Great Fire of Smyrna (1922): The Burning of a Cosmopolitan City

The Great Fire of Smyrna destroyed much of the port city of Smyrna (Izmir) on the Aegean coast of Anatolia in September 1922, days after Turkish nationalist forces captured it at the end of the Greco-Turkish War. The fire burned the Armenian, Greek and European quarters while thousands of refugees were trapped on the waterfront. It marked the end of some 3,000 years of Greek presence in the city and became a symbol of the “Asia Minor Catastrophe”.

Background

Smyrna had long been one of the most cosmopolitan cities of the Ottoman Empire, home to Turks, Greeks, Armenians, Jews and Levantine Europeans, and a major centre of trade. Greek Orthodox Christians formed a large part of its population, and Greek nationalists dreamed of uniting the coast with Greece.

In May 1919, with Allied approval, Greek troops landed at Smyrna. The Treaty of Sevres of 1920 placed the region under Greek administration, but the Turkish nationalists led by Mustafa Kemal rejected it. After the Greek army’s advance into central Anatolia failed in 1921, a Turkish offensive in late August 1922 broke the Greek front. The retreating Greek army evacuated Smyrna, and Turkish cavalry entered the city on 9 September 1922. The Turkish War of Independence was effectively won.

What happened

The city’s population was swollen by Christian refugees who had fled the fighting inland. In the first days of Turkish control there were killings and looting, especially in the Armenian quarter. The Greek Orthodox Metropolitan, Chrysostomos, was handed over to a crowd and murdered.

On 13 September 1922 fire broke out in the Armenian quarter. Driven by wind, it spread through the Christian and European districts towards the waterfront over the next days, consuming churches, schools, consulates, warehouses and homes. The Turkish quarter and the Jewish quarter were largely spared. By around 22 September the fire had burned out, leaving a large part of the city in ruins.

Tens of thousands of people fled to the quay, trapped between the flames and the sea. British, French, Italian and American warships lay in the harbour, but their governments ordered them to remain neutral, and at first they took off mainly their own nationals. Accounts by eyewitnesses describe people drowning as they tried to reach the ships.

Responsibility

Who started the fire remains contested. Many Western witnesses, including the American consul-general George Horton, and historians such as Marjorie Housepian Dobkin and Giles Milton, concluded that Turkish soldiers set or spread it. Turkish accounts have attributed it to Armenian or Greek arsonists or to the retreating Greek army. Because no impartial investigation took place, the debate has continued, and it remains politically sensitive in Greece, Armenia and Turkey.

The exodus

The Turkish authorities set a deadline at the end of September for the Christian population to leave. Asa Jennings, an American working for the YMCA, persuaded the Greek government to send ships and helped organise a mass evacuation, while Allied vessels eventually assisted. Well over 150,000 people were carried to Greek islands and mainland Greece. Many Greek and Armenian men of military age were instead deported to labour battalions in the interior, where large numbers died.

Estimates of the total death toll in the fire and the surrounding violence vary from about 10,000 to as many as 100,000. The refugees joined more than a million Orthodox Christians who left Anatolia in these years, a movement formalised by the population exchange agreed at the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923.

Key people

• Mustafa Kemal (Ataturk): commander of the Turkish nationalist forces, who entered Smyrna on 10 September 1922 and whose government controlled the city during the fire.
• Metropolitan Chrysostomos: the Greek Orthodox bishop of Smyrna, killed by a mob shortly after the Turkish entry; he was later recognised as a saint by the Church of Greece.
• George Horton: United States consul-general in Smyrna, whose memoir The Blight of Asia (1926) gave a hostile eyewitness account of Turkish conduct.
• Asa Jennings: an American YMCA worker who played a central role in arranging the evacuation of refugees by sea.

Legacy

For Greeks the burning of Smyrna is remembered as the climax of the Asia Minor Catastrophe, which ended the “Great Idea” of a greater Greece and transformed Greek society as refugees settled around Athens, Thessaloniki and elsewhere. For Armenians it followed the Armenian Genocide and destroyed one of their last large communities in western Anatolia. In Turkey, 9 September is celebrated as the liberation of Izmir, which was rebuilt as a modern Turkish city. The fire also entered literature, for example in Ernest Hemingway’s short sketch “On the Quai at Smyrna”.

Timeline

• 1919, 15 May: Greek troops land at Smyrna.
• 1922, 26 August: The Turkish Great Offensive begins and breaks the Greek front.
• 1922, 9 September: Turkish forces enter Smyrna.
• 1922, 13 September: Fire breaks out in the Armenian quarter.
• 1922, c. 22 September: The fire burns out after destroying the Christian and European quarters.
• 1922, late September: Mass evacuation of refugees by sea.
• 1923, 30 January: Greece and Turkey sign the convention on the exchange of populations.

Why it matters

The Great Fire of Smyrna ended the multi-ethnic character of one of the Mediterranean’s great port cities and symbolised the violent unmixing of peoples that followed the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Its causes and memory remain contested, which makes careful, evidence-based history especially important.