Eric Ambler on the Smyrna holocaust

 

 

In his classic noir novel The Mask of Dimitrios (1939), which concerns the efforts of second-rate crime writer Charles Latimer as he pieces together the murky life and career of Dimitrios Makropoulos, from his time in Smyrna’s dying days to his subsequent rise through the inter-war Balkan and Parisian underworlds, betraying, robbing and murdering his way into becoming a respectable European businessman, Eric Ambler provides a graphic account of the events that propelled the Levantine on his dark path, the fall of Smyrna to Kemalist forces in 1922.

‘Their lust for infidel blood still unsatisfied, the Turks swept on. On the ninth of September, they occupied Smyrna.

‘For a fortnight, refugees from the oncoming Turks had been pouring into the city to swell the already large Greek and Armenian populations. They had thought that the Greek army would turn and defend Smyrna. But the Greek army had fled. Now they were caught in a trap. The holocaust began.

‘The register of the Armenian Asia Minor Defence League had been seized by the occupying troops, and, on the night of the tenth, a party of regulars entered the Armenian quarters to find and kill those whose names appeared on the register.

‘The Armenians resisted and the Turks ran amok. The massacre that followed acted like a signal.

‘Encouraged by their officers, the Turkish troops descended next day upon the non-Turkish quarters of the city and began systematically to kill. Dragged from their houses and hiding places, men, women and children were butchered in the streets which soon became littered with mutilated bodies. The wooden walls of the churches, packed with refugees, were drenched with benzine and fired. The occupants who were not burnt alive were bayoneted as they tried to escape. In many parts looted houses had also been set on fire and now the flames began to spread.

‘At first, attempts were made to isolate the blaze. Then, the wind changed, blowing the fire away from the Turkish quarter, and further outbreaks were started by the troops. Soon, the whole city, with the exception of the Turkish quarter and a few houses near the Kassamba railway station, was burning fiercely. The massacre continued with unabated ferocity. A cordon of troops was drawn round the city to keep the refugees within the burning area. The streams of panic-stricken fugitives were shot down pitilessly or driven back into the inferno.

The narrow, gutted streets became so choked with corpses that, even had the would-be rescue parties been able to endure the sickening stench that arose, they could not have passed along them. Smyrna was changed from a city into a charnel-house. Many refugees had tried to reach ships in the inner harbour. Shot, drowned, mangled by propellers, their bodies floated hideously in the blood-tinged water. But the quayside was still crowded with those trying frantically to escape from the blazing waterfront, buildings toppling above them a few yards behind. It was said that the screams of these people were heard a mile out at sea. Giaur Izmir – infidel Smyrna – had atoned for its sins.

‘By the time that dawn broke on the fifteenth of September, over one hundred and twenty thousand persons had perished; but somewhere amidst that horror had been Dimitrios, alive.’

Eleftherios Venizelos and the Asia Minor campaign

Above is a talk by Roderick Beaton on Eleftherios Venizelos’ attempt to annex western Asia Minor and Eastern Thrace to Greece following the Great War and the collapse of the Ottoman empire.

Beaton asks what Venizelos was trying to achieve with his irredentist policy and, with the benefit of hindsight, how realistic was the aim of fulfilling the Megali Idea.

Beaton traverses the period 1912-1922, i.e. the successful campaigns in the Balkan wars; the predicament Greece faced with the outbreak of the Great War – whether to join the Triple Entente, as Venizelos ardently believed or remain neutral as King Constantine and his supporters demanded; and the occupation of Smyrna, the Treaty of Sèvres and the defeat of the Greek army by Turkish nationalist forces.

Beaton insists that the National Schism over participation in the Great War that led by 1916 to Greece having two governments – one with Venizelos at its head in Thessaloniki and the other in Athens loyal to the king – was not a constitutional dispute – Constantine insisted that foreign policy was his prerogative, whereas Venizelos insisted that the monarch had to subordinate himself to the wishes of the country’s political leadership on the British model; but rather a rift over what it meant to be Greek and what sort of Greece each side of the civil war – Beaton asserts that the schism amounted to a civil war – imagined.

Venizelos saw the Great War as an opportunity to liberate Greeks who found themselves outside of Greece’s borders – Beaton interprets this as prioritising the Greek ethnos (nation;) whereas Constantine and his followers had a narrower vision of Hellenism, were committed to the Greek state and wary of adventures that might undermine or overburden it. The latter argued that Greece was already stretched digesting the gains of 1912-13 – all areas of which were strongly pro-Venizelos – and that Greece was too weak to absorb more people and territory.

Eventually, in 1917, after the French navy blockaded Athens and its army occupied Thessaly, Constantine went into exile and Venizelos, having been forced to resign at the end of 1915, resumed power over the whole country, with Constantine’s brother Alexander ascending the emasculated throne.

Greece’s contribution to the Macedonian front gave it a place at the Paris Peace Conference at the end of the war. Here, Venizelos, in May 1919 got approval for the occupation of Smyrna, confirmed by the Treaty of Sèvres in August 1920, which also ceded Eastern Thrace to Greece.

In seeking to enforce the Treaty of Sèvres – which the Turkish nationalists under Mustafa Kemal had rejected – Greek forces found themselves dragged deeper and deeper into Anatolia, where the Turks had retreated.

At the same time as Venizelos was lobbying the British for financial and material support for Greek forces to deal a knock-out blow to the Turks, he was also preparing for elections in Greece. When they were lost in November 1920, Constantine and his supporters returned to power.

For opaque reasons, Beaton argues, even though the royalists had campaigned to end the Asia Minor war and bring the troops home, they decided to pursue Venizelos’ knock-out blow policy – but, critically, Beaton says, without seeking British backing. The result was defeat at the Battle of the Sangarios River in August/September 1921 and a year-long retreat to the Asia Minor coast and the end of the Ionian vision.

Critics of Venizelos have argued, Beaton says, that the root causes of the Asia Minor Catastrophe was the idea itself; that a Greek enclave in western Asia Minor was unviable, both from an economic and security standpoint, and that Sèvres was inherently unworkable.

But Beaton argues that Smyrna cut off from its Anatolian hinterland would have been no different from Thessaloniki, liberated in 1912, cut off from its Balkan hinterland and that the Macedonian city survived and thrived within Greece.

Beaton also asserts that rather than Greece, with the annexation of Asia Minor and Eastern Thrace, ending up having to rule over large numbers of resentful Muslim Turks, Greece would have pushed for a population exchange on the lines of the Balkan wars, with those Turks and Muslims left in the newly-liberated Greek territories being exchanged with Greeks and Christians who found themselves in the rump Turkish state.

As for the assertion that the Asia Minor campaign was doomed from the start by the military difficulties involved, Beaton argues rather that Greek forces nearly won the Battle of Sangarios River – the Turkish nationalist leadership ensconced in Ankara had made plans to evacuate the city – but that the declining morale of Greek troops and, crucially, the lack of backing from Britain swung the war the Turks’ way.

Venizelos, Beaton argues, would never have advanced further into Anatolia without British backing and it was a fatal mistake of the royalists to do so.

Where Venizelos is at fault, according to Beaton, was his over-enthusiastic support for the Triple Entente, his willingness to take Greece into the war from 1914 – even when the French and British were still trying to keep Turkey and Bulgaria out of the war and wanted Greece to hold off its involvement.

Rather than dismissing the objections of King Constantine and his supporters to Greece allying itself with Britain and France, Beaton believes Venizelos should have used his diplomatic skills – which outside of Greece had him heralded as a great European statesman – to persuade Constantine and the royalists of his vision.

If Venizelos wasn’t responsible for the Asia Minor Catastrophe, Beaton says, then he must take his share of the blame for the National Schism.

The project of creating Greece of the five seas and two continents, of reversing hundreds of years of history, needed to be underpinned by a strong, unified state and Venizelos’ failure to ensure this is where his responsibility for the demise of the Megali Idea lies.

Thoughts on Thucydides and the Peloponnesian War

Some points emerging from reading Donald Kagan's Thucydides: The Reinvention of History, particularly in relation to the war between the Athenian empire and the Peloponnesians as it transpired in Sicily.

I’m sure I’m not the first one to point out that the disastrous Sicilian expedition, which significantly contributed to the defeat of Athens in the Peloponnesian War, evokes striking similarities to the Asia Minor catastrophe: an enthusiastic and capable expeditionary force has initial success but, mostly due to poor leadership and increasing loss of morale and self-belief, fails to consolidate its advantages and finish the job, allowing for a revival of the enemy and leading to calamitous defeat. Indeed, I’m sure the similar fates suffered by the Athenians in Sicily and Greeks in Ionia was not lost on Eleftherios Venizelos, a student and translator of Thucydides.

We note the bitterness and savagery with which Greek fought Greek throughout the Peloponnesian War, but particularly in Sicily. Kagan writes on the treatment of Athenian and Sicilian allied prisoners by the victorious Syracusans and Corinthians:

‘The triumphant Syracusans took their prisoners and booty [from the Athenian expedition] and stripped the armor from the dead enemy, hanging it from the finest and tallest trees along the [Assinarus] river. On returning to Syracuse they held an assembly where they voted to enslave the servants of the Athenians and their imperial allies and to place Athenian citizens and their Sicilian Greek allies into the city’s stone quarries. A proposal to put Nicias and Demosthenes to death provoked more debate… [and] the assembly voted to execute both [the Athenian] generals.

‘The Syracusans held over seven thousand prisoners in their quarries, crowded together in inhuman conditions, burned by the sun during the day and chilled by the autumn cold at night. They were given about a half-pint of water and a pint of food each day… and they suffered terribly from hunger and thirst. Men died from their wounds, from illness and from exposure and the dead bodies were thrown on top of one another, creating an unbearable stench.’

Thus, what the ‘inhumanity’ of the Peloponnesian War – and not just this war, but the virtually continual state of internecine Greek wars – reminds us is that, in practice, in this period, there was as much an Athenian, Corinthian, Syracusan or Spartan ‘nation’ as a Hellenic one and that the pan-Hellenic consciousness that existed did so side by side and, more often than not, competed with ‘national’ identities derived from belonging to a particular city state.

Following on from this, a word on Athenian arrogance and Athenian nationalism. With the advent of the Athenian empire, the Athenians ascribed to themselves the right to decide what it was and what it was not to be a Hellene. Indeed, the Athenians came to believe their way of life was the epitome of Greekness – Pericles’ funeral oration being the clearest expression of this, with his assertion that Athens was ‘an education to Greece’.

Thus, those Athenians who initially argued against the Sicilian expedition did so on the grounds that the Segastans – who had asked the Athenians for assistance in their conflict with Selinus and Syracuse in western Sicily – were not Greeks but ‘an alien race’ and a ‘barbaric people’, even though the Segastans were, in fact, a mixture of Ionian Greek colonists and Hellenised Elymian Sicilians.

We note that Demosthenes the orator in the fourth century BC deployed the same Athenian conceit against the Macedonians, asserting that they had to be resisted and could not claim leadership of Hellas because Philip and his people were not Greeks but barbarians.

The Greek-Turkish population exchange: a necessary evil?

Thanks to the HA reader who suggested I go here and watch the talks and Q&A (in English) from professors Giorgos Mavrogordatos and Ayhan Aktar on the 1923 population exchange agreements between Greece and Turkey that saw 1.5 million Greeks from Asia Minor, Anatolia and Thrace resettled in Greece and half a million Turks go the other way.

Mavrogordatos suggests that the exchange was the best, or at least most pragmatic, outcome to the failed attempt by Greece to liberate Ionia.

Arguing in favour of homogenous nation-states, Mavrogordatos says that the Ottoman Greeks provided a means to complete the Hellenisation of those territories (especially Macedonia) liberated during the Balkan wars; ensured, with the expulsion of Muslims from Greece, that Greece didn’t end up with a problematic Muslim minority, which would now number three million; and that, indeed, since Turkey’s preferred method of dealing with minorities in its midst was physical destruction, having some sort of agreed relocation was the only way to guarantee the survival and future of 1.5m Greeks.

On the other hand, the Turkish professor bemoans the population exchange, guided as it was, he argues, by narrow, nationalist definitions of ethnic identity, which ended up impoverishing both countries and was a disaster for those directly affected.

The discussion to be had on the issues raised is inexhaustible, but I’ll just make a couple of points.

Having experienced the humiliating trauma of the decline and disintegration of the Ottoman empire, the new Turkish republic couldn’t countenance the continuing presence of Armenians, Assyrians and Greeks and had an unambiguous policy of annihilating its Christian minorities. This decisive approach is in contrast to the policy of Greece towards non-Greeks in the territories it had liberated in 1913 and was expecting to annex in Asia Minor.

Eleftherios Venizelos was torn between creating a Greece that would be a liberal multi-ethnic state in which non-Greeks (Muslims, Jews and Bulgarians) would be full citizens and have their rights and identities protected, and a more homogenous country, insensitive to its minorities, who would be subordinate to the dominant Greek element and encouraged to assimilate or, in the worst-case scenario, face exchange with Greeks living in Rumelia and Turkey. (Exterminating its minorities, as Turkey was prepared to do, did not appeal to Greece).

In Ionia, Venizelos was inclined to the former policy, insisting that the Turks living in the newly liberated areas should experience no discrimination and be won over to the benefits of Greek government – though at other times (as Mavrogordatos notes) he contemplates exchanging the Turks in Ionia for Greeks living in parts of Anatolia not liberated by the Greek army.

Informing Venizelos’ view of the Turks as susceptible to the advantages of enlightened Greek rule was a sense that Turks were less conscious of their national and religious identity than Greeks. This ignorance of the Turks had disastrous consequences for Greek rule in Ionia. More ruthless treatment of the Turks in Ionia may have suited Greek interests better, though it would have risked alienating Greece’s European allies who, hypocritically, made their support conditional on Greece proving its credentials as a civilised country by the fair treatment of the non-Greek population under its jurisdiction.

A similar Greek underestimation of Turkish nationalism was also evident later in Cyprus where, it should be pointed out that, after the Turkish invasion in 1974, the 200,000 Greeks forced from northern Cyprus and 50,000 Turks encouraged (by Turkey and Britain) to leave the government-controlled for the occupied areas – were not, according to the Turks, ethnically cleansed but the necessary victims of an agreed population exchange.

Dan Georgakas on the fall of Smyrna, 1922

 

Above is a good talk from Dan Georgakas given to the Pontian Greek Society of Chicago on the fall and evacuation of Smyrna in 1922 and how these events are represented in contemporary Turkey. Georgakas, whose family has roots in Asia Minor, is an interesting person. As well as being a significant chronicler of the Greek American experience and a champion of Greek causes and culture, he is a prominent film critic and political writer and activist, who was a part of that counter-cultural wave that swept over Detroit in the 1960s. Georgakas was a founding member of the anarchist group, Up Against the Wall Motherfuckers.

In his talk on Smyrna, Georgakas as well as detailing the horrors that befell the city’s Greeks when it was taken by Mustafa Kemal’s forces, makes the very significant point that the refusal to own up to the atrocities it committed at its establishment has meant that the Republic of Turkey was condemned to repeat them, as evidenced by the Varlik Vergisi, the Constantinople pogrom, the ethnic cleansing of Imvros and Tenedos and the invasion and occupation of Cyprus. In other words, Georgakas is telling us that Turkey’s lies about its past inform its present actions and as such should not be trusted by Greece or regarded as a reliable partner by America.

Seferis on Hellenism’s unfinished task; and more from The Free Besieged

'Greece lives, to the extent that she is able to give birth to great poets… I believe that if she has not managed to provide suitable soil for the tree that [once] burgeoned upon her land… in years to come she will be able not only to give birth, but also to suckle and to nurture the Poet, the Messiah, who will seize [back] from the hands of the barbarians the beauty, the gold-flaming torch, they have stolen from us.' (Giorgios Seferis)

Giorgios Seferis, along with Ion Dragoumis, is the greatest theorist of Hellenism in the 20th century and above is the conclusion of a lecture Seferis gave in Paris in March 1921, when he was just 21, on the Franco-Greek poet Jean Moreas (Ioannis Papadiamantopoulos). There's a lot to consider here; but just a couple of points: Seferis' optimism is surely based on the new Greek civilisation he hoped would emerge following the liberation of Asia Minor, an enterprise that failed and left Greece at the mercy of all sorts of barbarians, where, nearly 100 years later, it still remains. ‘Seizing back from the hands of the barbarians the beauty, the gold-flaming torch, they have stolen from us’ is Hellenism’s unfinished task.

■ Also, in my post for 25 March on Yiannis Markopoulos' musical interpretation of Dionysios Solomos' The Free Besieged; I omitted to make available the most beautiful and moving song on the album: Στα μάτια και στο πρόσωπο/In their eyes and on their face, sung by Nikos Xylouris. I've now put the song in Radio Akritas, and below are the lyrics.

Στα μάτια και στο πρόσωπο
Στα μάτια και στο πρόσωπο φαίνοντ' οι στοχασμοί τους.
Τους λέει μεγάλα και πολλά η τρίσβαθη ψυχή τους,
Αγάπη κι έρωτας καλού τα σπλάχνα τους τινάζουν.
Τα σπλάχνα τους κι η θάλασσα ποτέ δεν ησυχάζουν.
Γλυκιά κι ελεύθερ' η ψυχή σα να 'τανε βγαλμένη
κι υψώναν με χαμόγελο την όψη τη φθαρμένη.

In their eyes and on their face
In their eyes and on their face their thoughts are showing;
A host of major things they learn from the depths of their souls.
Their guts are violently stirred by love and desire for good;
Their guts and the sea alone are never still;
Sweet and free the soul as if it had broken loose,
And they raised with a smile their exhausted visage.

Eleftherios Venizelos and Greece In Her True Light

Greece In Her True Light is an interesting document published (in English) in 1916, which consists of several memoranda and speeches by Eleftherios Venizelos putting forward the case for Greece’s entry into WW1 on the side of the Allies. It describes the deals Venizelos was prepared to make to secure the maximum advantage to Greece’s national interests, which in this case meant the expansion of the Greek state into Asia Minor, Eastern Thrace and Cyprus. Venizelos’ policy of supporting Britain and France as a means to secure Greek expansion was opposed by King Constantine and other rightist forces in Greece, led by Dimitrios Gounaris.

Just a few points going through the document, which can be read here.

Initially, at the outbreak of WW1, Venizelos’ concern is to prevent Bulgaria – which had never accepted the treaties that ended the Balkan wars in 1912-13 – from joining the German and Turkish axis and threatening first Serbia and then Greece. In order to secure either Bulgarian neutrality or, better still, Bulgarian support in attacking Turkey, Venizelos was prepared to offer, in exchange for Allied backing for Greek demands in Asia Minor, the handing over to Bulgaria of Kavala and Drama in Eastern Macedonia.

Venizelos makes clear that Greek expansion into Asia Minor is not just a matter of creating a Greater Greece, but also protecting the lives of Ottoman Greeks who are already being targetted in a campaign of extermination, similar to the one already suffered by the Armenians. Venizelos adds that the policy of genocide is one the Turks are being encouraged to adopt by Germany.

Venizelos argues that if Greece had participated in the Gallipoli campaign, as requested by the Allies, then that campaign, to capture Constantinople, would have succeeded. He makes clear that Russian objections to Greece participating in the capture of Constantinople – Russia regarded Greece as a rival to claims on Constantinople – would have been overcome by France and Britain.

Venizelos accuses the obstructionist King Constantine of not only admiring Germany, but of desiring German victory in Europe, which would allow the king to sweep away the parliamentary system in Greece and establish a more monarchical system of government.

Venizelos mentions the British offer to cede Cyprus to Greece. Anti-Venizelists argued that such a concession was trifling and not worth Greece entering the war on the side of the British; but Venizelos insists that the addition of Cyprus to Greece would be a significant advance of Hellenism, especially in conjunction with other acquisitions in Thrace and Asia Minor.

It’s worth pointing out that the publication of the document – in English – was intended to convince Allied audiences that Venizelos, not Constantine, represented the ‘true’ Greece. Constantine’s pro-German neutrality was, of course, an outrage to the Allies and, indeed, in Canada and Australia, there were anti-Greek riots (aimed at Greek immigrants). 

The origins of Marseille and the end of Phocaea

It’s good to be reminded me of the scope and magnitude of Hellenism, the fact that, as Henry Maine put it: ‘Except for the blind forces of Nature, nothing moves in this world which is not Greek in its origins.’

France’s second largest city Marseille is Greek in its origins and the supporters of its football club commemorate this fact not only in the name of the club, Olympique de Marseille, and in the azure and white colours of the team’s kit, but also in the waving of Greek flags at home matches.

Indeed, in the recent Europa League game between Marseille and Fenerbache, from another city with Greek origins (Byzantium/Constantinople), the fans of the Turkish team were so incensed by the Hellenic national symbols, which they took to be a provocation, that they began to riot in the stadium – smashing seats, attacking Marseille fans – prompting the French police to require the home fans to put away their Greek flags.

Three days later, in the league match against Lille, the Marseille fans reiterated their esteem for the Greek flag by forming, as the video above shows, a giant human version of it, beneath which a banner read: ‘NE RENIONS PAS L’ORIGINE DE NOTRE VILLE’. (We do not deny the origin of our city).

As to the origins of Marseille/Μασσαλία, the city was founded by Ionian Greeks from Phocaea in Asia Minor in 600 BC, themselves colonists from Phocis in central Greece – Olympique de Marseille’s original name was US Phocéenne.

Phocaea was destroyed by the Ottoman Turks in 1914, an event recounted in George Horton’s The Blight of Asia. Horton, who was US consul general in Smyrna at the time, states that the fate of the Phocaeans would have been worse had it not been for the intervention of a group of resident Frenchmen, who felt a bond and obligation towards Phocaea because of its status as the ‘Mother of Marseille’.

Below are a few passages from The Blight of Asia describing the massacre and destruction of Phocaea.

‘The complete and documentary account of the ferocious persecutions of the Christian population of the Smyrna region, which occurred in 1914, is not difficult to obtain; but it will suffice, by way of illustration, to give only some extracts from a report by the French eye-witness, Manciet, concerning the massacre and pillage of Phocea, a town of eight thousand Greek inhabitants and about four hundred Turks, situated on the sea a short distance from Smyrna. The destruction of Phocea excited great interest in Marseilles, as colonists of the very ancient Greek town founded the French city. Phocea is the mother of Marseilles. Monsieur Manciet was present at the massacre and pillage of Phocea, and, together with three other Frenchman, Messieurs Sartiaux, Carlier and Dandria, saved hundreds of lives by courage and presence of mind.

‘The report begins with the appearance on the hills behind the town of armed bands and the firing of shots, causing a panic. Those four gentlemen were living together, but when the panic commenced they separated and each installed himself in a house. They demanded of the Kaimakam gendarmes for their protection, and each obtained one. They kept the doors open and gave refuge to all who came. They improvised four French flags out of cloth and flew one from each house. But, to continue the recital in Monsieur Manciet’s own words, translated from the French:

“During the night the organized bands continued the pillage of the town. At the break of dawn there was continual ‘tres nourrie’ firing before the houses. Going out immediately, we four, we saw the most atrocious spectacle of which it is possible to dream. This horde, which had entered the town, was armed with Gras rifles and cavalry muskets. A house was in flames. From all directions the Christians were rushing to the quays seeking boats to get away in, but since the night there were none left. Cries of terror mingled with the sound of firing. The panic was so great that a woman with her child was drowned in sixty centimeters of water.”

‘This extract is given from Monsieur Manciet’s description of the sack of Phocea in 1914, of which he was an eye-witness, for several reasons. It is necessary to the complete and substantiated picture the gradual ferocious extermination of the Christians which had been going on in Asia Minor and the Turkish Empire for the past several years, finally culminating in the horror of Smyrna; it is a peculiarly graphic recital, bringing out the unchanging nature of the Turk and his character as a creature of savage passions, living still in the times of Tamerlane or Attila, the Hun;— for the Turk is an anachronism; still looting, killing and raping and carrying off his spoil on camels; it is peculiarly significant, also, as it tells a story strongly resembling some of the exploits of Mohammed himself.

‘Monsieur Manciet says [in his account]:

“We found an old woman lying in the street, who had been nearly paralyzed by blows. She had two great wounds on the head made by the butts of muskets; her hands were cut, her face swollen.

“A young girl, who had given all the money she possessed, had been thanked by knife stabs, one in the arm and the other in the region of the kidneys. A weak old man had received such a blow with a gun that the fingers of his left hand had been carried away.

“From all directions during the day that followed families arrived that had been hidden in the mountains. All had been attacked. Among them was a woman who had seen killed, before her eyes, her husband, her brother and her three children.

“We learned at this moment an atrocious detail. An old paralytic, who had been lying helpless on his bed at the moment the pillagers entered, had been murdered.

“Smyrna sent us soldiers to establish order. As these soldiers circulated in the streets, we had a spectacle of the kind of order which they established; they continued, personally, the sacking of the town.

“We made a tour of inspection through the city. The pillage was complete; doors were broken down and that which the robbers had not been able to carry away they had destroyed. Phocea, which had been a place of great activity, was now a dead city.

“A woman was brought to us dying; she had been violated by seventeen Turks. They had also carried off into the mountains a girl of sixteen, having murdered her father and mother before her eyes. We had seen, therefore, as in the most barbarous times, the five characteristics of the sacking of a city; theft, pillage, fire, murder and rape.”

(Read the whole of Horton’s chapter on the Massacre of Phocaea here).