Ancestry 27 - Eudoxia & Leonidas: The Catastrophe

An historically misplaced and inglorious military intervention, which ultimately proved disastrous, apparently stemmed from the rekindling of a hollow grandiose nationalism –the “Great Idea” for a Greater Greece, after her political class decided to abandon neutrality and stand on the “right side of history” in WWI. With the Allies against the Central Powers, the Ottoman Empire amongst them, was thus entitled to a share in the spoils of victory in the aftermath of the Great War. An initial opportunistic encouragement and urging behind the scenes by the British (in pursuit of their interests in the region), after a few months of political and economic miscalculations and wrangling amongst the Great Powers, turned into cold indifference, albeit after the Greek Army had landed on the shores of Asia Minor and recklessly committed in invading Anatolia and advancing deep inland. Behind the petty nationalism were hidden, instigated or spontaneous, regional and universal imperialisms, small and large-scale interests and the conflict of political and economic forces. But this is not a place for an historical analysis. The historian Nikos Psyroukis, through his orthodox Marxist’s and materialist’s prism, in his volumes on the “The Asia Minor Catastrophe” that I read as a young man -in a first attempt to shed light on the details of my grandmother’s and ancestors’ turbulent past in the region and, consequentially, a large part of the history of my birthplace, documented coherently the root causes of the national disaster. At the end, the Greeks of Anatolia were abandoned to their tragic fate.

The railway line that passed through Bayindir, built by the British, evidence of timid steps in the  industrialization and modernization of an empire in its last throes, as well as attempts by the British imperialism to exert its muscle and expand its interests in the region, had perhaps contributed more than any other single geographical and historical factor into the development of the local economy, the movement of the goods it produced and, most importantly, the influx of new ideas and  in advancing the regional culture; the latter thanks to the mobility of people with open eyes, broad minds and an omnipresent appetite for wealth, which required establishing and maintaining strong materialistic and cultural ties with Smyrna, the undisputed cosmopolitan metropolis of Asia Minor. In 1922, that railway line proved to be a lifeline for many Greek families of Bayindir, while paramilitary Zeybeks and Çete (bandits) attacked homes and livelihoods with ferocious and vindictive moods: initially aiming more at looting property than motivated by a racial or religious fanaticism or nationalistic passions. The contingents of the Greek army, having come to the scene and presented themselves as liberators of the “Hellenism of Ionia” and resurrectors of ancient glories, surveyed the area and paraded in front of the hurrahing Greeks of the town, whilst the local governors renamed streets in honour of Greek military officers and organized sectarian celebrations and parades, thus alienating the non-Greek population and unnecessarily inflaming local nationalist sentiments and a vacuous religious fanaticism. After all this, after an uncalled-for chauvinistic marginalisation, even mistreatment and abuse of "non-Greeks and non-believers", which could only provoke an asymmetrical response in kind from the opposing side, the very same troops were recalled by mother Greece through an almost disorderly retreat. Their saviour and liberator, the Greek Army, left Bayindir, and then Smyrna.

It was a day in September 1922. With a few possessions that could fit in suitcases and torba, the teenager Eudoxia found herself with parents and siblings and crowds of thousands of other refuges at the waterfront of Smyrna, for the ships of salvation that would transport them to Greece, strained and terrified by the atrocities that were taking place behind columns of smoke in the suburbs and back alleys of the city. Many people were arriving at the Aegean seafront on araba, donkeys, mules or horses, fewer, the privileged and more fortunate ones amongst them, by train. Few elders stayed behind, insisting to die in the land where they were born. In a few days, Kemal Ataturk would enter Izmir victorious. There had been orders, with unwritten deadlines and ultimatums, for the Christians to evacuate their homeland. The Greeks strived to comply and catch up. As to whether in their minds Greece represented the hospitable motherland that would welcome them with open arms and offer protection, shelter and food, I doubt it. And those who had felt this way would have been disappointed at the end of their Odyssey.

The emotions that overwhelmed the soul of Evdoxia, her family, the pitiful caravans of refugees from Bayindir to Izmir, the crowded waterfront of Izmir, overflown by despair and anguish in the wait of helping hands and rescue boats (and there were scarcely enough, neither Greek, nor "allied" by the waterfront at the time to accommodate the multitude of refugees!) from the fires erupting around and the hell engulfing the promenade. The gravity of these emotions cannot be weighed on any scale or described lucidly by any language. Each distinct emotion succeeded another in a disorderly sequence, or merged with the previous and next ones, in each person individually, and in the mass of people in unison, under a cloud of panic that had spread over the city. Each emotion in all its possible grades and derivatives and superlatives: from the initial anxiety that rumours and news sowed, to fear, shock, terror, panic and hysteria, brought about by the awareness of a grim reality surrounding them, the realisation of their predicament. The shades of fear and terror were succeeded by the spectre of sorrow and misery, after they boarded a saviour boat. Fatigue and resignation to fate would turn into pain and suffering. The misery of fleeing would crystallize into sadness and aguish, even despair, ahead of a bleak future. For many, in the ports of Thessaloniki and the coastal towns and villages of Macedonia or the whatever alien shores they disembarked, that sadness and weariness, when minds began to ask the how’s and the why’s, would mutate into anger and rage, bitterness and indignation, against knowns and unknowns, culprits and non-participants.

I have not experienced, even approximately, a tragedy of the magnitude of the Asia Minor Catastrophe and, as such, not entitled to tell the tale of the storms of that time and the scars that left in the bodies and souls of the people who experienced them firsthand. A few lines from a haphazard and, maybe, biased outsider offers next to zero into this story, let alone history. The little it manages is to preserve, for him at least, a few precious threads with his past, vital to an existential self-consciousness.