Smyrna: Roots of Fire

Due to rising anti Greek sentiment, my family left Smyrna in 1909 to make a better life in America.  This quick read is an overview of how that transpired.

For three thousand years, Smyrna was Greek. Then, in a matter of days, it wasn’t.

Smyrna: Roots of Fire traces the full arc of one of history’s most consequential and least-told stories — from the Neolithic settlements of Anatolia and the Bronze Age kingdom of Arzawa, through the golden age of Ionian philosophy, Roman prosperity, and Byzantine faith, into the wealthiest, most cosmopolitan Greek city the world had ever seen: Ottoman-era Smyrna, home to hundreds of thousands of Greeks who called it, simply, home.

Then it traces exactly how that world ended — the Balkan Wars, the Greek landing of 1919, the catastrophic war that followed, and the Great Fire of 1922, which erased three millennia of continuous Greek presence on the Anatolian coast almost overnight.

This is history written with real weight where the history demands it, and real honesty where the record is genuinely disputed — with a closing chapter left blank on purpose, waiting for you to write the one part of this story that’s actually yours: how your own family found its way from Smyrna’s ashes to a new home in America.

16 chapters. One catastrophe. A history worth carrying forward.