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The Burning of Smyrna and the Exodus of the Anatolian Greeks

1922–1923 · Balkans, Anatolia & the Caucasus

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What happened

The Greek army's front in Anatolia broke in August 1922 and Turkish forces entered Smyrna on 9 September. Massacres in the Armenian quarter were reported by foreign consuls and missionaries, and on 13 September a fire destroyed the Armenian and Greek quarters while the Turkish quarter was largely spared. Hundreds of thousands of civilians were driven onto the quayside and were eventually taken off by Allied and chartered shipping, about 213,000 according to American relief figures, while men of military age were separated and marched into the interior in labour columns from which few returned. The fire's origin is disputed: Greek, Armenian and several foreign eyewitnesses attributed it to Turkish troops, while Turkish accounts attribute it to retreating Greek and Armenian arsonists. The exodus from Smyrna was the largest single episode in a movement that brought about 1.2 million Orthodox refugees into Greece and was formalised by the compulsory exchange agreed at Lausanne in January 1923.

Parties

Turkish nationalist forces entered Smyrna in September 1922 after the collapse of the Greek army in Anatolia; the Greek and Armenian quarters burned and the surviving Christian population was evacuated or deported

Disputed

The denominator

The Ottoman census of 1914 recorded 1,729,738 Greeks in the empire; the Ecumenical Patriarchate claimed closer to 2.5 million, and modern estimates cluster between 1.6 and 2 million. The figure used is the Ottoman count, which is the most systematic enumeration available and is generally treated as a floor.

Where the baseline comes from

• Greeks in Turkey — Wikipediaopen-edited
• Population exchange between Greece and Turkey — Wikipediaopen-edited

On the death toll

Contemporary estimates vary enormously. An early dispatch put deaths at about 1,000 with unknown further losses in the burning districts; the American consul George Horton estimated at least 100,000 dead, and an American relief official was quoted at 120,000. Population comparisons before and after leave roughly 190,000 people unaccounted for, but an unknown share of those were deported inland or evacuated elsewhere rather than killed. Deaths came from massacre, from the fire, from drowning at the quayside and from the deportation of men into the interior.

Documented forms of violence

Massacres, the separation and deportation of men of military age, and the destruction of the Christian quarters were reported at the time by foreign consuls, naval officers and missionaries whose accounts are collected by the Greek Genocide Resource Center.

Movements mapped

• Smyrna quayside -> evacuation to Piraeus and the Aegean islands213,480
• Eastern Thrace -> flight into Greek Macedonia and Thrace

Countries touched, on present-day borders

Turkey, Greece, Bulgaria

Related entries

• Overlaps with: The Persecution and Deportation of the Ottoman Greeks (the Greek Genocide)
  After the fix, the 1922 flight is counted only in the Smyrna entry, and the 1,000,000 displaced in the genocide entry is replaced by about 775,000 for 1913-18. The remaining overlap is in people, not in counts: survivors of the 1914-18 deportations who fled again in 1922 appear in both entries as two separate displacements. Deaths overlap for 1922 (the Smyrna massacre and the deportation of men inland fall within the genocide entry's 1914-23 death range); the size of that overlap is not separable.

Sources

• Greek Genocide Resource Center: The Smyrna catastrophe, September 1922 (documentation and eyewitness accounts)press
• MERIP (Middle East Research and Information Project): The Greek-Turkish Population Exchangepress
• Encyclopaedia Britannica: Greco-Turkish warsreference