Izmir

May 3, Izmir. By Gary

North along the coast is the city of Izmir, once called Smyrna, our next destination. Unfortunately we both have come down with flues, which hampers our ability to get up and get out and about in the morning. This too shall pass. Izmir is much bigger than Kusadasia, and is built around a very nice harbor. It too has ancient Roman ruins, and when the other two silted in, Smyrna continued on. Empires rise and fall, and after the Romans came the Ottoman Turks with a large empire over much of Arabia plus Turkey and other areas at various times.
By the 1900s, their empire was dwindling. The final straw came when Greece tried to re-take western Turkey through the port of Smyrna, known as the Grecco-Turkish war. They advanced many miles inland but were turned back by Turkish forces. The Greeks were Christian, as were the Armenians, who lived in villages throughout what is now Turkey, so the Armenians aligned themselves with the Greeks. Around this same time the Turks, who's empire was crumbling, desired an ethnically pure Turkish homeland, without Armenians in their midst. What we know as the Armenian Genocide. Turkey does not acknowledge this, but calls it a 'misunderstanding', or 'relocation'. Yeah, relocated to the Syrian desert to die of thirst. Kristen's great grandfather emigrated just before, in 1915, and her grandmother survived through it and came to the US in 1920, although she didn't leave through Smyrna.

Greeks and Armenians were herded down to the port at Smyrna and crowded onto the beach. Americans, French and British were brought onto their country's ships in the harbor. Then the fires started and the Greek and Armenian quarters of the city were engulfed in flame. The heat was unbearable and refugees waded out into the sea to escape. Many drowned. Some tried to get to the foreign ships but were turned back. Eventually aid came and refugees were loaded onto ships and taken elsewhere.

We walked the seaside malecon where the refugees huddled. We rested in the shade of trees in the park that had been built where the neighborhood was burned. We visited museums that glossed over atrocities and glorified the heroics. We had conversations with people here who dismissed the events. We rode ferries across the harbor and looked back at the view the departing refugees would've had.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Even the Best of Plans Can Be Disrupted

 The title says it all.  We've waited for what seemed like an opportune time.  We have the houses sold and most of our "stuff" sold off, donated or put into storage.  What we take with us, we take as backpacks.  Imagine that, our entire world of possessions in a backpack.  Well, we don't really have to imagine it because two years ago we spent four months taking cruise ships as transportation to South America and to Spain and Africa.  We found we had enough "stuff" to either enjoy a hot-tub on a cruise ship, or enough winter clothing to manage a trip into snowy areas, enough to hike a mountain or just the right accoutrements for a formal dinner invitation by the city president of a Spanish exclave (Melilla). So packing is not our problem.  Getting our responsibilities reduced by divesting ourselves of houses (and lawn mowers, cars, hot water heaters, heating bills, etc.,) has not been part of the problem.  Money to travel is not a problem....
Read more

Prelude to a Journey

All great journeys start with a small disturbance in the ordinary.  It is a question that flickers in the depths of the imagination and a door that is left slightly ajar in the mind. Sometimes it arises like a curiosity trying to clear its throat Sometimes its an incessant restlessness tapping at the hands of time on a watch.  A great journey begins at the exact moment that staying put becomes the stranger choice. And that moment of wanderlust has again arrived. ..... Pull out an old fashioned globe of our planet.  For this exercise, a Google map will not be sufficient.  It is sometimes necessary to hold the tangible in our hand in order to begin to imagine the inconceivable with any sense of understanding.  Now that you've pulled out your globe, or, in the case of you, the dear reader, your virtually imagined globe, spin it and drop a finger at random at some point, stopping the spin and igniting your imagination.  Look at where your finger landed and read...
Read more

Some Surprises....

Image
 April 21 Two days out of Tenerife, in the Canary Islands. Sometime during the night we transited through the straits of Gibraltar, anarrow passage only a few miles wide that separates the Atlantic and Mediterranean Oceans. On either side of our ship, they say about 3:30 in the morning or so, we would have been able to look out the port (left) side of our ship and see Spain, while a glance out the starboard (right) side would have offered us a view of Africa, specifically the dry and arid lands of Morocco. Now that we are in Europe, we are one step closer to the lands where my great grandparents and grandparents hailed from on my father's side. In five days time we will disembark in Kusadasi, Turkey for the beginning of our land adventure. To say that my feelings similar to that of the average tourist would be the understatement of the year. I'm literally working my way back to the villages they once called home prior to the genocide that saw 1.5 million people literally e...
Read more