Paradise Lost: Smyrna 1922 - The Destruction of Islam's City of Tolerance (5 page)

Each of the Levantine houses had a Florentine-style loggia situated just outside the gates. This was where the elderly members of the family would gather in late afternoon in order to share gossip and pass on news. All would defer to the elderly Magdalen, who would be flanked by her bodyguard, ‘staff in hand, [who] stood by her side like a guard of honour. The leaders of all the caravans passing through the village had to get off their donkeys and bow to her,’ recalled one. ‘If they neglected to do so, the
kavass
quickly taught them manners.’

The mansion that stood next to the Big House was owned by the Wood family, another formidable dynasty that lived under the patrician care of Mr Ernest. He was a starched and steely individual who, even by Edwardian standards, seemed to belong to another era. He saw it as his duty to take the ladies of the family for rides in his carriage and was punctilious in his observance of correct etiquette. ‘No one quite equalled the flourish of these expeditions,’ recalled one. ‘The handling of the ladies, the correct disposal of their trailing skirts, the arrangements for the comfort of the pugs and the last-minute alterations of these all took time.’ The pugs were a source of constant annoyance, as was Yanko, the stone-deaf coachman. ‘Whenever Aunt Luisa wanted him to stop, she would batter him with the handle of her umbrella.’

There were many other eccentrics who had made Bournabat their home. ‘Uncle Frank’ used to walk around the village with two loaded revolvers, which he would fire into the bushes whenever he was angry. Wallace Turrell was similarly explosive. ‘[He] was a lawyer by profession,’ recalled Eldon Giraud, ‘but never won a case as he always came to blows with the judge and would often be put in the same cells as the person he was defending.’

Although the Levantines were the most visible inhabitants of Bournabat, the village was also home to a large number of wealthy Greeks and Armenians – families like the Gasparians and Elmassians – who had elected to build their villas alongside those of the Levantines. The Whittall children mixed freely with the offspring of these families and often accompanied them to services at the local Orthodox church. Years later, one of those children could still recall the Greek priest ‘with his long black robes, his stove-pipe hat and his long hair done up in a bun . . . [He] was an awe-inspiring figure’. She added that ‘you could imagine him determinedly going up to heaven in a chariot of fire, whereas our quiet, sober little parson would have hesitated to summon a cab’.

The Greek priest was a close friend of the Whittalls and a regular visitor to the Big House. ‘[He] came to visit the servants and to bless the house at certain times of the year.’ So, too, did the local Catholic priest, Père Innocent. ‘[He] was nothing if not worldly [and] came to breakfast with my uncle and to have long, philosophical discussions with him.’

The patrician families of Bournabat felt at ease in any society, whether Levantine, Greek, Armenian or Turkish. One of the Whittalls remembers her father undertaking winter business expeditions into the heart of Anatolia, dressed in a cloak and astrakhan hat, and looking much like a Turk. ‘When he stayed in the houses of his Turkish colleagues, he merged into the surroundings and was perfectly at home. He was used to their ways and their conversations and was always treated as if he were one of themselves. Sitting cross-legged on the floor, he would eat from the communal dish.’

The working lives of the Levantines were punctuated by long hours of leisure and play. Boating was one of the most popular activities in Edwardian Smyrna and many families owned at least one yacht or yawl. The largest of these was a veritable leviathan, the 160-ton
Abafna
owned by Albert Aliotti, a descendant of one of Smyrna’s richest families. The La Fontaines possessed three motor cruisers, as did the Whittalls, while the Giraud family owned a yacht and a motor cruiser. This latter craft was called the
Helen May
and was the plaything of Edmund Giraud, who was married to one of Magdalen Whittall’s numerous grandchildren.

Edmund wrote a book entitled
Days off with Rod and Gun
; given that he spent nine months of the year pottering about on the
Helen May
, the days off must have occurred with considerable frequency. ‘It was between 1908 and 1914 that Smyrna saw its happiest and most prosperous days,’ he wrote, ‘and during these few years of prosperity, yachting around Smyrna was at its best.’ The yachtsmen would set off on Fridays and arrange an anchorage somewhere off the Turkish coast in order ‘to shoot ashore, or to go fishing, or else simply to pass the time pleasantly in each other’s company’. A photograph published in Edmund’s book depicts them happily at leisure, decked in white flannels and boaters, and sniffing the stiff sea breeze.

Edmund and his friends often sailed to Long Island, which was situated in the middle of the bay. He so enjoyed these outings that in 1913 he conceived of a plan to buy land on the island and build himself a summer house. ‘This, however, I found to be a difficult thing to do,’ he wrote. ‘In that small, isolated community, land was held as a family possession and rarely, if ever, sold. Selling land to an outsider was quite unprecedented.’

But like so many of the Levantines, Edmund was not really an outsider. He spoke fluent Greek and had excellent contacts in the Greek community. After friendly negotiations, he acquired the land and constructed a cliff-top house with spectacular views across the bay. Henceforth, Long Island became a regular meeting point for all the Levantine yachtsmen of Smyrna.

Edmund’s fortune brought many benefits to the village: he wired electricity to the fishermen’s cottages and gave money to the community. In return, the villagers brought him gifts of fruit and vegetables. In the dark years that were to follow, they would have even greater reason to be grateful. Edmund’s patrician sense of duty would help save the lives of many inhabitants on Long Island.

Boating was just one of many social activities enjoyed by the Levantines. The Whittalls, Girauds and their neighbours also enjoyed spectacular balls and parties in the early years of the twentieth century. In the spring of 1907, for example, Herbert Octavius’s favourite club, the ‘Sporting’, hosted a gala-extravaganza with all-night dancing, music and theatrical interludes. It raised an enormous sum of money for the city’s Israelite Orphanage and guaranteed the continued welfare of many homeless boys and girls. The charity gala’s organising committee was typically Levantine in its composition: it comprised three Turks, one Greek, one Jew and one Armenian, along with representatives of all the European nationals of Smyrna.

Charitable evenings such as this were by no means unusual; Herbert Octavius was forever receiving letters of appreciation for his charitable work. And he, like all his business associates, poured his fortune into hospitals, nursing homes and orphanages.

Edwardian visitors to Smyrna remained puzzled by these Levantine dynasties, whose origins were as hybrid as the hyacinths that Edward Whittall cultivated in his glasshouses. One British vice-consul described them as ‘more exuberantly patriotic than we allow ourselves to appear at home’. Yet they rarely visited their mother countries and, although the Whittalls chose resolutely English names for their sons, one side of their family was in fact Venetian in origin, descendants of the great Cortazzi dynasty. Other families in Smyrna were more open about their mixed origins. Many families had sons and daughters whose names – Polycarp, Hortense and Francesci – betrayed their convoluted bloodlines.

With their fluency in five or six languages and their extraordinary wealth to boot, the lives of these dynasties seemed untouched by the cares of the world. But unbeknown to Herbert Octavius or any of his neighbours in Bournabat, the Levantines were rapidly entering the twilight of their charmed existence. It fell to an outsider, an eccentric Englishman named William Childs, to warn them – and all the rest of Smyrna’s non-Turkish communities – that they were living on borrowed time.

The Great Idea

T
he captain had met some oddballs in his time but this particular Englishman was stranger than most. William Childs was travelling along the Black Sea coast of Turkey accompanied by one large trunk of Cambridge sausages and dozens of tins of bacon.

When the captain enquired as to his passenger’s line of business, he drew an even more startling response. Childs was not travelling on business. Rather, he was intending to walk across Anatolia, a trek that would take him across more than 1,300 miles of wild countryside. He had no desire to eat the ‘native foods’ during his travels, preferring to rely on his trusty sausages. He found that they set him up for the day, providing him with the energy for a long walk. No matter that his insistence on eating pork might offend Muslim sensibilities. ‘I intended,’ he wrote, ‘to have good honest English breakfasts the whole way.’

Nor did he have any intention of trying to blend in with the local inhabitants; he was a firm believer in wearing his Englishness on his sleeve. ‘The fact of being English,’ he later wrote, ‘was ever the most universal and respected recommendation I could possess.’

When Childs confessed that his voyage was being undertaken for the purposes of pleasure and recreation, the captain of the little mail packet began to fear for his passenger’s safety. ‘An avowal of lunacy had been made to him . . .’ wrote Childs, ‘and he took it as a matter requiring immediate attention.’ Childs did his best to explain why he wished to travel on foot but the captain remained unconvinced. ‘“Paris and Berlin and Vienna are for pleasure,” he said, “but not this country.” And he waved his arm towards the coast.’

Childs’ plan was indeed eccentric, especially as he was setting off in winter, when the temperature was already well below zero, yet it was not entirely without logic. He saw that the world was rapidly changing and he wanted to visit the heartland of Anatolia now – in October 1912 – before the colourful old customs disappeared for ever. He had decided to travel on foot because he thought it would bring him into direct contact with the different races and peoples of the interior of the country.

But there was another reason why Childs was undertaking his voyage – one that he did not reveal to the captain. He was working as a spy, garnering intelligence for the British Secret Service. The government, fearful of Russian expansion into Anatolia, was also deeply concerned by German influence in Turkey. As the international climate grew increasingly tense, British ministers realised that they needed a more detailed report on Turkey’s vast interior.

Childs never admitted his role as an undercover agent, although he dropped several hints in the book that he would later write. He suggested that his voyage had been provoked by more than idle curiosity and liked to refer to himself as ‘an ever listening ear and watchful eye’. His industry seems to have impressed his bosses in Whitehall. Soon after his return to London, he was given employment in the secretive ‘Room Four’ of the Foreign Office, gathering sensitive information on Turkey and the Middle East.

Childs’ account of his Anatolian voyage,
On Foot Through Asia Minor
, might have sold more copies if he had included the tales of banditry and abduction that he promised his readers. Yet even base metal occasionally glitters and Childs’ dullness is not without sparkle. His prosaic tales of daily life in the hinterlands of the Ottoman empire are heavy with portent and reveal many of the underlying tensions that would soon tear the empire apart. As such, his book is a clarion of doom for the international city of Smyrna.

Childs’ first stop was Samsun, a cosmopolitan Black Sea port that bore certain similarities with Smyrna. He had been ashore only a few hours when he caught his first glimpse of the troubles that lay ahead. He was taking refuge from the biting cold when a young boy approached him and asked for a contribution to the Greek navy. Childs was taken aback by such a provocative act but he soon learned that collections for the Greek military were a daily occurrence. The Greeks in Samsun ‘look to Greece and contribute money in her aid, especially to her navy, with open-handed generosity, hoping dimly for the reconstitution of the Greek Empire with Constantinople for its capital’. Childs was told that they had raised more than £12,000 in the previous year – a significant sum of money.

Although he was not aware of it at the time, he had witnessed an event of quite extraordinary significance. More than four and a half centuries after the Byzantine empire was snuffed out by the forces of Mehmet the Conqueror, the flotsam and jetsam of that empire – Greeks left adrift in Ottoman Turkey – were casting their gaze westwards, towards the mother country.

Over the long years of Ottoman rule, many had lost touch with their patrimony. Some had abandoned their Christian faith and many more had forgotten how to speak Greek. When the English traveller, Sir William Ramsay, passed through Anatolia in the 1890s, he had been shocked to find entire communities that could no longer converse in their mother tongue.

By the time Childs was trekking over the lonely peaks of Anatolia, everything was on the point of change. Intellectuals from Athens had pushed deep into the countryside in order to teach communities about their Greek roots. Even the smallest Greek villages boasted a school that taught children the language of their forefathers. These schools were transforming the old way of life in rural Turkey. The country found itself with a new class of educated Greeks who were channelling all their energies into commerce, profit-making and politics – often at the expense of the Turks. ‘The Turks have turned a blind eye to the painstaking efforts of the Greeks,’ wrote Gaston Deschamps, ‘little realising that the day would come when they would find themselves enslaved by those in their midst.’