Paradise Lost: Smyrna 1922 - The Destruction of Islam's City of Tolerance (3 page)

It was not just the Brussalises’ noses that enjoyed the evening promenade. The arias of frivolous Italian operettas drifted out from the open-air bandstands while the honky-tonk of ragtime conveyed a message of fun from the more outré establishments. Consul George Horton, a contemporary of Petros’s parents, recalled that each café ‘had its favourite
politakia
or orchestra of guitars, mandolins and zithers and the entertainers grew increasingly animated as more and more wine was consumed’.

Horton had lived in many places in the world, but nowhere caught his imagination like Smyrna. It had the climate of southern California, the architecture of the Côte d’Azur and the allure of nowhere else on earth. ‘In no city in the world did East and West mingle physically in so spectacular a manner,’ he wrote.

The city was dominated by the Greeks. They numbered 320,000 and had a virtual monopoly on the trade in the sticky figs, sultanas and apricots for which Smyrna was so famous. They also owned many of the city’s flagship businesses, including the two largest department stores, Xenopoulo and Orisdiback, which sold imported goods from across the globe.

It was in this first emporium, more than eight decades ago, that the young Petros Brussalis got his first taste of luxury. He remembers accompanying his mother and three haughty aunts on extravagant shopping expeditions that included obligatory pit-stops at these two stores. The Brussalis family lived in Cordelio on the far side of the bay. From here, a short ferry ride brought them to the city centre – an exciting adventure for a five-year-old boy, although Petros disliked being dragged from store to store by four chattering women, who insisted on dressing in fancy hats for their shopping outings. ‘I didn’t like it at all,’ he recalls with half a smile. ‘Even as a very young boy I thought it was beneath my dignity. Worse still, my aunts would give me their packages to carry.’

But young Petros’s eyes would widen when his female entourage swept into Xenopoulo on Frank Street. ‘
Everything
was imported from overseas,’ he recalls. ‘Biscuits, big tins, chocolates, lemon drops. To this day I can remember the names of them all.’

The Greeks had left their mark on every walk of life. Smyrna boasted scores of Orthodox churches and almost as many schools. The young Aristotle Onassis was one of the many local Greeks who attended the famous Aronis School.

Many of the city’s best hotels, brasseries and cafés were also run by Greeks, establishments like the Acropoli, Luxembourg and North Pole. Yet Greek ownership did not lead to an exclusively Greek clientele. The Frenchman, Louis de Launay, passed one café and recalled seeing ‘green turbans, red fezzes, embroidered Armenian hats, pink on a black backing, and the gleaming glass of the hookah pipes’.

The centre of Greek business was on the waterfront, where the wealthiest merchants had their trading houses. One of these was Petros’s godfather, a fig exporter who sold his fruit to merchants from far and wide.

‘You’d hear every language under the sun on the quayside,’ recalls Petros, ‘and see ships from everywhere in the world. There were so many of them that they’d have to moor with their sterns to the quay.’

The harbour was indeed one of the great sights of Smyrna. There were thirty-three steamboat companies catering for passenger liners arriving almost daily from London, Liverpool, Marseilles, Genoa, Brindisi, Trieste and Constantinople, as well as all the principal ports of the Levant.

As merchandise and fruit was loaded onto the merchant ships, Petros’s godfather would select the ripest and stickiest figs and present them to his young charge. ‘I also remember him choosing one special crate which he presented each year to the King and Queen of England.’

Greeks could be found living right across the city; the European community congregated in their own quarter just behind the quayside. Alfred Simes, a sprightly ninety-seven when I met him, recalls street festivities taking place almost every night of the week. ‘In the evenings, the maids would sweep the dust from the street and place armchairs outside the houses,’ he says. ‘Of course there were very few cars in those days. Everyone came out into the street after their supper and offered cakes and sweets to their neighbours and friends. At Christmas, we’d all sing carols in French, Greek, English and Italian.’

Frank Street was the principal artery that ran through the European quarter. It had been laid out long before the advent of the motor car and was very narrow – too narrow, even, to cope with the human traffic. Yet in spite of the bustle, heat, noise and collisions with donkeys and camels, it remained the city’s most popular street for shopping. When Marcel Mirtil came here on his world tour in 1909, it was the hair salons that caught his attention. ‘In sheer size, they were reminiscent of ballrooms.’

Here, too, were the city’s principal banks – the Imperial Ottoman, Credit Lyonnais, the British Oriental and the Bank of Vienna. No fewer than seven countries had their own postal systems that worked alongside the Ottoman system. And there were several dozen maritime insurance companies.

One of Alfred Simes’s earliest memories is standing on tiptoes at his bedroom window and watching a daily procession of bowlers, fezzes and homburgs passing along Boulevard Aliotti, the street where his family lived. ‘The gentlemen of business were always so impeccably smart,’ he recalls. ‘They wore the finest tailored suits and hats.’

The European quarter’s most ostentatious building was the Grand Hotel Kraemer Palace, with its gigantic foyer and capacious dining rooms.

Baedeker’s guidebook particularly recommended the hotel for its ice-cold pilsen beer imported from Munich. The Kraemer Palace also offered German newspapers and had the city’s finest brasserie, serving such specialities as
sauerbraden
and
blanquette d’agneau
to a bustling international clientele.

Adjacent to the European area of Smyrna was the vibrant Armenian quarter, home to another of Smyrna’s wealthy communities. The Armenians, who numbered around 10,000, had a reputation for being diligent and conscientious. One of those who lived here – a doctor named Garabed Hatcherian – would later write a chronicle of his life in the city. ‘After three years of hard work in Smyrna I had achieved a measure of success,’ he recorded on the opening page of his notebook. ‘I was doing well, having become the physician of a great number of wealthy families.’ Similar sentiments are echoed time and again in the jottings of Smyrna’s Armenians. They were indeed ‘doing well’ and they had learned to enjoy their bourgeois creature comforts.

The nearby Jewish quarter had traditionally been one of the most squalid, but by 1909, when Marcel Mirtil visited, it had been modernised and given sanitation. It nevertheless retained the same picturesque quality that had charmed the travellers of the previous century. The women still wore traditional Oriental costumes and had a reputation for beauty, although to Mirtil’s critical eye their girth was rather ‘too opulent’. The Jews were equally at home doing business with Greeks or Turks. ‘Extremely polyglot,’ wrote Gaston Deschamps, ‘they’re able to speak Turkish with the Turks and Greek with the Greeks.’ He was interested to note that among themselves they still spoke a dialect of Spanish, a legacy of their expulsion from Spain in 1492.

The Americans were rather more recent arrivals. They started to pour into Smyrna in the late nineteenth century and soon became one of the city’s distinct communities. They lived for the most part in Paradise – a large colony on the fringes of the city – and founded important educational and humanitarian institutions, including the American International College, an Intercollegiate Institute, a YMCA and a YWCA. They also owned the Standard Oil Company, whose big steel drum could be seen at the far end of the quayside. The Americans employed many thousands of workers – especially the MacAndrews and Forbes liquorice firm – and were respected for their charitable endeavours.

They were ably represented by their gregarious consul, George Horton, who was at the centre of every social activity. ‘Teas, dances, musical afternoons and evenings were given in the luxurious salons of the rich Armenians and Greeks,’ he wrote. ‘There were four large clubs: the
Cercle de Smyrne
, frequented mostly by British, French and Americans; the “Sporting” with a fine building and garden on the quay; the Greek Club and a Country Club near the American college with excellent golf links and a race course.’

Horton’s easygoing nature and determination to enjoy himself earned him and his fellow Americans much popularity among the Smyrniots.

Foreign tourists arriving on the daily passenger liners were always taken to the picturesque Turkish quarter of the city, which sprawled up the rocky flanks of Mount Pagus. This area was the most overcrowded and dilapidated, a maze of makeshift houses, cafés, little stores and Muslim shrines.

The majority of the 140,000 people who lived here were artisans and craftsmen ‘[employed] in the manufacture of copper utensils, camel bells, horseshoes, locks, chains [and] drums for packing figs’. So wrote Sir Charles Wilson, author of
Murray’s Handbook
, who added that these were the only Turks who still dressed in traditional costume. Visitors flocked to the souk in search of the fabled Orient, but even in the poorest part of town, they would find the same imported items that were on sale elsewhere in the city. Louis de Launay noticed ‘all sorts of bits and bobs from Europe. Here, a stall resembling the Louvre, there, one that’s more like Bon Marché. Boots that are “ready to wear”; Indian cottons from Manchester, elasticated bowties, Swiss watches; stall holders in frock coats and fezzes; buyers in Western dress.’

Although the Turks played a marginal role in the commerce of Smyrna, they dominated the politics of the city. The Ottoman governor of Smyrna was traditionally always a Turkish national and his primary task was to represent the interests of all the different nationalities who had made the city their home. A glance at the 1913 census reveals why his job was not easy. Smyrna’s Christians outnumbered the Muslims by more than two to one; his was a majority Christian city in a resolutely Muslim world. To many Turks – and especially to government ministers in Constantinople – Smyrna had forever been the city of the infidel.

‘
Vous êtes interessé par Rahmi Bey?
’ said a clipped voice on the end of the telephone. ‘You must visit me. Today. At four o’clock.’

I had come on the trail of the affable, irascible and benignly despotic Rahmi Bey, governor of Smyrna at the time when Petros Brussalis and Alfred Simes were still young boys. Rahmi’s elderly daughter-in-law, the tantalisingly worldly Esma Dino Deyer, still lives in the Ottoman mansion that was for a brief period the governor’s private residence. From the outside, it presented a picture of sorry decline. Newspaper-sized sheets of paintwork had detached themselves from the rendering and the latticed shutters were veiled in dust. But inside, its elegant marble atrium was redolent of a more refined epoch.

I was ushered into the principal drawing room, where an imposing portrait of Rahmi Bey hung above the fireplace. We sat in near-darkness, for the shutters were kept closed and showed no signs of having been opened for half a century or more. On the floor there were richly coloured carpets from Persia and Turkmenistan. On the settle there was a pistol and a scimitar.

‘He was rich, extremely cultivated and spoke impeccable French,’ said Esma, as she slotted a Balkan cigarette into an ivory holder. ‘And his wife came from an old and distinguished Ottoman family.’

Rahmi was to prove a benevolently devious governor. His machiavellian politicking during the First World War ought to have cost him his life, yet once-secret papers in the National Archives in Kew reveal that Rahmi was always one step ahead of his masters in Constantinople.

Rahmi Bey, in common with many of the city’s elite, lived in one of the elegant suburbs that formed a ring around the metropolis. These leafy districts, which had begun life as country villages, were popular with Smyrna’s Levantine bourgeoisie.

The Levantines were by far the richest community in the area. Of European descent, but thoroughly versed in the ways of the Orient, they had lived in Turkey since the reign of King George III. They, more than any other community, had helped to shape Smyrna in their own image – rich, cosmopolitan and of mixed blood and heritage. Their factories and mines employed all, regardless of race or nationality. And they had a concern for their workforce that was patrician in sentiment and philanthropic in outlook. In the dark days of the First World War, many of Smyrna’s families would owe their continued existence to the Levantine magnates.

They had the largest financial stake in every commercial activity in the city. They controlled Smyrna’s shipping companies, insurance agencies, mines, banks and all of the most profitable import-export businesses. Cotton textiles and carpets were two of the most important exports and had provided the foundations of their vast fortunes. Dried fruit, too, was hugely lucrative. The Levantines also imported many goods to Turkey, including coffee, sugar and furs.

Their businesses were on a truly grand scale. One of the Giraud family’s trading wings, the Oriental Carpet Manufacturing Company, employed 150,000 people, many of them inhabitants of Smyrna. The Whittalls’ business empire – which included a massive fruit-exporting enterprise – was even larger.