Paradise Lost: Smyrna 1922, By Giles Milton

Smyrna, the wealthiest of Ottoman cities, embodied that empire's best qualities of cosmopolitanism and religious tolerance. The city, now Izmir in Turkey, boasted some of the most luxurious department stores, cinemas and opera houses in the world.

“The feminine element from the age of about 13 overdresses like a professional,” a British officer observed in 1918. While Greeks predominated, the city also housed sizeable Armenian, Jewish, Turkish, European and American populations. The Levantines were by far the richest community, with the largest stake in every commercial activity. They were of British and European descent and had lived in Smyrna since the reign of George III.

Giles Milton’s engrossing account of the events leading up to the destruction of the city in 1922 is based largely on the previously unpublished letters and diaries of these Levantine dynasties. The Whitalls, Girauds and Van der Zees led a charmed existence. Life was a glittering round of tennis parties, balls, yachting and picnics accompanied by bouzouki players. Smyrna had been largely untouched by the tragedies of the Great War. The city’s Ottoman governor, Rahmi Bey, a genial Anglophile, even protected the Armenian population from the deportations and massacres of 1915 and tried to broker a coup d’état with the British. His affections were not returned.

“For more than five centuries, the presence of the Turk in Europe has been a source of distraction, intrigue and corruption,” Lord Curzon declared. “Let not this occasion… be missed of purging the earth of one of its most pestilent roots of evil.”

The victorious Allies gave the Greeks the go-ahead to invade. News of the occupation of Smyrna in 1919 and of ensuing Greek atrocities stirred nascent Turkish nationalism and resistance. The failure of the Greek occupation three years later evoked no great panic. The citizens of Smyrna, confident that the warships of the Allied fleet would protect them, were unprepared for the horror unleashed upon them.

Eye-witness accounts of carnage make for stomach-churning reading, but faith in human nature is restored by Milton’s accounts of the heroism of individuals like Asa Jennings. An American employee of the YMCA, his efforts stirred the Allies and the Greek government into rescuing half a million refugees. Milton’s book celebrates the heroism of individuals who put lives before ideologies.