The Thread (10 page)

When he came back to his home city on leave, Leonidas found he had no such dislike of Irini Street, and seemed to prefer it to the area in the city centre where his own squalid apartment was situated. Pavlina always welcomed him with a warm meal, Olga with her smile and Dimitri with unconcealed delight. The little boy adored his uncle, who would spend hours singing him nursery rhymes or performing magic tricks, making toffees or coins appear from nowhere. There were squeals of excitement and laughter whenever Uncle Leonidas appeared.

There was an overall rebuilding plan for the entire city that was being drawn up by a Frenchman, Ernest Hébrard. It specified that the small streets would be replaced by boulevards and grand buildings. These would be much more in keeping with the scale of things that merchants such as Komninos aspired to, but while he celebrated the transformation of his city, the Muslims and Jews he shared it with did not. The Moreno family saw with dismay that the area of twisted lanes south of Egnatia Street where many Jews had lived was not going to be rebuilt on the old model and most of the Jewish community was to be pushed towards the outer edge of the city. It was the same for the areas of the city where many Muslims had lived. They were being shunted away from the centre too.

Through the sheer good fortune of having been spared the fire, the quarter where Irini Street was situated was outside the area for replanning. It may have been overcrowded, but it was a harmonious way of life that suited its residents, and none of them ever wanted it to change.

Konstantinos completed the rebuilding of the warehouse, and even before the first anniversary of the fire it was functional again, with a monthly income as high as it had been before – and even greater profits. He would now commence work on the showroom.

In November 1918, the war which had drawn in nations from every corner of the globe came to an end. The Greek divisions fighting on the Macedonian front had helped break German and Bulgarian resistance and the general collapse of Germany had followed. When the Armistice was signed and the victors began to carve up the sprawling Ottoman Empire, Eleftherios Venizelos was hoping that the Greek contribution would be recognised. For many years, he had nurtured a great dream, his ‘
megali idea
’: to reclaim huge areas of Asia Minor from the Turks and to re-establish the Byzantine Empire. At the time, there were over one million Greeks living in various locations across Asia Minor, many of them in Constantinople. A central part of Venizelos’ dream was to recapture this city, which had been taken from the Greeks in 1453.

As the terms of a treaty were being drawn up, Venizelos was hoping for control of Constantinople and Smyrna, a city on the west coast of Asia Minor. For many Muslims in Thessaloniki it was an uncomfortable time. The Allies had beaten their fellow Muslims in Turkey and they quietly wished that the Ottoman Empire had been victorious.

Before a peace treaty with Germany could be signed, however, Venizelos’ ambition brought about a dangerous new mission for the Greek army. In May 1919, while his brother was counting his profits from the trading of wool and khaki, and his little nephew was playing hide and seek with his friends in Irini Street, Leonidas Komninos was heading towards Asia Minor. With the support of French, British and American ships, twenty thousand Greek troops occupied Smyrna, which was regarded as one of the finest ports in the Aegean.

The ostensible reason for the invasion was to protect the city from the Italians, who had landed just south of it, but Venizelos also claimed to be protecting the hundreds of thousands of Greeks who lived there from the Turks. Five years earlier, nearly a million Armenian Christians had been forced from their homes in Asia Minor and marched barefoot into the desert to die. There was concern that the Greeks who had inhabited the region for generations might meet the same fate, and such thoughts strengthened the motivation of Leonidas Komninos and his men.

The occupation was carried out with relatively little bloodshed (the Turkish commander had been told not to resist), but some atrocities were committed and several hundred Turks were slaughtered.

The following summer, Leonidas’ regiment marched successfully eastwards. The objective was to extend the area of occupation close to Smyrna. As the Turkish Nationalist movement grew, resistance became increasingly fierce, but nevertheless the Greeks succeeded in occupying most of western Asia Minor, systematically destroying Turkish villages and exterminating their inhabitants as they passed through.

The taking of Smyrna had triggered a wave of nationalism among the Turks and many of them dreamed of revenge. They now retaliated by slaughtering thousands of Greeks, including many who lived near the Black Sea. Brutality on a shocking scale was perpetrated by both sides, and villages and towns were wiped out.

During this time, Leonidas came home just once on leave. He visited his brother at the warehouse, but spent most of his week sitting quietly in the house in Irini Street. Olga found him changed. He seemed to have aged ten years in only one.

There was one way in which he did seem the same, however. In spite of the fact that he was exhausted he still had time and energy for little Dimitri. On this visit he had brought him a hoop and he kept his nephew amused for hours by trying to teach him over and over again how to balance it.

In early 1921, Leonidas’ regiment was part of a new offensive. This time the aim was to reach Ankara. Although the Greeks were defeated in two significant battles, they managed to occupy some strategic positions in central Asia Minor and by the summer it appeared that victory over the entire region was finally within their grasp. Even at the time, Leonidas considered it an error not to press on to victory but the order was to halt and the regiment had no choice but to obey. Just as he feared, the Turks used this time to organise a new line of defence on the other side of the river Sakarya, one hundred kilometres west of Ankara.

The Greeks eventually advanced to the river. With their superior numbers, it might have been an easy victory, but after a bloody twenty-one-day battle against an enemy that occupied positions on higher ground, they began to run out of ammunition and had to retreat, withdrawing to the lines they had held two months earlier.

Even though they had not been entirely defeated, morale among the men was low and within the senior ranks many, including Leonidas, campaigned for withdrawal westwards towards Smyrna. Others persisted in their fantasy of taking Constantinople and so Greek troops were obliged to stay and defend their positions. For almost a year, there was a stalemate.

Meanwhile the Turks were busy organising their troops for a final battle. They were not interested in any kind of settlement with the Greeks. The man in charge of their campaign had been born in Thessaloniki, only a few hundred metres from Leonidas himself. Forty years old, the ice-blue-eyed Kemal Ataturk was now leading the Nationalist movement in Asia Minor, and with a government established in Ankara, he was hellbent on crushing the Greeks and driving them back to the Mediterranean.

At the end of August 1922, Ataturk attacked the Greeks’ defensive positions and within a few days, half of the invading soldiers had been captured or killed.

The defeated men had no time to dig the sun-baked earth, and fields lay strewn with unburied dead, many of them stripped of their boots and weapons. Clouds of buzzing, blue-black flies hovered menacingly, waiting for the vultures to have their fill. There were no flowers or funeral rites, and the Greek heroes of battle lay unmourned and, before long, unrecognisable.

Survivors fled westwards towards Smyrna, intent on self-preservation. Many of them paused to commit appalling atrocities en route, raping, massacring and looting, before razing whole towns to the ground. In one Muslim village, all the inhabitants – men, women and children – were locked inside the mosque before it was ignited.

In the first week of September, thousands of Greek soldiers, Leonidas among them, arrived in Smyrna hoping to escape from the country by boat. Hot on their heels came the Turkish army, aflame with desire for revenge. Three years had passed since the Turks had lost the city, but they had always planned to take it back.

L
EONIDAS LAY SLUMPED
against the wall of a grain store. His head had fallen forward onto his chest and his tattered uniform was smeared with dried blood. Filthy, bruise-blackened toes protruded through the ends of his boots.

A few hundred yards away, a woman and her daughter turned into the street, fresh and clean in their pale summer frocks. The little girl skipped, and chatted, as sweet as rose petal syrup, looking about her eager and curious. She knew something was happening in her city but she did not know what.

Close to her breast, the mother also carried a baby, dressed in matching cotton lawn, embroidered with pink daisies.

The past few days had brought rapid change to their beautiful city. In spite of recent events in the rest of Turkey, Smyrna had been relatively carefree since the turbulent few days of 1919 when the Greek troops had taken it over, and its residents were curiously oblivious to the upheavals taking place elsewhere in Asia Minor. The recent warm summer days had seen people on the streets selling their harvests of figs, apricots and pomegranates, and bargains had been struck for opium, satin and frankincense in a dozen different languages by people in an array of native dress from turbaned Persians to fez-topped Turks. In the previous month the opera had sold out every night, and open-air cafés had been full, their customers serenaded by string quartets.

Only a week ago this street had been suffused with the aroma of jasmine and freshly baked bread from a nearby bakery. Now it stank of unwashed men. A few days before, following the sudden arrival of thousands of Greek soldiers, waves of Greek civilian refugees had also begun to pour in from the interior. Like the soldiers, they were fleeing from the Turkish army and were destitute.

The population of Smyrna was now fearful, especially when they heard a rumour that the Turkish cavalry was on the outskirts of the city.

‘Come on,
agapi mou
, let’s walk a bit faster,’ the young mother said with suppressed alarm.

As they passed, she cast a sideways glance at the row of Greek soldiers who lay there, all identically positioned, their heads uniformly angled, legs splayed. They looked as though they had fallen before a firing squad. Their state of semi-consciousness was the result of a relentless thousand-kilometre march, with few supplies except those they had pillaged from the towns and settlements along their route. They were comatose with exhaustion.

It was then that the woman noticed they were the object of the soldiers’ stares.

‘We have to get home. Now!’ she said, almost breaking into a run and pulling the child along. The uncanny silence of the streets, the dead bodies that seemed to be stirring to life, the lurking dogs – none of this was normal for Smyrna and she was disturbed beyond all feelings of fear. Her senses were on alert, like the mangy hounds in the shadows. Both of them were aware of an unknown, but imminent danger.

Meanwhile, in the dark space of Leonidas’ mind, memories and hallucinations swirled in a devilish dance. Though he did not yet know it, the foul recollections of what he had seen and perpetrated would never be washed from his mind. Sweet dreams would never come again. With his few surviving men, he had arrived on the outskirts of Smyrna a few days earlier, hoping to sail home to Thessaloniki. British, French, Italian and American warships basked in the harbour, but there was not a Greek flag in sight. They were too late. The Greek ships carrying thousands of their fellow soldiers had departed.

Exhausted from their journey, they had found somewhere to rest in a quiet street. There would be a solution but for now, on these lumpy cobbles, they succumbed to troubled sleep.

Several hours later, a grey blanket settled over Leonidas. It was not like the comforting counterpane that his mother used to spread over him for winter warmth. It was a layer of dark smoke, creeping up his nostrils and down into his lungs. He dreamed of the fire that had destroyed his family’s business. His recollection of the temperature on that day and the strength of the blaze were so vivid. And then came the screams.

‘
Fire! Fire! The city is on fire!
’

The cries awoke him and he realised that the acrid, bitter stench of smoke was not just in his dream. The situation in Smyrna had been relatively ordered, given that the city’s population had swollen by several hundred thousand in the past few days, but chaos now took hold and shook the city like an earthquake. People ran through the streets screaming and crying. Fear was in the eyes of both wealthy and poor. The city had caught light.

All the men leaped to their feet. Panic swept away exhaustion. Streams of people swarmed past them towards the sea, a few with babes in arms, but most of them with nothing. There were groups of children who had disgorged from schools and orphanages, and a wealthy woman who had grabbed the most valuable coat she had and now stood incongruously dressed in sable. The refugees who had come into the city in the past few days clung on to their bundles of possessions with which they had already trekked for hundreds, if not thousands, of kilometres. All of them were heading in the same direction. To the harbour.

The Armenian quarter of Smyrna had been torched by the Turkish cavalry, who now rode through the city wreaking havoc and destruction. Greeks hiding in their homes would listen with terror from an upper floor as their doors were beaten down and their rooms ransacked. They would then smell petroleum being sprinkled about before their homes were ignited. The choice was this: to reveal their presence and be cut to pieces or to be incinerated and die in the fumes.

Stories travelled as fast as the fire: of rape and mutilation, of rows of heads from decapitated women on stakes, of rats feasting on entrails. Whatever crimes the Greeks had committed, the Turks were intent on exacting revenge a hundredfold. The only real hope was to get out to sea. Smyrna was melting around them.