Was nationalism to blame for the Smyrna fire?
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.36399/GroundingsUG.10.191Keywords:
Nationalism, Smyrna Fire, Greco-Turkish War, 1922, Hellenism, KemalismAbstract
This essay examines the role of Turkish and Greek nationalist ideologies in igniting the flames of ethnic tensions that culminated in the Smyrna fire of 1922. The Greco-Turkish war was propelled forward by the nationalist rhetoric of the ‘Great Idea’ that expressed the fantasy of stretching the Greek state to encompass key areas of ancient and Byzantine Hellenism in Anatolia. This militant ideology was broadly interpreted as a threat to the very presence of Turkish nationals in Anatolia and was thus detrimental to the development of a Turkish counterpart in the form of Kemalist pan-Turkism. As the last event in a cause-and-effect sequence of nationalist conflicts, the Smyrna fire exemplifies the destructive nature of Kemalist nationalism, which was directed against both the human and the material character of Ottoman Smyrna with the aim of purging the city of its non- Turkish elements and creating a tabula rasa on which the history of the newly formed national identity could be rewritten and projected onto the urban fabric.
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