On Saturday 9th September, 1922, the victorious Turkish cavalry rode into Smyrna, the richest and most cosmopolitan city in the Ottoman Empire. What happened over the next two weeks must rank as one of the most compelling human dramas of the twentieth century. Almost two million people were caught up in a disaster of truly epic proportions. PARADISE LOST is told with the narrative verve that has made Giles Milton a bestselling historian. It unfolds through the memories of the survivors, many of them interviewed for the first time, and the eyewitness accounts of those who found themselves caught up in one of the greatest catastrophes of the modern age.

On one level Smyrna 1922 is a modern Greek tragedy replete with the elements of irony and horror. The Greeks, one of the victorious Allied powers during World War 1, were betrayed by their allies and their army driven into the sea at Smyrna by the forces of Mustapha Kemal, an insurgent leader to whom his former enemies had given considerable covert help. There followed an enactment of the week of orgy after the fall of Constantinople in 1453; pillage, rape and massacre culminating, in this instance, in the spectacular destruction by fire of Smyrna (now Izmir), considered an infidel city by the Turks because of its predominantly Greek character and population. Dobkin's study is a definitive work concerning a debacle deliberately soft pedalled and almost expunged from the memory of modern day man in the words of Henry Miller in The Colossus of Maroussi.

"Ships of Mercy" reveals the true heroes of Smyrna, forgotten by history. It is based on more than ten years of research by Christos Papoutsy, who traveled around the globe to document the rescue of hundreds of thousands of Greek refugees on the Smyrna quay in September 1922.

September 1905. At the heart of the Ottoman Empire, in the ancient city of Smyrna, Scheherazade is born to an opium-dazed mother. At the very same moment, an Indian spy sails into the golden-hued, sycamore-scented city with a secret mission from the British Empire. When he leaves, 17 years later, it will be to the smell of kerosene and smoke as the city, and its people, are engulfed in flames. Told through the intertwining fates of a Levantine, a Greek, a Turkish and an Armenian family, this unforgettable novel reveals a city, and a culture, now lost to time. 'Fiercely intelligent, finely textured and achingly beautiful' Elif Shafak 'Utterly delightful' Buki Papillon 'This rich tale of love and loss gives voice to the silenced, and adds music to their histories' Maureen Freely, Chair, English PEN 'A must-read' Ayse Arman, Hu ̈rriyet 'A symphony of literature' Açik Radyo 'Defne Suman is a story-teller. She tells the story of how love, emotions and identities are influenced by socio-political events of a lifetime' Cumhuriyet Newspaper 'A wonderfully braided story of family secrets set in the magical city of Smyrna, told in luminous prose' Lou Ureneck, author of Smyrna, September 1922

The final years of the Ottoman Empire were catastrophic ones for its non-Turkish, non-Muslim minorities. From 1913 to 1923, its rulers deported, killed, or otherwise persecuted staggering numbers of citizens in an attempt to preserve “Turkey for the Turks,” setting a modern precedent for how a regime can commit genocide in pursuit of political ends while largely escaping accountability. While this brutal history is most widely known in the case of the Armenian genocide, few appreciate the extent to which the Empire’s Assyrian and Greek subjects suffered and died under similar policies. This comprehensive volume is the first to broadly examine the genocides of the Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks in comparative fashion, analyzing the similarities and differences among them and giving crucial context to present-day calls for recognition.

This powerful and moving historical novel is inspired by the written recollections and the memories that haunted the author's father, Nicias Aridjis,--a captain in the Greek army, who returned from the fields of battle to Smyrna, 50 miles southeast of his hometown of Tire, in 1922 just as Turkish forces captured this cosmopolitan port city. Smyrna in Flames , by the internationally acclaimed Mexican writer and poet Homero Aridjis, lays bare the unimaginable events and horrors that took place for nine days between September 13 and 22--known as the Smyrna Catastrophe. After capturing Smyrna, Turkish forces went on a rampage, torturing and massacring tens of thousands of Greeks and Armenians and devastating the city--in particular, the Greek and Armenian quarters--by deliberately setting disastrous fires. After years of fighting in World War I and the Greco-Turkish War, Nicias enters a Smyrna under siege. He desperately moves through the city in search of Eurydice, the love of his life whom he left behind. Wandering the streets, the sounds of hopelessness commingle in his mind with echoes of the ancient Greek poets who sang of the city's past glories. Images and voices, suggestive of Homeric ghosts adrift in a catastrophic scenario, conjure up a mythological, historical, geographical quest that, in the manner of classical epic, hovers between the heroic and the horrible, illustrating the depths and depravity of the human soul. Making his way from district to district, evading capture, Nicias observes the last vestiges of normal life and witnesses unspeakable horrors committed by roaming Turkish forces and partisans who are randomly abusing and raping Greek and Armenian women and torturing and murdering their men. What he experiences is literally a living hell unfolding before his eyes. As Nicias passes familiar buildings, cafes, and churches, his mind and soul fill with nostalgia for his earlier life and the promise of love. Fortunately for the reader, the brutal and bloodthirsty scenes of the Smyrna Catastrophe are leavened by the voice of this "visionary poet of lyrical bliss, crystalline concentrations and infinite spaces," as Kenneth Rexroth has described Aridjis. His portrayal of a genocide-in-progress floods our senses, turning these chaotic scenes into a poignant drama. At the very end, aboard one of the last ships out of Smyrna before its final fall, Nicias scours the throng of thousands of desperate Greeks and Armenians pressing forward to escape on already overcrowded ships. Suddenly Turkish forces move in to shoot and stab, and, overwhelmed by the all-pervasive tragedy, Nicias abandons Smyrna and Asia Minor forever. Nicias is not a historian, he is an eyewitness and a survivor, and while the book is written in the context of his personal experiences, knowledge and conjectures of the events of the time, Nicias's son Homero has enriched the narrative with plausible fictional episodes and reports by journalists and written testimony by men and women who lived through the Smyrna Catastrophe.

A Financial Times Book of the Year A Foreign Affairs Book of the Year A Spectator Book of the Year “A landmark contribution to the study of these epochal events.” —Times Literary Supplement “Brilliantly researched and written...casts a careful eye upon the ghastly events that took place in the final decades of the Ottoman empire, when its rulers decided to annihilate their Christian subjects...Hitler and the Nazis gleaned lessons from this genocide that they then applied to their own efforts to extirpate Jews.” —Jacob Heilbrun, The Spectator Between 1894 and 1924, three waves of violence swept across Anatolia, targeting the region’s Christian minorities. By 1924, the Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks, once nearly a quarter of the population, had been reduced to 2 percent. Most historians have treated these waves as distinct, isolated events, and successive Turkish governments presented them as an unfortunate sequence of accidents. The Thirty-Year Genocide is the first account to show that all three were actually part of a single, continuing, and intentional effort to wipe out Anatolia’s Christian population. Despite the dramatic swing from the Islamizing autocracy of the sultan to the secularizing republicanism of the post–World War I period, the nation’s annihilationist policies were remarkably constant, with continual recourse to premeditated mass killing, homicidal deportation, forced conversion, and mass rape. And one thing more was a constant: the rallying cry of jihad. While not justified under the teachings of Islam, the killing of two million Christians was effected through the calculated exhortation of the Turks to create a pure Muslim nation. “A subtle diagnosis of why, at particular moments over a span of three decades, Ottoman rulers and their successors unleashed torrents of suffering.” —Bruce Clark, New York Times Book Review