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.