1922 Smyrna: What it means from a Global historical perspective

Lecture by Associate Professor Nicholas Doumanis

September 2022 marks the centenary of the destruction of the Aegean port of Smyrna, the cosmopolitan city in which Greeks formed the largest community, but which suddenly became the overwhelmingly Turkish city of ?zmir. What happened between 9 September 1922, when Turkish Nationalists rode into Smyrna, and 1 October, by which time the Greek community had vanished? Why did a prosperous city that had survived years of Greek-Turkish hostilities become, from a Greek perspective at least, the chief victim of those hostilities? What do these events tell us about the dramatic shift from a world of empires to one of nations?