This powerful and moving historical novel is inspired by the
written recollections and the memories that haunted the author's
father, Nicias Aridjis,-a captain in the Greek army, who returned
from the fields of battle to Smyrna, 50 miles northwest of his
hometown of Tire, in 1922 just as Turkish forces captured this
cosmopolitan port city. Smyrna in Flames , by the internationally
acclaimed Mexican writer and poet Homero Aridjis, lays bare the
unimaginable events and horrors that took place for nine days
between September 13 and 22-known as the Smyrna Catastrophe. After
capturing Smyrna, Turkish forces went on a rampage, torturing and
massacring tens of thousands of Greeks and Armenians and
devastating the city-in particular, the Greek and Armenian
quarters-by deliberately setting disastrous fires. After years of
fighting in World War I and the Greco-Turkish War, Nicias enters a
Smyrna under siege. He desperately moves through the city in search
of Eurydice, the love of his life whom he left behind. Wandering
the streets, the sounds of hopelessness commingle in his mind with
echoes of the ancient Greek poets who sang of the city's past
glories. Images and voices, suggestive of Homeric ghosts adrift in
a catastrophic scenario, conjure up a mythological, historical,
geographical quest that, in the manner of classical epic, hovers
between the heroic and the horrible, illustrating the depths and
depravity of the human soul. Making his way from district to
district, evading capture, Nicias observes the last vestiges of
normal life and witnesses unspeakable horrors committed by roaming
Turkish forces and irregulars who are randomly abusing and raping
Greek and Armenian women and torturing and murdering their men.
What he experiences is literally a living hell unfolding before his
eyes. As Nicias passes familiar buildings, cafes, and churches, his
mind and soul fill with nostalgia for his earlier life and the
promise of love. Fortunately for the reader, the brutal and
bloodthirsty scenes of the Smyrna Catastrophe are leavened by the
voice of this "visionary poet of lyrical bliss, crystalline
concentrations and infinite spaces," as Kenneth Rexroth has
described Aridjis. His portrayal of a genocide-in-progress floods
our senses, turning these chaotic scenes into a poignant drama. At
the very end, aboard one of the last ships to take refugees out of
Smyrna before its final fall, Nicias scours the throng of thousands
of desperate Greeks and Armenians pressing forward to escape on
already overcrowded ships. Suddenly Turkish forces move in to shoot
and stab, and, overwhelmed by the all-pervasive tragedy, Nicias
abandons Smyrna and Asia Minor forever.
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