On September 13, 1922, Smyrna began to burn.
Within days, much of the historic port city had been destroyed. Its Armenian and Greek quarters were reduced to ruins, thousands were killed or disappeared, and enormous crowds were driven toward the waterfront in a desperate attempt to escape.
The destruction of Smyrna became one of the final catastrophes in the violent uprooting of the historic Armenian and Greek populations of the Ottoman Empire and Asia Minor.
Before the fire
Smyrna, today İzmir, was one of the Ottoman Empire’s most important commercial ports. The city was home to large Greek and Armenian communities, alongside Turkish, Jewish, Levantine and other populations.
Armenians had built churches, schools, businesses, cultural institutions and newspapers in the city. The Armenian quarter, known as Haynots, was one of the centers of Armenian life in Smyrna.
By 1922, years of war, persecution and forced displacement had transformed the region.
The Greco-Turkish War ended with the collapse of Greek forces in western Asia Minor. As the Greek army retreated, civilians and refugees poured into Smyrna.
Turkish nationalist forces entered the city on September 9, 1922. Mustafa Kemal arrived the following day.
What followed was not merely a transfer of military control.
Violence before the flames
In the days after Turkish forces entered Smyrna, Armenians and Greeks faced killings, looting, arrests and other violence.
The Armenian quarter became one of the principal sites of the attacks.
George Horton, the U.S. consul general in Smyrna, later described Turkish soldiers controlling access to the Armenian quarter while armed men entered the neighborhood, looted homes and killed residents. Horton also accused Turkish forces of deliberately setting fires in the city.
Contemporary American diplomatic records confirm that reports of killings and persecution reached Washington. In October 1922, the U.S. State Department sought information about whether an American protest had been made over the reported “indiscriminate killing of Armenians” and the terrorization of Greek refugees in Smyrna.
September 13
On September 13, fires broke out at several locations in Smyrna.
A contemporary U.S. naval report stated that the fire began at around 1 p.m. in the Armenian quarter. By the following day, the European section of the city had been almost completely destroyed and the American Consulate had burned.
Other accounts recorded numerous fires around the Armenian hospital, railway stations and warehouses. As strong winds drove the flames westward, the separate fires merged into a massive conflagration that consumed the Armenian, Greek and European quarters. The Muslim and Jewish quarters largely escaped the destruction.
Responsibility for starting the fire has remained contested in Turkish historical narratives. Contemporary witnesses and later historians have offered competing accounts, with Turkish versions frequently blaming Greeks or Armenians and numerous Western eyewitnesses attributing the fires to Turkish forces.
What is not disputed is that the fires broke out after Turkish nationalist forces had taken control of the city and that the Armenian and Greek sections suffered the overwhelming destruction.
The U.S. State Department later described the fires as apparently incendiary but said it had received conflicting evidence concerning who started them. It nevertheless stated that the Turkish military authorities occupying Smyrna could hardly avoid responsibility for failing to maintain order during the catastrophe.
I think this wording is stronger than saying simply that “most historians conclude Turkish forces set the fire.” If you want to make that direct attribution, it needs stronger historiographical sourcing than Near East Relief alone.
Trapped between the fire and the sea
As the flames spread through the city, enormous crowds fled toward Smyrna’s waterfront.
Behind them was the burning city. In front of them was the Aegean Sea.
Foreign warships belonging to the major Allied powers were anchored offshore, but their presence did not immediately result in the evacuation of the population.
The scale of the disaster soon became impossible to ignore.
On September 15, British, French, Italian and American naval officers in Smyrna concluded that evacuation was the only solution. They estimated that approximately 150,000 refugees needed to be removed from the city.
Other American reports put the overall number of destitute refugees in and around Smyrna considerably higher. A September 15 State Department telegram referred to approximately 300,000 destitute refugees in Smyrna.
Evacuation accelerated later in the month.
On September 24, seven Greek vessels arrived and evacuated approximately 15,000 refugees. Two days later, American officials reported that another 43,000 had been evacuated to Mytilene.
Turkish authorities separated men aged 18 to 45 from the other refugees. American diplomatic records stated that some were put to work clearing debris and repairing the railway, while officials could obtain no reliable information about the fate of the majority. Other refugees were deported into the interior.
By early 1923, the U.S. State Department reported that more than 200,000 people had been evacuated from Smyrna during September alone.
How many died?
There is no universally accepted death toll for the catastrophe.
Estimates differ considerably because the destruction of Smyrna involved not only the fire, but also killings, disappearances, deportations and deaths during the chaos surrounding the evacuation.
I would therefore remove the sentence in your introduction saying “tens of thousands of people were dead or missing” unless you are prepared to source a specific estimate. It may ultimately be defensible, but it introduces a numerical claim that is unnecessary when the exact death toll remains disputed.
What is beyond dispute is the enormous scale of the destruction and displacement.
The Armenian and Greek quarters were devastated. Homes, businesses, schools, churches and community institutions built over generations disappeared in the fire.
The American Consulate was also destroyed. U.S. naval officers reported its destruction while the fire was still raging, and the State Department later confirmed that the consular building had been lost in the general conflagration.
For Armenians who had survived the Armenian Genocide and the persecution of the preceding years, Smyrna became another center of destruction and forced displacement.
For the Greeks of Asia Minor, the catastrophe became one of the defining episodes of the destruction and expulsion of their historic communities from the region.
A city that disappeared
The Great Fire of Smyrna cannot be understood simply as a fire.
Before September 1922, Smyrna had been a major Mediterranean port shaped over generations by Armenian, Greek, Turkish, Jewish, Levantine and other communities.
After the killings, fire, deportations and mass flight, that social world had been destroyed.
The city was rebuilt as İzmir.
Its historic Armenian and Greek communities were not.
More than a century later, photographs of the catastrophe remain among its most powerful records: enormous columns of smoke rising above Smyrna while thousands of people crowded the waterfront below.
The fire began on September 13, 1922.
By the time the catastrophe was over, Armenian and Greek Smyrna had largely ceased to exist.
