The Great Fire Read Online Free PDF Page B

growing a fig was a complicated business, requiring the husbandry of wasps.
    The city was also a principal source of Turkish tobacco—the region grew a small and aromatic leaf that commanded high prices. The American cigarette industry would not have been possible without Turkish tobacco. Virginia burley had a harsh taste so the industry, just getting started in the early twentieth century, blended Turkish tobacco with homegrown burley, and cigarette sales soared. R.J. Reynolds created a new cigarette blended with Turkish tobacco and called it Camel. It became the first national cigarette brand in America—one of the first national brands for any consumer product.
    Smyrna was home to the Oriental Carpet Manufacturing Co., the world’s biggest purveyor of oriental carpets. The company was a cartel, created by Levantine and Armenian merchants, and it controlled 90 percent of the Ottoman Empire’s carpet trade. The company brought Turkish carpet production to astonishing heights, employing more than a hundred thousand women as piece workers weaving carpets on home looms. It took four weavers six weeks to make a single eight-by-twelve-foot rug, which would sell in the United States for 275 dollars, which was about half of the annual wage of an American industrial worker in 1910. The company sold its carpets by the thousands in London, Paris, and New York. It had a showroom at 160 Fifth Avenue in New York, and many a Turkish carpet graced the best town houses of Manhattan.
    A center of cultivated leisure, Smyrna published dozens of newspapers—eleven in Greek, five in Armenian, seven in Turkish, five in Hebrew, and four in French. Book publishing houses prospered. The city had concert halls, seventeen movie theaters, playhouses, grand hotels, private clubs with extensive menus, yacht races, hunting estates, a racetrack, and the first golf course in the Near East. It also had 226 saloons, 24 distillers, and 465 coffeehouses, which often were small gambling parlors. There was nothing a Smyrniot liked more than a wager. It hadfirst-class steamship service to London and New York, a French department store, and a football league and stadium. It sent athletes to the early modern Olympics.
    Divided by religion and ethnicity, Smyrna was a city of districts—there was the Armenian Quarter, the Greek Quarter, the Turkish Quarter, the Jewish Quarter, and the Frankish or European Quarter, though by the end of the nineteenth century the truly wealthy Levantines had moved to one of the city’s nearby towns, the richest of which was Bournabat, with homes on the scale of the Newport robber barons. The servant staffs of some of the Levantines could populate small villages. A good deal of the Levantine treasure had come as a consequence of the so-called capitulations, special privileges foreign governments had negotiated with the sultan to encourage trade. One of the privileges was exemption from taxes. One sultan, his treasury depleted, took out a loan from a Levantine family at Smyrna.
    The people of Smyrna could listen to opera from Italy, waltzes from Vienna, intricately sung Asian-modal melodies in the seaside cabarets, or Anatolian folk tunes in the city’s hashish dens and brothels. Ever sensual, Smyrna loved its lemon sherbet and short dresses. Its penchant for frivolity outshone even its celebrated neighbors of the Levant. Compared to Smyrna, Athens was a dusty village, Beirut a backwater, and Salonika an aging slum. Even Alexandria—also founded by the insatiable Macedonian boy-king Alexander the Great—was a lesser flower of cosmopolitanism. Chateaubriand said Smyrna was another Paris; a Greek soldier, evoking the city’s ancient Greek past as he approached it from the sea, called it “the bride of Ionia, the city of a thousand songs.”
    Smyrna had one more distinction—it was the first city in the Holy Land to receive American missionaries.
    The first two missionaries assigned to the Near East departed Boston in 1819 to