The Great Fire Read Online Free PDF

founding churches and the ancient city where Mary, the mother of Jesus, had lived out her life, St. Paul had disputed with its residents over their worship of Artemis, and some years earlier Antony had spent a lively summer with his Greek queen of Egypt, Cleopatra. For Jennings, the assignment to Smyrna was an answered prayer—it was getting him closer to his dream, a chance to see Jerusalem.
    As Jennings’s steamer approached Pelican Point at the entrance to Smyrna’s harbor and churned its way through the blue-green water, he saw Smyrna bustling and gleaming along its two-mile waterfront, its Quay lined with mansions, hotels, cafés, theaters, and private clubs. Many of the buildings along the Quay were constructed of white marble, and from the water they shimmered like sugar cubes in the intense light of the summer sun. The names along the Quay, as Jennings would soon find, read like a lyric to the city’s joie de vivre : Café de Paris, Club Hellenique, Club de Chasseurs, Theatre de Smyrne, Hotel Splendid, Sporting Club, and Pathe Cinema.
    IN THE NINETEENTH AND early twentieth centuries, Smyrna was the richest and most cosmopolitan city of the eastern Mediterranean, a busy trading center of a half-million people—Turks, Greeks, Armenians, Jews, and Levantines, the long-settled and fabulously wealthy Europeanmerchant families that had come seeking their fortunes in the 1700s. It was mostly a Greek city—it had more Greeks than Athens, and its principal languages were Greek and French—fused with a dash of Turkish to create a Smyrniot argot not always understandable to the Greeks of old Greece. A Smyrniot might begin a joke in Greek and finish it in Turkish.
    Situated midway down the westward prominence of Asia Minor where the Turkish peninsula splinters into a confetti burst of Aegean islands, Smyrna was a multicultural aggregation of merchants and entrepreneurial adventurers. Blessed with sunshine in summer and rain in winter, Smyrna had a deep harbor and an industrious population that possessed a genius for commerce. The business of Smyrna was business. At the western end of one of history’s most famous trade routes, the Silk Road, it provided a gateway to the wider world for farmers whose expert and intensive cultivation yielded an enormous variety of fruits, vegetables, tobacco, and fiber along a fertile coastal plain drained by rivers with echoes of classical mythology, Meles, Hermus, and Meander.
    Those who lived in Smyrna in its best years remembered it as a dream of lavender-scented breezes, garden parties, dancing, and parasols along the harborfront. Smyrna was an emporium and a seaport and a kind of polyglot city-state inside the Ottoman Empire; it was marble mansions, tobacco leaf and opium cake; it was a long table set with grapes, lamb, eggplants, artichokes, red fishes, caviar, oysters, pomegranate, and cheeses; it was rows of busy cafés and coffeehouses; it was folded carpets on the backs of sleepy-eyed camels; it was the sound of the Anatolian lute, the smell of jasmine, and the taste of anise from its favorite liquor, raki; it was Italian opera and Greek operetta and the call to prayer of the muezzin and the ringing of the Russian-cast bells of Agia Photini. For the Greeks, Smyrna was wealth; for the Armenians, it was wealth; for the Levantine Europeans, it was even greater wealth; for the Ladino-speaking Sephardic Jews, expelled from their Iberian homes by Ferdinand and Isabella, it was the safety of not Spain; and for the Turks, it was “ Giavour Izmir, ” Infidel Smyrna. Smyrna was an enchantment, an emotion, and an idea that in the end could not close the circle of its own aspiration toward religious tolerance.
    Smyrna grew rich from its carpets, silk, tobacco, opium, raisins, fragrant oils, and figs, considered the best in the world. When Americans in California wanted to develop a fig industry in the late nineteenth century, they traveled to Smyrna to learn its secrets. They discovered