The Great Fire (65 page)

Smyrna was a plain of destruction after the fire. The fire began in the Armenian Quarter and spread west and north, taking with it churches, homes, businesses, hotels and warehouses. The value of the losses reached billions of dollars in today’s terms. American tobacco companies lost millions of dollars. The number of dead has never been firmly established. (
Courtesy of A. Karamitsos
)

Smyrna, in better times. This postcard from the early 1900s shows Smyrna during the Belle Epoch, a period of prosperity and mostly tolerant multiculturalism. The Sporting Club was one of several private clubs along the Quay. (
Courtesy George Poulimenos
)

The campus of International College in Paradise. The college preparatory school was built largely with a gift from Louise Kennedy, widow of an American railroad magnate. Its faculty came from America’s best universities. (
Izmir Ahmet Piristina City Archives and Museum
)

The USS
Scorpion
, Admiral Bristol’s retreat and flagship. It was the scene of regular parties and formal luncheons for Bristol’s officers and guests. It was typically moored at Therapia, a resort on the Bosphorus. (
Thomas Kinkaid Collection, The Naval History and Heritage Command
)

Admiral Mark Bristol (
third from right
), with Mrs. Bristol to his right, leading one his outings with his Constantinople set, in this instance to a town near the mouth of the Danube on the Black Sea. To the far left, Lt. Commander Henry E. Knauss of the USS
Simpson
and to the far right Charles Sweeny, soldier of fortune,
New York World
reporter, and reputed French spy. Ernest Hemingway was among Sweeny’s admirers, and Sweeny was a pallbearer at Hemingway’s funeral. (
Thomas Kinkaid Collection, The Naval History and Heritage Command
)

The Jennings family in 1931: Willard, Bertha, and Asa W., standing left to right, and Amy and Asa. Jennings’s ill health led to a heart attack and early death, at age fifty-five. (
Roger Jennings
)

Professor Caleb Lawrence of International College in Paradise. Lawrence, born in Wilton, Maine, was chairman of the American Relief Committee in Smyrna. He had long service in Turkey and served with the YMCA in France during WWI. (
Caleb Lawrence Papers
)

E.O. Jacob was the YMCA director in Smyrna who had opposed Jennings’s transfer to the city and pushed him aside during the relief operation.

Halsey Powell as a Navy cadet. He entered the Naval Academy in 1900 at age sixteen and had studied Greek and Latin at Centre College in Kentucky. (
U.S. Naval Academy
)

Latife Hanum, an ardent Turkish patriot who provided a home for Mustapha Kemal in Smyrna and later married him. They were divorced two years later. She was a cultured woman from one of Smyrna’s leading Moslem families, spoke numerous languages, played the piano and had attended the Sorbonne. (
Izmir Ahmet Piristina City Archives and Museum
)