Smyrna in Flames, A Novel

moldy apple. The mirage of a city at peace was breaking up,

and every opportunity for pillage was pounced on. Finding

them unguarded, the locals looted the Greek army storehouses.

Horse-drawn wagons packed with barrels of cooking oil, sacks

of flour, and cartons of sugar were led through the streets by

men, women, and children who reckoned that these goods were

better off taken by them than by the Turks.

       Gangs of chettes, the thieving, criminal swine used by the

Turkish army as irregulars, materialized in public spaces and

shopping streets. People were convinced that some had been

there since May 1919, the date of the Greek landing, and more

had been steadily infiltrating the city thereafter. Descriptions

of their physical traits were frequent preludes to tales of atrocity

and murder.

        “The barbarians have arrived. They were expected in three

days’ time, but they came today,” said Seferiades, the whitehaired

man with round spectacles he had seen in the café, to

Nicias. At school this man had told him about Constantine

Cavafy, the poet he encountered in Athens in 1905, both having

been to the Hermes School of Commerce in Alexandria, after

which they had kept in touch through postcards. Seferiades had

sent Cavafy one captioned “Marché aux figues dans les bazars,”

dated Smyrna, September 29, 1911. The last message he received from Cavafy in Alexandria was a poem, “The God Abandons Antony.”

       “What do you mean?”

       “The barbarians have arrived.”

       “The Turks entered the city. They came from the south,

burning villages and towns. The girls at the college saw them

go by as they were doing calisthenics in the schoolyard. They

turned their heads to look at the chettes. The chettes all fixed

leering gazes upon the Levantine maidens with arms aloft in

their black-and-white blouses and long skirts over laced bootees.

Bournabat had fled. The houses were in darkness. Five

thousand chettes arrived bent on killing, plunder, and rape.”

       The man peered short-sightedly at Nicias, studying his reaction.

       “Have we met before? Where?”

       “At school.”

       “I know you met Professor Seferiades, but I don’t know

whether Professor Seferiades met you.”

       The sound of trotting horses could be heard. Turkish troops

were entering the city. Greeks and Armenians ran to conceal

themselves in homes and stores.

       “Don’t pretend you don’t know; pack your belongings and

bid Smyrna farewell, for Smyrna has betrayed you. My own

escape will be through the grand front door of death.”

With these words Alexis Seferiades climbed onto a block of

stone. White hair ruffled by the breeze, eyes bright behind

thick lenses, he gazed into the distance, listening to the sea. He

began to recite: “When they saw Patroclus dead, the horses of

Achilles began to weep; their immortal nature was upset deeply

by this work of death they had to look at.” Then he stepped

down, and walked away from the Turks.

       How far would he get? Where had he come from and where

was he going? Where had he got hold of that green velvet

jacket? Nicias watched him move off down the narrow street,

uncertain whether his presence was real or an aural hallucination.

As the other turned the corner he recalled that Seferiades

had been the first, on the subject of the “incantation of light,”

to tell his class about The Student of Prague—that film in

which a young man disposed to magic duels to the death with

his mirror double.

       The Turkish cavalry was riding down the harbor road, having

secured the docks with emplacements of cannon and other ordnance,

while the side streets were blocked by infantry platoons.

This was the formal entrance into Smyrna of Mustafa

Kemal’s troops. The mounted regiment, all in black, their inky

fezzes displaying a red crescent and red star, advanced among

banners and scimitars. Battle-hardened foot soldiers with Mongolian

features marched with a disdainful air, looking neither

right nor left, towards the Konak, where they would hoist the

national flag at the top of the main building.

       The Turkish population welcomed their army by decorating

shop windows, house-fronts, trees, and lampposts with pieces

of red fabric. The ponderous strains of patriotic music rang out

from the balconies, and women holding armfuls of flowers

came over the water on launches. In the main square, around

the monumental clock tower and its four fountains, men waved

red flags and brandished sabers, rifles, and portraits of Kemal 

as though to defy the Greek and Armenian inhabitants. Some

cavalrymen called out to the terrified people be afraid!”

       Among the onlookers at this parade of Kemalist troops under

General Murcelle Pasha were Levantines from Bournabat,

Boudja, Cordelio, and Paradise, mixed with many Armenians

and Greeks, men and women who stared in bafflement at such

a ferocious show of strength.

       “I believe I’ve seen the fellow before,” said an Englishman

who was in Smyrna to buy carpets.

       “Who?” an American schoolteacher inquired.

       “Murcelle Pasha. The other night I came across him in a

sodomite establishment—one that escaped being closed by

Stergiades because it’s run by foreigners—dressed as a woman;

but don’t tell a soul. To see the wrong person in the wrong place

can be fatal.”

       The rejoicing continued until an unseen hand lobbed a grenade

in front of the Passport Office, causing superficial face

wounds to a Turkish officer. That was the pretext for the Kemalist

troops stationed in front of the railings that protected the

Konak to march into the Armenian quarter and begin the killing.

       It might have seemed a simple matter for the Turks to overrun

this neighborhood, but the area was a densely populated

warren of small streets and whitewashed, red-roofed houses.

Grande Rue Armenienne Resadiye, Rue Russan, Grand Rue

Basmahane, Rue Vemian, Rue Ste.-Paraskevi, Rue Sahin,

Grand Rue Fethiye, Rue Moda, Grand Rue Meles, Grand Rue

Kemer, Rue Suzan, Rue Derder, Rue Kabouroglou. Streets that

linked churches, hospitals, schools for boys or girls, railway stations,

and big mansions such as that of Dr. Garabed Hatcherian

and those of the Aram, Berberian, Atamian, Kasparian, Hartunian,

Balikjian, and Arakelian families; here too lived Hovekim

Uregian, who had angled a mirror in his corner window so as to

observe from within the house the “inferno of blood” and

“small girls being defiled in the street by the Turks.”

       The bands of irregulars, with their crossed bullet belts and

fistfuls of rifles, garrotes, and daggers, were breaking into shops

and homes to commit pillage, murder, and havoc. Their appearance

heralded violence and death. Earlier Nicias had seen them

go by in gangs of twenty or thirty, in the direction of the city

center and towards the villas of Cordelio, Boudja, Bournabat,

and Paradise.

       “What’s going on next door?” he heard an Armenian woman

say, leaning out of a window.

       “Probably a cat trying to get out,” her husband replied from

the darkened room beyond.

       “It’s not an animal; it’s a man with blood on his hands. I’m

afraid for the children we left alone in the house,” the woman

said. When she went into the street she was stopped by a gaggle

of chettes who began to surround her, pointing, pawing, lifting

her clothing, some roaring with laughter, others smoking hashish.

“Let me pass!” She struggled to fight them off with mounting

terror.

       “Leave not a single one alive; grind them into the ground;

nobody will obstruct our road to victory!” The words slid out

sideways through the crooked mouth of a bandit with a sharp

snout and yellow eyes; his neck, poking up above the white

cloths covering his chest and shoulders, appeared deformed.

Women and children could be heard screaming inside a

house. The cries were first piercing, then faint. A smell of

grime, dead meat, and blood-soaked clothing rose from a broken

drain.

       Hiding in every room were women, old people, children, and

men who had survived deportation by the Ottomans to Changra.

The sick, the dying, and the dead had been left to rot on the

floor. Others watched the movements of a chette recklessly

engaged in plunder and rape. Nicias got a glimpse of his hands

on the breasts of a little girl. Like a louse he explored her

nakedness, slid over her body, bit her, pinched her, pecked her.

Dishes and flower vases went crashing. Her father who came

between them was stabbed with a knife.

       The little girl rushed out of a back door. Beside herself with

fear, she clung to Nicias’s knees. In a mixture of Armenian and

Greek she begged him to save her. But the chette dragged her

back indoors, threw her face down on the rug and penetrated

her like a dog. Her younger brother, hiding in the adjoining

room, scratching on the windowpane, watched the deflowering.

The Turkish soldiers cordoned off the Armenian quarter.

The inhabitants were no longer safe behind their own front

doors. Families locked down in their homes began to feel helpless

and forsaken. Outside, bands of chettes communicated by

means of blood-curdling squeals.

        The stores pulled down their shutters. The theft of flour, oil,

sugar, and other staples had become commonplace. Food was

growing scarce. Turkish soldiers broke down the doors of ostensibly

deserted houses with their rifle-butts to commit robbery,

rape, and murder. When the neighbors realized what was going

on, they grew panic-stricken; afterward they crept fearfully

towards the scene of the crimes, and as fearfully backed away

once they learned the facts.

       In Frank Street the chettes were stealing jewelry, rugs, cash,

fine clothes, chocolates, wine, household goods, and anything

else of value. In a service area at the back of a store, Nicias saw

the irregulars tip a pan of scalding lentil soup into the lap of a

cook, who ran out into the street squealing with pain; but at the

sight of another bunch of bandits, she fled back in again.

       “In the suburb of Boudja, the cavalry killed Oscar and Cleo

de Jongh. For lack of caskets the Dutch couple’s bodies could

not be buried and were left beneath a tree, among other trees

where abused Armenian girls had been suspended naked from

the branches, some by their belts, others by their hair.” This

was the last news Nicias heard that night.