The Greek landing at Smyrna

On the morning of 15 May 1919, under the guns of Allied warships, soldiers of Colonel Nikolaos Zafeiriou’s Greek 1st Infantry Division stepped ashore on the quayside of Smyrna. In Greece, which still used the Julian calendar, the date was 2 May. The largest city of western Anatolia, a port home to tens of thousands of Greeks, Turks, Armenians, Jews and Europeans, passed under Greek control without a fight, because the Ottoman authorities had ordered the garrison not to resist. The landing had been approved in Paris by the leaders of the victorious powers, and the Greek Prime Minister, Eleftherios Venizelos, saw it as the first step towards realising the Megali Idea, the dream of a state embracing all Greeks on both sides of the Aegean. Yet the day that was meant to be a triumph turned into a massacre. A shot rang out, Greek soldiers opened fire, and several hundred people, most of them Turks, were killed in the streets and on the quayside. The news stirred the whole of Turkey. Four days later Mustafa Kemal landed at Samsun on the Black Sea and began to build the movement that within three years would drive the Greeks out of Anatolia.

An empire to be divided

The Ottoman Empire had lost the Great War together with Germany. On 30 October 1918 it signed the Armistice of Mudros, which handed the victors control of the Straits and allowed them to occupy any “strategic points” should a situation arise that threatened their security. In November the Allied fleet dropped anchor off Constantinople, where the weak Sultan Mehmed VI ruled, ready to make concessions as long as he kept his throne. The leaders of the Young Turk Committee of Union and Progress, who bore responsibility for entering the war and for the Armenian genocide, fled the country.

The victors had conflicting plans for the Turkish lands. In secret wartime agreements they had divided them into spheres of influence. Britain and France shared out the Arab provinces, and Italy had been promised south-western Anatolia, including the Smyrna region, in an agreement concluded at Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne in April 1917. The agreement required the consent of Russia, which after the revolution nobody consulted any longer, and it never came into force, but the Italians regarded it as binding. In March 1919 they landed troops at Antalya on their own initiative, and their warships began appearing in one port after another along the coast.

Greece had entered the war on the side of the Entente only in June 1917, after years of conflict between Venizelos and King Constantine I, who wanted to remain neutral. At the Paris Peace Conference Venizelos laid claim to Thrace and western Anatolia. He invoked the right of nations to self-determination set out in President Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points and argued that in the Smyrna district the Greeks formed a majority, or at least the most numerous and most enterprising part of the population. His figures were disputed, since Turks predominated in the interior, but the port itself had for centuries been a largely Greek city. The Turks called it “infidel Smyrna”. Venizelos, regarded in Paris as the most skilful politician among the smaller allies, won over above all the British Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, who saw a strong Greece as Britain’s natural ally in the eastern Mediterranean.

The decision in Paris

The opportunity arose from the Italian crisis. In April 1919 the Italian Prime Minister, Vittorio Emanuele Orlando, walked out of the conference in protest at the refusal to award Fiume to Italy. In the Italians’ absence Lloyd George argued that the Greeks in Anatolia were threatened by Turkish bands and that the Italians intended to seize Smyrna on their own. Some historians believe the British exaggerated the reports of danger to the Christians. On 6 May Lloyd George, Wilson and the French Prime Minister, Georges Clemenceau, agreed that Greece should send troops to Smyrna. The next day they conferred with Venizelos and British military officers in Lloyd George’s flat in the rue Nitot. According to the American minutes, Venizelos assured them that he could send one division from Macedonia at once without weakening the Balkan front, and added that over 30,000 Greek citizens in Smyrna were under threat from the Turks. Wilson replied that this was a very important reason for protecting them. It was decided that the troops would remain under Greek command and that the Turks would be informed only once the troops were already aboard ship, so that they would have no time to prepare resistance. Orlando, who returned to Paris a few days later, could only take note of the decision.

Formally the landing was an Allied operation under Article 7 of the Armistice of Mudros, with Greece acting as the Allies’ agent. Nobody, however, was under any illusion. Venizelos treated the occupation of Smyrna as a prelude to its annexation by Greece, and Lloyd George wanted to forestall the Italians. The question of sovereignty over the city was left open until a peace treaty with Turkey was concluded.

14 May

The transports carrying Zafeiriou’s division sailed from the ports of Greek Macedonia in mid-May. According to Western studies the convoy consisted of 14 ships with around 13,000 soldiers, escorted by three British and four Greek destroyers. On 14 May the Allies notified the Ottoman authorities in Smyrna that, in accordance with the armistice, they were taking over the forts at the entrance to the gulf. That same day British, French and Greek troops occupied the fortifications on the headlands and islands around the gulf. The governor, Izzet Bey, and the commander of XVII Corps, Ali Nadir Pasha, were also informed that Greek troops would land the following day. In line with the policy of the government in Constantinople, Ali Nadir Pasha ordered that there be no resistance. The Turkish soldiers were to stay in their barracks.

In the Greek quarters the news was greeted with enthusiasm. Houses were decked with blue-and-white flags, and Metropolitan Chrysostomos prepared a welcome. The Turks experienced the same events as a humiliation. On the night of 14–15 May several thousand people gathered in the old Jewish cemetery known as Maşatlık. There the Society for the Rejection of Annexation (Redd-i İlhak) was founded, while bonfires burned and drums beat above the city. Among the crowd were young activists linked to the former Committee of Union and Progress, including the journalist Hasan Tahsin, editor of the newspaper Hukuk-u Beşer (The Rights of Man).

The first shot

On the morning of 15 May the troops began to come ashore. Metropolitan Chrysostomos blessed the soldiers, and the quayside filled with crowds of Greek inhabitants carrying flags and flowers. Neither the future high commissioner nor any of the senior commanders was present, and the arrangements lacked order. The 1/38 Evzone battalion under Lieutenant Colonel Dionysios Stavrianopoulos disembarked at around eight o’clock north of its designated landing place, at the Pasaport pier, and had to march south along the quay through the cheering crowd. Its route led past the konak, the governor’s residence, and past the Turkish barracks of Sarı Kışla (the Yellow Barracks), where Ottoman soldiers waited, disarmed or without orders.

As the column approached the konak, a shot was fired. It is not known for certain who fired it, and the later commission of inquiry could not establish this either. Turkish tradition attributes it to Hasan Tahsin, who is said to have fired his revolver at the soldiers and killed the standard-bearer carrying the Greek colours, before being killed himself by bullets and bayonets. Some accounts speak of shots from several places, and some researchers, Turkish ones among them, doubt this version, pointing out that Tahsin’s name does not appear in the earliest sources. What happened next, however, is certain. The evzones, convinced that Turks in the barracks and the konak were firing at them, opened rifle fire on the buildings. The shooting went on for some time, until the Turks in the barracks hung out a white flag and came out with their hands up.

The captured soldiers and officials were marched along the quay towards a Greek ship that was to take them away. On the way crimes were committed. British and American witnesses, officers of the warships lying in the harbour, reported that Greek soldiers and civilians beat the prisoners with rifle butts, stabbed them with bayonets and shot those who fell, and that bodies were thrown into the water. According to Turkish accounts, Colonel Süleyman Fethi Bey was killed at this point, bayoneted when he refused to shout “Zito Venizelos” (“Long live Venizelos”). Ali Nadir Pasha was also beaten. The mob looted houses and shops in the Turkish quarters, and over the following hours and the next day the violence spread to the surroundings of the city.

How many died

The casualty figures remain disputed and depend on whose accounts one believes. According to frequently cited contemporary Allied estimates, between 300 and 400 Turks were killed or wounded on 15 and 16 May, and about a hundred people on the Greek side, including two soldiers. Other tallies give anything from several dozen to more than six hundred Turks killed. Turkish sources, especially later ones, speak of a far larger number of victims in Smyrna itself and in the surrounding villages. It is no longer possible to establish an exact figure. What is beyond doubt is that on the day the Allies sent the Greeks to Smyrna in the name of protecting the population, the victims were above all defenceless Turks.

Stergiadis and the commission of inquiry

A few days after the landing the high commissioner, Aristeidis Stergiadis, arrived in Smyrna. A Cretan and a long-standing associate of Venizelos, he had been entrusted by the Prime Minister with the administration of the zone. Greek sources state that he took up office on 8 May by the Julian calendar, that is, on 21 May. Stergiadis at once proclaimed that all inhabitants were equal before the law. He brought the guilty before a court martial, which according to Greek figures convicted 74 people, among them 48 Greeks, 13 Turks and 12 Armenians, and he set up a commission, including representatives of the powers, to pay compensation. He imposed order with a ruthlessness that won him the respect of some Turks and Europeans but the hostility of the Greek inhabitants, the army and the clergy.

News of the massacre at Smyrna quickly reached Paris. The Allies set up an inter-Allied commission of inquiry chaired by the American Admiral Mark Bristol, with French, British and Italian generals. A Greek officer was allowed to take part in its work, but without a vote. The commission began work in August 1919, heard some 175 witnesses and submitted its report in October. It found that before the landing there had been no threat to the Christians in and around Smyrna that would have justified it, placed the blame for the bloodshed chiefly on the Greeks, and recommended replacing the Greek troops with Allied ones. Venizelos protested against the report. Some historians accuse the commission of bias, especially Bristol, who was known for his dislike of the Greeks, and point out that it passed over the crimes committed against Greeks that summer around Aydın. The Supreme Council did not publish the report and did not withdraw the Greeks; in the autumn of 1919 it merely set them a demarcation line they were forbidden to cross.

Samsun

The landing had consequences that nobody in Paris foresaw. Until May 1919 the Turks were beaten, war-weary and divided, and they accepted the occupation of Constantinople and the Arab provinces with resignation. The seizure of Smyrna by the Greeks, the Sultan’s former subjects, and the bloody scenes on the quayside on top of it, provoked universal outrage. Protest rallies were held in Constantinople. The largest, in Sultanahmet Square on 23 May, drew more than 100,000 people according to various estimates. In the countryside around Smyrna the first volunteer bands formed within days – the nucleus of the so-called National Forces (Kuva-yi Milliye) – and began firing on Greek outposts.

On the evening of 16 May the old steamer Bandırma sailed from Constantinople carrying General Mustafa Kemal, the hero of Gallipoli, whom the Sultan’s government had sent as inspector of the Ninth Army to oversee the disarmament of the troops in northern Anatolia. On 19 May he landed at Samsun. Instead of disarming the army, he began to organise resistance. The Turks regard that day as the beginning of their War of Independence and celebrate it as a national holiday. For the Greeks, and for some historians, the war began at Smyrna four days earlier, because it was the landing that set the two nations against each other.

The Greek units soon pushed beyond the city. In the last days of May they occupied Aydın, Manisa and other small towns in the river valleys, often against the wishes of the Allies. In June, in the small town of Menemen, Greek soldiers and local Christians killed many Turks, while in Aydın Turkish irregulars, who had driven the Greeks out of the town for a few days, massacred the inhabitants of the Greek quarter and burned it down, and the Greeks, on their return, responded in kind. From its first weeks the war was a war against the civilian population, in which both sides took revenge on the defenceless.

Significance

The landing at Smyrna provoked the first Turkish response to the plan to partition Anatolia and was at the same time that plan’s greatest mistake. The Allies wanted to impose peace on Turkey without any effort of their own, using Greece to do it. In August 1920 they signed the Treaty of Sèvres with the Sultan’s government, which placed Smyrna under Greek administration with the prospect of annexation to Greece after five years. But by then Mustafa Kemal’s Grand National Assembly was already governing in Ankara, and it did not recognise the treaty. In November 1920 Venizelos lost the election, King Constantine returned to Athens, and France and Italy came to terms with Kemal. Greece was left alone in Anatolia, supported now only by Lloyd George’s words. In 1921 the Greek army was halted on the Sakarya; in August 1922 the Turks broke through the front, and in September they entered Smyrna. Metropolitan Chrysostomos was murdered by a Turkish mob, and the Great Fire consumed the Greek and Armenian quarters. A period that had begun with a landing blessed by the metropolitan ended with the deaths of tens of thousands of people and the flight of hundreds of thousands.

The Treaty of Lausanne of July 1923 replaced Sèvres. Turkey was the only defeated state of the Great War to win a revision of the imposed peace by force of arms, and the population exchange resettled some 1.2 million Orthodox Christians from Anatolia to Greece and some 400,000 Muslims in the opposite direction. After three thousand years, the Greeks disappeared from the coast of Asia Minor. From the ruins of the empire arose Kemal Atatürk’s Republic of Turkey, secular and nationalist, which drew closer to Greece in the 1930s and remained neutral during the Second World War almost to the end.

Smyrna also has a significance that reaches beyond Greece and Turkey. It showed that the Paris peace, resting on the power of the victors rather than on their readiness to fight, could be overturned. The revisionists of the 1920s and 1930s learned this lesson. Adolf Hitler spoke admiringly of Kemal, who had built out of a defeated country a state capable of defying the dictates of the powers. As the historian Stefan Ihrig has shown, the German nationalist press was already holding Kemal up as a model in the early 1920s and treated his victory as proof that a victors’ dictate could be broken if the nation stood behind a resolute leader. The population exchange sanctioned at Lausanne, in turn, became a precedent: resolving national conflicts by resettling entire communities, which during and immediately after the Second World War affected millions of people in Central and Eastern Europe.