Istanbul_ The Collected Traveler_ An Inspired Companion Guide - Barrie Kerper [40]
Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews, 1430-1950, by Mark Mazower (Knopf, 2004). Mazower spent twenty years working on this project, and his book is a stellar achievement. The city that Mazower refers to as “an indexer’s nightmare and a linguists’ delight” (there are at least thirteen medieval spellings alone) is known by most people today as Thessaloniki. Salonica is the birthplace of Atatürk as well as Nâzım Hikmet, Turkey’s best-known modern poet. By the time of the exchange, Jews made up a very large percentage of the population—as late as 1912 they were the largest ethnic group—and by July 1923, Mazower notes, there were still at least eighteen thousand Muslims (though by this time the city was predominantly Greek).
By 1925, Mazower relates, the Salonica authorities, in an effort to erase any indication that there had ever been Muslims there, decided to demolish the city’s minarets, which had defined its skyline for five centuries. He refers to the exchange as a turning point: “for like the departing Muslims, the Greek immigrants had been forced by the catastrophe that befell them to leave their own forebears behind. Since the dead who counted to them lay far away, often in unknown graves, why should they have attached importance to those who happened to be buried in their new places of settlement? … Feeling at home in Salonica meant turning it into an entirely new city, building settlements on the outskirts that had not even existed in Ottoman times.”
Smyrna 1922: The Destruction of a City, by Marjorie Housepian Dobkin (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1966). The (long) subtitle of this book is The first comprehensive account of the burning of the city and the expulsion of the Christians from Turkey in 1922, and recounting this story, step by step, is exactly what Housepian, who is of Armenian descent, has done. Hers may be the only book to do so—or, at least, I haven’t found another. Similar to Twice a Stranger, this reads quite like a novel.
Having researched official documents, letters, diaries, and news clippings and interviewed many eyewitnesses, Housepian reveals the events leading up to the burning of Smyrna and its aftermath. In the process, she also reveals the economic motives behind the Western world’s position and—surprise, surprise—the importance of oil in forming Near Eastern policy. (Remember the prescient quote, “He who owns the oil will own the world,” written by French petroleum minister Henri Bérenger in a letter to Georges Clemenceau, December 12, 1919.)
Of all the personal narratives Housepian shares in the book, I am unable to forget one in particular, referring to the aftermath of the fire: “The family of Marika Tsakirides, intact, found it impossible to rejoice amid so much sorrow. ‘Very few people were so lucky,’ she says now. ‘Almost everyone lost someone. “A mother lost a child; a child lost a mother.” It has become—how do you say? A saying. A refrain. In Greek the words sound beautiful: E Mana hani to pedi, ke to pedi ten Mana. That is what happened in that time.”
Housepian concludes by noting that “the brand of diplomacy that triumphed at Smyrna and Lausanne led to end products no less bizarre and even more costly in areas beyond Turkey. Yet the policy-makers of the 1920s, their agents, and their successors saw no portents of disaster in the discrepancy between what they had to gain and others had to lose.” It seems to me that “to ponder the resolution of a minority problem in Turkey” nearly ninety years ago is more than a little