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20 October 2012 Last updated at 14:01 GMT
A new wave of refugees in the city that was Smyrna
By Fergal Keane BBC News,
Izmir
[image: Government buildings in Izmir (then Smyrna) circa 1920]
Greeks had lived in Izmir (then Smyrna), for thousands of years
Thousands of Syrians who have fled from the fighting in their country are
living in refugee camps just inside Turkey. But some have gone further west
to the coastal city of Izmir - a place itself scarred by wanton killing and
destruction in World War I.
When a city is destroyed, what can we say of the buildings that rise in its
place?
Are they a completely new metropolis? Or must something of the spirit of
the old, no matter how fragmented, always haunt the present?
It is a question which must occur to any sentient traveller in the cities
of the eastern Mediterranean. where great civilisations have risen,
glittered brilliantly, then vanished into kingdoms of broken stone and dust.
But I do not think it has ever occurred to me with such poignancy as in
Izmir, the city the Greeks once called Smyrna, before their 3,000-year-old
living presence in Asia Minor was all but expunged.
I had not come here to reflect on the sorry story of international intrigue
and massacre which led to the death of Smyrna. I was following the story of
a different group of people fleeing a contemporary conflict whose own
cocktail of international intrigue and massacre has displaced more than
quarter of a million people.
But it was not possible to hear the stories of Syrian refugees without
thinking of what befell the substantial populations of Greeks and Armenians
in Smyrna in September 1922 in the aftermath of the World War I.
Ancient empires had collapsed. The Hapsburgs and the Ottoman Turks - who
between them had dominated central Europe and the near East - were
consigned to fast-receding memory.
The victorious British and French appointed themselves guardians of the
Middle Eastern territories of the defeated Ottomans and helped bequeath to
modern generations no end of troubles.
But it was the Greek invasion of the Ottoman lands of Asia Minor that set
in train the disaster of Smyrna.
With British support they invaded Anatolia in 1919 and marched inland.
There were massacres of Turks and these helped infuse a powerful
nationalist response.
When the Turkish army defeated the Greeks and descended on Smyrna, there
was wanton killing of tens of thousands - pillage and rape and the great
fire whose effect is measured now in absences.
[image: Greek people fleeing from Izmir (then Smyrna) by sea in 1922] Thousands
of Greeks living in Izmir (then Smyrna) fled during the fighting
Gone are the streets in which the voices of Greeks, Turks, Armenians,
Levantines and Jews mingled.
Lost is the rich mix of cultures that drew inspiration from the great
philosophical and religious traditions of West and East, that traded and
prayed and made music and told stories in the narrow lanes of the bazaar
and by the glittering water of the Aegean on summer evenings.
The crisis ended in 1923 with a treaty providing for the mass exchange of
populations across the region. Muslims were forced to go to Turkey by the
Greeks. Christians were forced to go west by the Turks. More than a million
and a half people were uprooted.
To the traveller wandering modern Izmir in search of the past, it is as if
the Greeks had never been here.
Pedestrians walking along Kordon Street in Izmir
Many of Izmir's old buildings have disappeared
A handful of old buildings remain but there is a squat ordinariness about
the architecture of the place now - wonderfully friendly though its people
are, and golden though the light remains as as you walk the quayside in the
late evening.
I was watching the sunset in the company of a young Syrian man, who gave
his name as Mehmet.
He had fled his country three months ago. He had deserted the army and fled
west.
Last month he attempted to reach Greece, the first step on a journey he
hoped would take him to Germany or Britain where he might begin a new life.
But the smugglers had sent him to sea on a dangerous boat.
[image: A map of Turkey]
There were as many as 100 people on board, most of them women and children,
when it struck rocks and overturned.
"There was a boy I had befriended," he told me, "a child of about 12 and
I'd told him that when we got to Europe, I would look after him."
The boy drowned along with 60 other refugees.
As he tried to save his own life by swimming to shore, Mehmet remembered a
woman and her child both fighting to cling onto him.
He did not say what he did when this happened and I did not ask him. His
face was contorted with pain.
I asked him what he would do if he got to Europe.
"I would study guitar and then teach it," he said.
Mehmet was a classical guitarist. His favourite pieces of music were the
Preludes of Johann Sebastian Bach.
But in the escape from Syria, he had left his guitar behind. The music in
him had been silenced.
But still, like all those numberless refugees before him in other wars, he
kept his eyes fixed on the sea, on the idea of another life that was surely
waiting if he could only cross the water.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-20005509
A new wave of refugees in the city that was Smyrna
By Fergal Keane BBC News,
Izmir
[image: Government buildings in Izmir (then Smyrna) circa 1920]
Greeks had lived in Izmir (then Smyrna), for thousands of years
Thousands of Syrians who have fled from the fighting in their country are
living in refugee camps just inside Turkey. But some have gone further west
to the coastal city of Izmir - a place itself scarred by wanton killing and
destruction in World War I.
When a city is destroyed, what can we say of the buildings that rise in its
place?
Are they a completely new metropolis? Or must something of the spirit of
the old, no matter how fragmented, always haunt the present?
It is a question which must occur to any sentient traveller in the cities
of the eastern Mediterranean. where great civilisations have risen,
glittered brilliantly, then vanished into kingdoms of broken stone and dust.
But I do not think it has ever occurred to me with such poignancy as in
Izmir, the city the Greeks once called Smyrna, before their 3,000-year-old
living presence in Asia Minor was all but expunged.
I had not come here to reflect on the sorry story of international intrigue
and massacre which led to the death of Smyrna. I was following the story of
a different group of people fleeing a contemporary conflict whose own
cocktail of international intrigue and massacre has displaced more than
quarter of a million people.
But it was not possible to hear the stories of Syrian refugees without
thinking of what befell the substantial populations of Greeks and Armenians
in Smyrna in September 1922 in the aftermath of the World War I.
Ancient empires had collapsed. The Hapsburgs and the Ottoman Turks - who
between them had dominated central Europe and the near East - were
consigned to fast-receding memory.
The victorious British and French appointed themselves guardians of the
Middle Eastern territories of the defeated Ottomans and helped bequeath to
modern generations no end of troubles.
But it was the Greek invasion of the Ottoman lands of Asia Minor that set
in train the disaster of Smyrna.
With British support they invaded Anatolia in 1919 and marched inland.
There were massacres of Turks and these helped infuse a powerful
nationalist response.
When the Turkish army defeated the Greeks and descended on Smyrna, there
was wanton killing of tens of thousands - pillage and rape and the great
fire whose effect is measured now in absences.
[image: Greek people fleeing from Izmir (then Smyrna) by sea in 1922] Thousands
of Greeks living in Izmir (then Smyrna) fled during the fighting
Gone are the streets in which the voices of Greeks, Turks, Armenians,
Levantines and Jews mingled.
Lost is the rich mix of cultures that drew inspiration from the great
philosophical and religious traditions of West and East, that traded and
prayed and made music and told stories in the narrow lanes of the bazaar
and by the glittering water of the Aegean on summer evenings.
The crisis ended in 1923 with a treaty providing for the mass exchange of
populations across the region. Muslims were forced to go to Turkey by the
Greeks. Christians were forced to go west by the Turks. More than a million
and a half people were uprooted.
To the traveller wandering modern Izmir in search of the past, it is as if
the Greeks had never been here.
Pedestrians walking along Kordon Street in Izmir
Many of Izmir's old buildings have disappeared
A handful of old buildings remain but there is a squat ordinariness about
the architecture of the place now - wonderfully friendly though its people
are, and golden though the light remains as as you walk the quayside in the
late evening.
I was watching the sunset in the company of a young Syrian man, who gave
his name as Mehmet.
He had fled his country three months ago. He had deserted the army and fled
west.
Last month he attempted to reach Greece, the first step on a journey he
hoped would take him to Germany or Britain where he might begin a new life.
But the smugglers had sent him to sea on a dangerous boat.
[image: A map of Turkey]
There were as many as 100 people on board, most of them women and children,
when it struck rocks and overturned.
"There was a boy I had befriended," he told me, "a child of about 12 and
I'd told him that when we got to Europe, I would look after him."
The boy drowned along with 60 other refugees.
As he tried to save his own life by swimming to shore, Mehmet remembered a
woman and her child both fighting to cling onto him.
He did not say what he did when this happened and I did not ask him. His
face was contorted with pain.
I asked him what he would do if he got to Europe.
"I would study guitar and then teach it," he said.
Mehmet was a classical guitarist. His favourite pieces of music were the
Preludes of Johann Sebastian Bach.
But in the escape from Syria, he had left his guitar behind. The music in
him had been silenced.
But still, like all those numberless refugees before him in other wars, he
kept his eyes fixed on the sea, on the idea of another life that was surely
waiting if he could only cross the water.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-20005509