Gold, Incense and Smyrna

I arrived in Smyrna in September ’91... On days like these, when the Turks celebrate the city’s destruction with enormous flags hanging from government buildings, crimson sheets as if painting their facades with blood. Inexperienced in the professional travels of my diplomat partner, with a two-year-old baby in my luggage, I set up my life within the thick walls of the old two-storey house by the beach, in the Kapetanakis mansion. Gazing at the opposite shore, counting the little boats heading across to Kordelio, re-reading about the national trauma. Then, impatient, I rushed out into the streets of Smyrna, searching for signs of its former grandeur and sensing the stench of the fire in the air. At the doors of the listed Greek houses, young ladies welcomed me; in the shops, I was greeted with smiles and pleasantries; and in the cafés, I eavesdropped on the Levantine women exchanging comments in Greek. My friends would ask me, ‘What is Smyrna like across the way?’ Back then, seventy years after the destruction, everyone knew about the lost paradise and the Asia Minor tragedy, but no one knew of Smyrna at the dawn of the twentieth century, of the few Christians still strolling along the ‘Kai’, of the Romanesque houses, standing tall, a reminder of the historic face of a waterfront synonymous with human suffering and uprooting. This is a collection of seven short stories, seven ‘moments’ of everyday life in modern Smyrna. The author’s connection with the city today, her love for the remaining Greeks and for the few remaining neoclassical houses, are captured in this book with lyricism, warmth and sensitivity. Without any historical record, she manages to draw the reader into a game between fantasy and reality.