minor in 1922, see P. Mackridge, ‘The myth of Asia Minor in Greek fiction’, in Hirschon, Crossing the Aegean, 246, n. 11.
53 Eng, D. L. and Kazanjian, D., (eds), Loss: the politics of mourning, (Berkeley 2003), 1–27Google Scholar.
54 del Pilar Blanco, M. and Peeren, E. (eds), Popular Ghosts: The haunted spaces of everyday culture (London 2010)Google Scholar, xiii, citing M. de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, tr. S. Rendall (Berkeley 1988), 108.
55 Burke, P., ‘History as Social Memory’, in Butler, T.E. (ed.), Memory: History, Culture and the Mind (Oxford 1989), 97–114Google Scholar.