Paradise Lost

Before 1922, Smyrna was a major Ottoman port whose Greek, Armenian, Jewish, Muslim and European communities made it one of the eastern Mediterranean’s most commercially connected cities. Giles Milton reconstructs that society through family papers, diplomatic records and eyewitness testimony, then follows the consequences of the Greek occupation of western Anatolia and the Turkish nationalist counter-offensive. As the war turned against Greece, civilians crowded into Smyrna seeking safety.

Turkish forces entered the city in September 1922, and a vast fire destroyed much of the Greek and Armenian quarters while refugees were trapped along the waterfront. The book describes violence, evacuation and the hesitant response of Allied warships, alongside Asa Jennings’s effort to organise ships for survivors. It treats the catastrophe as the end of a diverse urban world and as part of the mass displacement that accompanied the collapse of empire and the formation of modern Greece and Turkey.