The Thread

by Victoria Hislop

  The ostensible reason for the invasion was to protect the city from the Italians, who had landed just south of it, but Venizelos also claimed to be protecting the hundreds of thousands of Greeks who lived there from the Turks. Five years earlier, nearly a million Armenian Christians had been forced from their homes in Asia Minor and marched barefoot into the desert to die. There was concern that the Greeks who had inhabited the region for generations might meet the same fate, and such thoughts strengthened the motivation of Leonidas Komninos and his men.

  The occupation was carried out with relatively little bloodshed (the Turkish commander had been told not to resist), but some atrocities were committed and several hundred Turks were slaughtered.

  The following summer, Leonidas’ regiment marched successfully eastwards. The objective was to extend the area of occupation close to Smyrna. As the Turkish Nationalist movement grew, resistance became increasingly fierce, but nevertheless the Greeks succeeded in occupying most of western Asia Minor, systematically destroying Turkish villages and exterminating their inhabitants as they passed through.

  The taking of Smyrna had triggered a wave of nationalism among the Turks and many of them dreamed of revenge. They now retaliated by slaughtering thousands of Greeks, including many who lived near the Black Sea. Brutality on a shocking scale was perpetrated by both sides, and villages and towns were wiped out.

  During this time, Leonidas came home just once on leave. He visited his brother at the warehouse, but spent most of his week sitting quietly in the house in Irini Street. Olga found him changed. He seemed to have aged ten years in only one.

  There was one way in which he did seem the same, however. In spite of the fact that he was exhausted he still had time and energy for little Dimitri. On this visit he had brought him a hoop and he kept his nephew amused for hours by trying to teach him over and over again how to balance it.

  In early 1921, Leonidas’ regiment was part of a new offensive. This time the aim was to reach Ankara. Although the Greeks were defeated in two significant battles, they managed to occupy some strategic positions in central Asia Minor and by the summer it appeared that victory over the entire region was finally within their grasp. Even at the time, Leonidas considered it an error not to press on to victory but the order was to halt and the regiment had no choice but to obey. Just as he feared, the Turks used this time to organise a new line of defence on the other side of the river Sakarya, one hundred kilometres west of Ankara.

  The Greeks eventually advanced to the river. With their superior numbers, it might have been an easy victory, but after a bloody twenty-one-day battle against an enemy that occupied positions on higher ground, they began to run out of ammunition and had to retreat, withdrawing to the lines they had held two months earlier.

  Even though they had not been entirely defeated, morale among the men was low and within the senior ranks many, including Leonidas, campaigned for withdrawal westwards towards Smyrna. Others persisted in their fantasy of taking Constantinople and so Greek troops were obliged to stay and defend their positions. For almost a year, there was a stalemate.

  Meanwhile the Turks were busy organising their troops for a final battle. They were not interested in any kind of settlement with the Greeks. The man in charge of their campaign had been born in Thessaloniki, only a few hundred metres from Leonidas himself. Forty years old, the ice-blue-eyed Kemal Ataturk was now leading the Nationalist movement in Asia Minor, and with a government established in Ankara, he was hellbent on crushing the Greeks and driving them back to the Mediterranean.

  At the end of August 1922, Ataturk attacked the Greeks’ defensive positions and within a few days, half of the invading soldiers had been captured or killed.

  The defeated men had no time to dig the sun-baked earth, and fields lay strewn with unburied dead, many of them stripped of their boots and weapons. Clouds of buzzing, blue-black flies hovered menacingly, waiting for the vultures to have their fill. There were no flowers or funeral rites, and the Greek heroes of battle lay unmourned and, before long, unrecognisable.

  Survivors fled westwards towards Smyrna, intent on self-preservation. Many of them paused to commit appalling atrocities en route, raping, massacring and looting, before razing whole towns to the ground. In one Muslim village, all the inhabitants – men, women and children – were locked inside the mosque before it was ignited.

  In the first week of September, thousands of Greek soldiers, Leonidas among them, arrived in Smyrna hoping to escape from the country by boat. Hot on their heels came the Turkish army, aflame with desire for revenge. Three years had passed since the Turks had lost the city, but they had always planned to take it back.

  Chapter Five

  LEONIDAS LAY SLUMPED against the wall of a grain store. His head had fallen forward onto his chest and his tattered uniform was smeared with dried blood. Filthy, bruise-blackened toes protruded through the ends of his boots.

  A few hundred yards away, a woman and her daughter turned into the street, fresh and clean in their pale summer frocks. The little girl skipped, and chatted, as sweet as rose petal syrup, looking about her eager and curious. She knew something was happening in her city but she did not know what.

  Close to her breast, the mother also carried a baby, dressed in matching cotton lawn, embroidered with pink daisies.

  The past few days had brought rapid change to their beautiful city. In spite of recent events in the rest of Turkey, Smyrna had been relatively carefree since the turbulent few days of 1919 when the Greek troops had taken it over, and its residents were curiously oblivious to the upheavals taking place elsewhere in Asia Minor. The recent warm summer days had seen people on the streets selling their harvests of figs, apricots and pomegranates, and bargains had been struck for opium, satin and frankincense in a dozen different languages by people in an array of native dress from turbaned Persians to fez-topped Turks. In the previous month the opera had sold out every night, and open-air cafés had been full, their customers serenaded by string quartets.

  Only a week ago this street had been suffused with the aroma of jasmine and freshly baked bread from a nearby bakery. Now it stank of unwashed men. A few days before, following the sudden arrival of thousands of Greek soldiers, waves of Greek civilian refugees had also begun to pour in from the interior. Like the soldiers, they were fleeing from the Turkish army and were destitute.

  The population of Smyrna was now fearful, especially when they heard a rumour that the Turkish cavalry was on the outskirts of the city.

  ‘Come on, agapi mou, let’s walk a bit faster,’ the young mother said with suppressed alarm.

  As they passed, she cast a sideways glance at the row of Greek soldiers who lay there, all identically positioned, their heads uniformly angled, legs splayed. They looked as though they had fallen before a firing squad. Their state of semi-consciousness was the result of a relentless thousand-kilometre march, with few supplies except those they had pillaged from the towns and settlements along their route. They were comatose with exhaustion.

  It was then that the woman noticed they were the object of the soldiers’ stares.

  ‘We have to get home. Now!’ she said, almost breaking into a run and pulling the child along. The uncanny silence of the streets, the dead bodies that seemed to be stirring to life, the lurking dogs – none of this was normal for Smyrna and she was disturbed beyond all feelings of fear. Her senses were on alert, like the mangy hounds in the shadows. Both of them were aware of an unknown, but imminent danger.

  Meanwhile, in the dark space of Leonidas’ mind, memories and hallucinations swirled in a devilish dance. Though he did not yet know it, the foul recollections of what he had seen and perpetrated would never be washed from his mind. Sweet dreams would never come again. With his few surviving men, he had arrived on the outskirts of Smyrna a few days earlier, hoping to sail home to Thessaloniki. British, French, Italian and American warships basked in the harbour, but there was not a Greek flag in sight. They were too late.
The Greek ships carrying thousands of their fellow soldiers had departed.

  Exhausted from their journey, they had found somewhere to rest in a quiet street. There would be a solution but for now, on these lumpy cobbles, they succumbed to troubled sleep.

  Several hours later, a grey blanket settled over Leonidas. It was not like the comforting counterpane that his mother used to spread over him for winter warmth. It was a layer of dark smoke, creeping up his nostrils and down into his lungs. He dreamed of the fire that had destroyed his family’s business. His recollection of the temperature on that day and the strength of the blaze were so vivid. And then came the screams.

  ‘Fire! Fire! The city is on fire!’

  The cries awoke him and he realised that the acrid, bitter stench of smoke was not just in his dream. The situation in Smyrna had been relatively ordered, given that the city’s population had swollen by several hundred thousand in the past few days, but chaos now took hold and shook the city like an earthquake. People ran through the streets screaming and crying. Fear was in the eyes of both wealthy and poor. The city had caught light.

  All the men leaped to their feet. Panic swept away exhaustion. Streams of people swarmed past them towards the sea, a few with babes in arms, but most of them with nothing. There were groups of children who had disgorged from schools and orphanages, and a wealthy woman who had grabbed the most valuable coat she had and now stood incongruously dressed in sable. The refugees who had come into the city in the past few days clung on to their bundles of possessions with which they had already trekked for hundreds, if not thousands, of kilometres. All of them were heading in the same direction. To the harbour.

  The Armenian quarter of Smyrna had been torched by the Turkish cavalry, who now rode through the city wreaking havoc and destruction. Greeks hiding in their homes would listen with terror from an upper floor as their doors were beaten down and their rooms ransacked. They would then smell petroleum being sprinkled about before their homes were ignited. The choice was this: to reveal their presence and be cut to pieces or to be incinerated and die in the fumes.

  Stories travelled as fast as the fire: of rape and mutilation, of rows of heads from decapitated women on stakes, of rats feasting on entrails. Whatever crimes the Greeks had committed, the Turks were intent on exacting revenge a hundredfold. The only real hope was to get out to sea. Smyrna was melting around them.

  ‘We have to try and get out,’ said Leonidas to his men. He felt that he had already failed them, by being left stranded in this city.

  ‘We’re an easy target like this, aren’t we?’ said one of the youngest recruits, plucking at his army shirt.

  ‘Nobody is safe from the Turks,’ answered his captain. ‘But it would probably be safest if we separate and take different routes to the harbour. It will make us less obvious.’

  ‘Where will we meet?’

  ‘Just get any boat you can. And we’ll see each other again in Thessaloniki.’

  After two years of being in each other’s company it was a perfunctory parting, but each of them had to look out for himself now. Leonidas watched the tattered remains of his regiment join the human flow that surged down towards the sea. Soon they became indistinguishable from the rest.

  Before following, Leonidas looked behind him. Columns of fire and smoke plumed high into the air. The ground where he stood was suddenly rocked by an explosion and then he heard the crash of a collapsing building, the sound of shattering glass, the thud of falling masonry. Like hundreds of thousands of others, he sensed that time was running out to escape from this flaming city.

  Down at the port, both residents and refugees were fighting for places on any boat they could. What had begun in an orderly fashion, with people quietly queuing and hopeful for a place, had descended into chaos. With the city on fire and atrocities being perpetrated just a few hundred metres away, panic was taking hold. The temperature of fear increased with every person who arrived to join the crowd, which was now enclosed in a space just one kilometre wide and a few hundred metres deep. It was a catastrophe.

  Alone and unencumbered by possessions, Leonidas was able to manoeuvre himself towards the centre of the crowd. He could see small boats piled high with chairs, mattresses and trunks being rowed out to sea. Other vessels meant for one man and his fishing nets had twenty people on board. There was the sound of splashing as people threw themselves into the sea, intent on swimming out to one of the Italian boats to plead for refuge. Occasionally there was the sound of gunfire as a swimmer was picked off by a Turkish sniper.

  Leonidas felt a wave of shame. Every Greek killed was revenge for a dead Turk. What a pointless game of numbers it seemed to have become. Death for the man he saw vanishing beneath the surface of the water was speedy but he knew there had been times when he and his men had ensured that a victim’s suffering was long and painful before they allowed him his final gasp.

  Flashes of the shame and horror of the past few months had haunted his dreams, but now plagued his every waking moment too. He turned away from the water and pushed against the tide of people to find his way to the back of the crowd. His eyes were stinging with tears from the smoke but sobs came from deep within. He could not leave. With all the crimes that weighed on his conscience, how could he could push in front of any other man, woman or child? There was not one person here who did not deserve to live more than he. In all those months of the campaign, the soldiers had been swept along on a tide of hatred and self-justification, but now it was self-loathing that tore at his heart. Base acts of animal violence swam in front of his eyes, one after another, then another and another . . .The harbour of Smyrna had disappeared for him and in its place were dark images from the past weeks.

  Anyone not entirely preoccupied by their own plans for escape would have noticed a skeletal, sunburned soldier walking as though in a trance away from the sea. His ragged hair was white with dust, and tears ran between the deep crevices of his prematurely aged and wrinkled skin.

  Coming in the other direction, was the woman with her two girls in their embroidered frocks. She was desperate for places for herself and her daughters. ‘Athina?’ she asked repeatedly, as she followed directions towards the queue for a ship to Piraeus, the closest port to Athens. Her politeness and her elegance were a passport through the crowd and people parted to let her and her infants through. The baby’s pitiful cries were enough to arouse sympathy in even the hardest heart.

  As the woman continued on her way, a building went up in flames close by and sparks flew. She was only metres from the front of the queue.

  At that moment, a glowing ember dropped onto the little girl’s sleeve. The fabric immediately melted away, burning the skin beneath, and she shrieked in pain, pulling away from her mother to extinguish the flame. Meanwhile, her mother was being relentlessly swept forward, and in the next moment had been ushered onto a small boat. It would take her to the Piraeus-bound ship that was safely anchored some distance away.

  Realising that her daughter was not with her, the woman began to scream.

  ‘Where’s my Katerina? Where’s my little girl? Katerina! Katerina! Katerina! My little one!’

  She clamoured to be allowed off but her desperate attempts to stand up caused the little vessel to rock precariously and her panic was clearly putting everyone in danger.

  ‘People are fighting to get on these boats, not off!’ insisted a burly man, grabbing her wrists and pulling her down. ‘Now just bloody well sit down so we can get out of here! Someone else will bring your kid.’

  A wall of people now stood between the five-year-old and the water, obscuring the sight and sound of her sobbing mother.

  The little girl was preternaturally calm. This was her home city and she was certain to find someone to help her. Surrounded by the maelstrom of shouting, fear and burning, she wandered away from the port. The agony of her raw skin now began to torment her.

  Meanwhile, Leonidas continued to meander blindly away from the crowds. There was an inte
nse throbbing inside his head, as though the screams around him were within his skull. He sank down in a doorway and buried his head in his hands, wanting to block out the chaos around him.

  Eventually he looked up, as if he could feel the child’s eyes on him. In her white dress, she looked like an angel without wings, and behind her pale silhouette the distant fire surrounded her with a supernatural glow. She was a fairy, a spirit, but she was crying.

  This vision stirred him to action and he stood up.

  This little angel made him feel brave. He saw that she was clutching her arm.

  ‘It hurts,’ she said, bravely.

  ‘Let me look.’

  The vulnerable patch of raw skin needed protection and, without a moment’s hesitation, he ripped off his shirtsleeve.

  ‘You must get it bandaged up properly, but this will do for now,’ he said, tying the fabric round her arm. The heavy cotton khaki looked incongruous next to the fine white muslin, which he noticed was embroidered with delicate flowers.

  ‘So where are you going? Why are you wandering about alone?’

  ‘My mother and sister have gone . . .’ she turned and pointed towards the sea, ‘. . . on a boat.’

  Her innocence was transcendent.

  ‘We have to get you on a boat, then, don’t we?’

  She held her arms out so that he could pick her up and together they went back towards the clamouring crowds.

  ‘What’s your name?’ he asked her. ‘And where do you come from?’

  ‘I’m Katerina. And I don’t come from anywhere.’

  ‘You must come from somewhere,’ he teased, happily distracting her with their conversation.