The destruction of Smyrna, and the refuge Cyprus gave its survivors

Local cyprusGreecehistoryTop Newsturkey The destruction of Smyrna, and the refuge Cyprus gave its survivors Smyrni Kaigetai Id 1534877 Relevant News Things to do on Monday, August 31 31 August 2026 The destruction of Smyrna, and the refuge Cyprus gave its survivors 31 August 2026 IBAN no longer needed for everyday transfers under new Cyprus payment plan 31 August 2026 newsroom 31 August 2026 FacebookXWhatsAppEmailPrintViber By Dr Sotiroula Vasileiou The poet Giorgos Seferis, born in Smyrna, left the city with his family in 1914, eight years before its destruction. He never lived through the catastrophe itself, but it marked him for life. In one poem, he conjures a horseman bringing fire, a household torn apart, and a world left with no one guilty and no witnesses, only smoke, an image of atrocity so total that even memory of it seems to have been erased. Thousands of other Smyrniots were not so fortunate: they were killed or burned alive along with their homes, schools and churches, or drowned, or died of disease on the ships and in the camps that received them. “Smyrna is burning” On August 27, 1922, the first irregular Turkish cavalry entered Smyrna, followed by regular Turkish troops. Metropolitan Chrysostomos was martyred, handed over to the mob. On August 31, after violence, massacres, destruction and looting, the city once known as the priceless pearl of the East was consumed by fire. By the time the blaze was brought under control, the toll stood at roughly 50,000 dead, 70,000 homes and shops burned, and hundreds of other buildings damaged. The 30-metre bell tower of the Metropolitan Church of Agia Fotini was blown up with dynamite. Greek newspaper headlines at the time captured the scale of the horror, Smyrna in flames, the Metropolitan butchered, Christians slaughtered in the streets, while later editions accused France and Italy of celebrating amid the carnage and condemned what they called Britain’s shameful moral bankruptcy for standing aside. In the days that followed, thousands of Greek and Armenian men of military age were forced onto death marches into the interior. Most of the remaining survivors, an estimated 300,000 people, reached Greece as refugees, thanks above all to the humanity and efforts of Asa Kent Jennings, a small-statured American Methodist pastor. The Greek authorities in the city had long since left, and there was no room for Ottoman Christian subjects aboard the Allied ships still in the harbour. Jennings deserves to be remembered. In another poem, Seferis wonders aloud whether humanity is measured by those who cry out or bury themselves in their own affairs, or by those who actually carry life forward, a question that Jennings answered in practice. After making contact with Kemal to buy time, he pressed the Greek government, almost by force of will, into sending ships to rescue the refugees. Cyprus, a refuge for Smyrniots and other Asia Minor refugees By the end of 1922, roughly 2,400 refugees from Asia Minor had reached Cyprus. The French steamer Pierre Loti sailed from Smyrna on September 11, 1922, carrying 327 Greek refugees. To board (the ship was also carrying French nationals bound for Marseille), each refugee paid 16 pounds, plus additional payments to the crew. One refugee arrived without fingers; Turkish captors had cut them off after robbing him. Cypriots who had lived comfortably in Smyrna arrived on the British steamer King George, described at the time as half-naked and lacking everything. According to survivors, the killing continued even as people fled. Smyrna’s streets were said to be filled with decomposing corpses picked over by dogs, raising fears of epidemic disease. A Cypriot eyewitness, writing in the newspaper Foni tis Kyprou, described thousands of Greek and Armenian women and children dying as fire swept through the schools and churches where they had sought shelter, among them, he wrote, some who were at least spared by “no profane, barbaric hand.” Other women, he recorded, became victims of assault in temples and institutions, and mothers threw themselves into the sea still holding their infants, all in a city once known as a haven of grace and culture. Even amid this, the press of the time also recorded the determination of survivors to begin again. Among the refugees, it noted, was a pianist, Miss Aigyptiadou, who had trained and performed in Italy, America and Smyrna, and who had already decided to settle in Cyprus and take on students. Also noted was the arrival of the Panionios discus thrower Dimitris Karabatis, holder of the Pan-Hellenic record in his event. On September 14, 1922, Archbishop Kyrillos III issued an encyclical expressing grief and sympathy for what he called the martyred Hellenism of Ionia, calling for memorial services and ordering collections of money, food and clothing for the destitute, sick and homeless victims. Cypriot solidarity was both moral, expressed in emotionally charged public writing, and practical, taking the form of donations, charity cinema screenings, and help with work, food and housing. Turkish brutality was condemned in the Cypriot press, as was what was described as the disgraceful moral failure of the Allied powers. The Varosha-born satirist Zacharias Sotiriou, writing in his paper Pyx Lax, mocked the Allied powers’ quiet self-interest and warned that no one would be spared what was coming. He also offered a set of bitter definitions of the age: Greece as the eternal victim of both foreigners and its own; the “rights of nationalities” as a lure the powerful dangled before the wronged; self-interest as the only power that truly ruled; and Kemal as the embodiment of Turkish savagery. The Nicosia-born Ioannis Perdios, writing in the satirical paper Mastigion, pictured Smyrna sold off and betrayed, and imagined the tide rising in disgust at those who had stained their own honour with blood. In 1930, the Greek-Turkish Friendship Pact sealed the uprooting of the refugees and ended any real prospect of compensation; the offsetting of Greek and Turkish properties against one another was denounced at the time as an arbitrary confiscation. With Cyprus now their home, the refugees integrated and, in many cases, thrived. Eleni Aigyptiadou, having taught at the American Academy of Nicosia, founded her own Music Academy in 1933. The memory of those roots, and the need to pass it on, has remained non-negotiable. In the immediate aftermath of the catastrophe, the Limassol-born writer Dimitrios Dimitriadis, known as Dorian, predicted that Smyrna would become a legend carried forward by its surviving inhabitants, who would go on rebuilding the city in memory wherever they found themselves. A century later, the Cyprus-based poet Mona Savvidou-Theodoulou, herself of Asia Minor descent, wrote of a Smyrniot goldsmith’s hands still shaping the silverwork of the icon of Panagia tou Kykkou, and of tracing the map of the catastrophe through place names that now wear different names, a wound, she suggested, to be approached with respect, and a memory to be kept, like an open oyster guarding its pearl. From Smyrna to Kyrenia (1922, 1974) On August 16, 1974, Dinos Koutsoumis, editor-in-chief of the Alexandria-based Greek newspaper Tachydromos, drew a pointed comparison between British conduct at Kyrenia and at Smyrna. As he described it, a British helicopter carrier stationed off Kyrenia sent launches ashore that picked up only foreign nationals, turning away local women and children seeking safety from Turkish fire; he wrote that not a hair of an Englishman was to be harmed while Turkish tanks bore down on the Cypriots left behind. He argued the scene echoed Smyrna, where the Allied powers had likewise evacuated only their own nationals, and called it another dark chapter in the way great powers treat the small. Testimonies from Kyrenia confirm the account: the vessel in question was the helicopter carrier HMS Hermes, which during the first wave of the 1974 invasion picked up only British and other foreign nationals, a stance that indirectly condemned many local residents, killed or taken captive, to death or torture. The Smyrna-born writer Maria Peratikou-Kokaraki, a refugee from Karavas, wrote in 2018 of anxiety rising through a refugee’s body like wind through cloth, naming Smyrna and Kyrenia, Cappadocia and Famagusta, Romylia and Morphou in the same breath: pain and uprooting, repeating themselves across a century. Dr Sotiroula Vasileiou holds a PhD in History from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. Subscribe to our Newsletter Latest News Things to do on Monday, August 31 IBAN no longer needed for everyday transfers under new Cyprus payment plan Survivors describe “battle for survival” on sinking ship “Is my wife alive?” — anguish grows as Kyrenia search resumes Hospitals discharge shipwreck survivors as search for 18 missing continues 35 degree peak, mostly clear skies on Monday Captain and seven crew members arrested following Kyrenia ferry disaster Follow en.philenews on Google News and be the first to know all the news about Cyprus and the world.