The Great Fire (66 page)

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The writer in Ernest Hemingway’s short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” said it was the first time he had seen “dead men wearing white ballet skirts and upturned shoes with pompons on them.” The work of Hemingway is dotted with references to the Greek-Turkish War though he did not arrive in Turkey until after the war was over in late September 1922, and even then he spent most of his time in a hotel room suffering from malaria. The aftermath of the Greek-Turkish War made Hemingway’s career as a newspaper correspondent and informed his work for the rest of his life.

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Pronounced Sev-dee-kyu-ee.

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Nancy Horton, at 102 years old, was living today in Athens as this book was written. She was interviewed several times.

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This summary of the life and experiences of Dr. Hatcherian, and those that follow, are taken from
An Armenian Doctor in Turkey
—
Garabed Hatcherian: My Smyrna Ordeal of 1922.
Dr. Hatcherian’s diary was a family heirloom, discovered by his granddaughter Dora Sakayan in 1991. Professor Sakayan, a scholar of applied linguistics, first published it in Armenian and subsequently in English (Arod Books, 1997). It is a rare and astonishing document.

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The building is now called the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.

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Gasoline Alley,
the popular comic strip, began in the
Chicago Tribune
in 1918 and featured a group of guys talking about cars.

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Singer Sewing Machine Co.

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The substance of this narrative comes from an interview in the collection of the Asian Minor Research Center in Athens.

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Arthur Godfrey, the future radio and television star, was a radioman on the
Litchfield
. (Levantine, memoir, Mrs. Lawrence)

^*
 
Like Rhodes, Hepburn may also have had trouble holding his alcohol. Much later in his career, the widow of Van Clear Black, the wealthy former owner of the
Baltimore Sun
and close friend of FDR, accused Hepburn of insulting her with a proposition while he was drunk at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington. Mrs. Black wrote several letters to Roosevelt about the incident, and the correspondence indicates that Roosevelt asked the secretary of the navy to get involved. Hepburn had also been a friend of the late Mr. Black. (President Franklin Roosevelt’s Office Files, 1933–45; Jessie Gary Black correspondence)

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It’s hard to know what American city Hepburn was thinking of. In 1920, Prohibition’s first year, Chicago was America’s most dangerous city. There were 229 killings for the year. That number was likely exceeded in a day in Smyrna.

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In his London trial testimony, Lamb said Britain had not decided on war, but Horton’s account is consistent with naval activity and other reports. It seems the truth was somewhere in between: the British anticipated war but had not settled on it.

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Mrs. Birge’s boys placed a plaque at her church in Bristol, Connecticut, upon her death in 1925. It reads, “Placed here by her boys, to whom she was a protector and friend in the hour of peril. . . .” Haroutoun Casaprian, one of the boys, graduated from the University of Virginia Law School in 1928.

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There are at least four first-person accounts of the evacuation of the Girls’ School, the YWCA, and the orphanage. They vary slightly in their details but agree on key elements.

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The State Department subsequently investigated charges that Barnes had shown a callous attitude toward the refugees, an assertion repeated by American sailors interviewed by Marjorie Housepian in her book
Smyrna 1922: The Destruction of a City
.

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Morris would become American’s first ambassador to Iran and the American chargé d’affaires in Berlin when Hitler declared war on the United States. Ribbentrop delivered the war note to Morris.

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In 2005, Standard Commercial merged with another tobacco company to form Alliance One. EK’s grandson is chairman of the board of directors.

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Ironical, perhaps: Balchova was the location of Agamemnon’s Baths, the place in legend to which the Greeks who fought at Troy were led by an oracle to heal their wounds.

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Bristol had tried unsuccessfully to suppress the report, which had been delivered to the consul general in Aleppo.

^*
 
An alternate description of their meeting is offered in a Turkish biography of Latife. In that account, she sent Kemal a note offering the house. This account is taken from Lord Kinross’s magisterial biography,
Attatürk
. It conforms with the account of Halide Edib who was with Kemal at the time.

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In later recounting the episode, Jennings wrote, “They insisted we guarantee their protection for their ships. We would not agree to go any further than the order and instructions we had received, but assured them that an American Destroyer would escort their ships into and out of the Smyrna harbor and that American officers and sailors would assist in loading the refugees.” In any event, it seems clear that Bristol had no knowledge of the negotiations. He certainly would not have agreed to providing protection to the Greek merchant ships.

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Shoedsack was an innovative documentary filmmaker who also went on to direct
King Kong
and
Mighty Joe Young
.

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Near East Relief sought to defray its expenses by selling tickets, but refugees also were evacuated without them. There are indications that some of the ticket sales were an illicit and unauthorized attempt to extract money from the refugees.

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The Vourla refugees included the family of George Seferis, who later would win the Nobel Prize for his poetry, which drew on his nostalgia for Anatolia. Seferis was at school in Europe at the time of the evacuation.

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The Selmiyeh Barracks was the place where Florence Nightingale, the founder of the modern nursing, had made her reputation during the Crimean War.

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Nansen was award the Nobel Peace Prize for his work with refugees after World War I.