Paradise Lost: Smyrna 1922 - The Destruction of Islam's City of Tolerance Read Online Free Page A

magnates.
    They had the largest financial stake in every commercial activity in the city. They controlled Smyrna’s shipping companies, insurance agencies, mines, banks and all of the most profitable import-export businesses. Cotton textiles and carpets were two of the most important exports and had provided the foundations of their vast fortunes. Dried fruit, too, was hugely lucrative. The Levantines also imported many goods to Turkey, including coffee, sugar and furs.
    Their businesses were on a truly grand scale. One of the Giraud family’s trading wings, the Oriental Carpet Manufacturing Company, employed 150,000 people, many of them inhabitants of Smyrna. The Whittalls’ business empire – which included a massive fruit-exporting enterprise – was even larger.
    The majority of Levantines lived in Cordelio, Boudja or Paradise, three of the more expensive and sought-after garden suburbs. They were places of excitement in the early years of the twentieth century, for there was a frisson of danger that was not present in the city itself. When Petros was a young boy, brigands still haunted the snow-dusted peaks of Nymph Dagh that formed the backdrop to the port. And picnic excursions to Lake Tantalus, undertaken in a barouche with Greek bazouki players, could quite easily end in a shoot-out. Gwynneth Giraud, elderly matriarch of the Giraud clan, can still remember her grandmother recounting stories of a running gun battle in the grounds of their suburban mansion. As I sipped Earl Grey tea in the shade of a chestnut tree, she showed me where brigands had fired pot-shots at her grandfather more than 120 years earlier.
    The Girauds lived in the spectacular Levantine colony of Bournabat, where all the most exclusive addresses were to be found. Lying some six miles from the city centre – and dominated by rambling villas and pleasure gardens – Bournabat was home to many of the great dynasties that had done so much to shape Smyrna.
    The Giraud family, the Woods and the Patersons, along with many others, all lived in palatial mansions. All, too, commanded vast fortunes. But even among the very rich there was a strict hierarchy of power. There was one family in Bournabat that wielded more influence – and had done more to engender Smyrna’s unique spirit – than their surrounding neighbours put together.
    Tuesday, 11 March 1902
    Dearest Mother,
    These are most delightful people. Helen Whittall . . . came to fetch me at 11 and we journeyed up here together . . . Mr Whittall joined us and there were also troops of cousins, for they all live out here. The house is a great big place with high enormous rooms, set in a garden 200 years old, across which a line of splended cypresses runs. The old mother of the tribe, Mr Whittall’s mother, lives here, a very old woman who kissed me when I came in. We lunched, after which we walked about in the garden gathering bunches of roses and violets. Mrs Herbert Whittall is a very nice sweet woman, and the girl Helen a dear. It was a stormy day with sudden bursts of rain and bright sun between, so we did nothing more until we had had a cheerful schoolroom tea, after which Mr and Mrs Whittall and I went to see a brother of his, Mr Edward Whittall, who is a great botanist and has a most lovely garden. He collects bulbs and sends new varieties to Kew and is well known among gardeners – an interesting man, too, for he is the Vali’s [the city governor’s] right hand and is consulted by him on all matters, a thing unbeknown before, they say. But these people get on with the Turks. The old sultan, uncle of Abdul Hamed, stayed in this house; it is the only private house which has received a sultan.
    When Gertrude Bell visited the Whittalls of Smyrna in the spring of 1902, she caught a tantalising glimpse of a private world. The Whittall family had amassed a spectacular fortune over the previous five decades. By the time King Edward VII came to the throne in distant England, they wielded