What does Eric Ambler’s novel ‘The Mask of Dimitrios’ have to do with the Greco-Turkish War?

The Mask of Dimitrios (1939) is an espionage novel by Eric Ambler (1909-1998), a recognised master of the genre, and is set in interwar Europe and the western part of West Asia. The novel depicts a world of displaced persons, Nansen passports (named for Norwegian explorer and diplomat Fridtjof Nansen), vulnerable exile communities, shady armaments dealers, conmen and corrupt policemen.

Although some critics consider The Mask of Dimitrios to be the least worthy of Ambler’s five pre-war novels, it is notable for its description, in the chapter “1922”, of the destruction of Smyrna (today’s Izmir, Turkey) in September 1922. Greek armies entered the collapsing Ottoman empire in 1919.

Having joined the winning side in the world war, the Greeks were recognised by the Allies as a legitimate occupation force in Asia Minor and Anatolia. By the summer of 1922 they had been defeated and they retreated in poor order from central Anatolia, ahead of the armies of Mustafa Kemal (subsequently honoured as “Father of Turks”). The Greek forces’ escape through Smyrna and their failure to protect Greek civilians of Asia Minor was the last gasp of a project to reclaim a Great Greece, or the “Greek Idea”, that had animated Hellenic patriots for more than a century.

The Smyrna tragedy has been a defining feature of modern nation-building in Greece and Turkey, both in its remembrance and its silencing. For successive generations of Greeks, the burning of most of Smyrna, the slaughter of masses of unprotected civilians and the scattering of thousands was the defining experience of the “Asia Minor Catastrophe”.

Turks beset by hostile external forces and suspicious of internal others – Kurds and Armenians as well as Greeks – spoke of their vengeance against Giaur Izmir (“Infidel Smyrna”). Yet the Smyrna catastrophe is not so much actively denied by Turks today as it is overshadowed in collective memory by the diplomatic settlement that followed, the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne; and the trauma of the “exchange” of minority populations between Greece and Turkey is replayed in terms of how the agreements of 1922-1923 might be reversed to give modern Turkey its full measure of respect in the world.

Facts through fiction

As readers of Tolstoy’s War and Peace across generations would testify, some history is best explored or told through fiction. Ambler’s “1922” holds up as a dispassionate description of a human crisis minutely covered by the world press, whose facts were disputed by several interested governments and continue to be contested today. Ernest Hemingway’s story “On the Quai at Smyrna” (first published in 1923 and 1924) is a deadpan vignette with hint of queasy gallows humour. Hemingway fans and detractors alike take notice of it.

Ambler’s narrative of Smyrna 1922 in scarcely seven hundred words is the single instance in this novel of his deploying historical description to convey a moral message. Its function appears at first to identify a place and time where Dimitrios is known to have been some fifteen years prior to his murder, which the novel’s protagonist has decided to investigate. Dimitrios was born in Salonika and was identified in police records by a Greek surname, but whether he is actually Greek, Muslim, Jew, or someone else is never revealed.

The Mask of Dimitrios shows us how nationality proves a fluctuating currency in a world where recognition of nation-states is everything. If it is easy today to mistake a recounting of the Smyrna catastrophe in a work of fiction for the real thing, it is because of the ways we continue to make sense of traumatic events of the long twentieth century.

As for the actual Smyrna disaster which “Dimitrios” escaped, there were numerous witnesses to the murder of the chief Greek Orthodox cleric in Smyrna, an event not mentioned in Ambler’s book. There were reprisals. Local Turkish commanders did not prevent the sacking of European schools and convents or the desecrations of churches, synagogues and cemeteries. French, British, Italian and American naval commanders off Smyrna had confused orders about protecting and extracting the threatened population of hundreds of thousands that crowded the port in August and September. Smyrna’s Greek and Armenian quarters, packed with war refugees and the survivors of previous Ottoman ethnic cleansing attempts, were systematically torched by the Turks.

The image Ambler creates in “1922” of shot, stabbed and burned bodies scarred by ships’ propellers as they floated in Smyrna harbour emerges straight from hundreds of reports in the world’s newspapers. He mentions but does not venture to enumerate the Anatolian Turks raped, abused and killed by the retreating Greek army as it melted away during the summer’s battles.

Did the deaths of Greeks, Armenians, Jews and other non-Turks in Smyrna over two weeks in 1922 approach one hundred thousand or did they exceed that number? Did Turkish soldiers set building in fire in the occupied city after being provoked, or was the burning of the city over the course of ten days the result of orders from the top of the emerging Kemalist state, which continued to disfavour and dispossess Turkey’s remaining Greek population down to the 1960s?

Writing The Mask of Dimitrios more than decades after historical events it describes, Ambler was aware of analyses of the Smyrna crisis by Western and other governments, reports by humanitarian organisations such as Near East Relief, and works by historians (such as Arnold Toynbee and James Bryce) who autopsied ethnic cleansing campaigns and mistreatment of civilian populations in Europe and West Asia during the bloody years of 1913-1923. Yet his assignment of blame in “1922” is as restrained as his terse account of the destruction of “Infidel Smyrna” is grisly. The tone of narration of the Smyrna disaster in The Mask of Dimitrios is of a piece with the whole novel, with its characters’ moral greyness, apathy and veiled motives.

What really happened?

What is indisputable – and is a reason for “remembering” Smyrna 1922 – is that the Smyrniote Greek community that had existed for more than two thousand years, and whose population exceeded that of Athens in 1914, was erased within a month, with the survivors scattering to mainland Greece and Aegean islands. The Treaty of Lausanne legalised a compulsory population exchange of approximately 1.3 million “Greeks” of Asia Minor (Christians, but not all Greek speakers) and as many as 400,000 “Turks” (most of them Muslims). Only a fraction of the Ottoman Greek population remained in the new Turkish republic by 1925, and the expulsions from Asia Minor and Eastern Thrace swelled Greece’s population by about 25% within a few years.

Given the structure of the Greek economy, there was no demographic dividend; also, the elderly, children and women with dead or missing husbands predominated among the Smyrniotes. Several historians and legal scholars identify this negotiated and legal but forced human displacement as the precedent for other, possibly more horrendous population transfers of the twentieth century whose architects opportunely justified transfers in terms of international law or collective security.

“Human rights” was not an operative concept in the Lausanne negotiations. We may set apart from the 1923 compulsory population exchange countless instances of mass transfer of populations within sovereign territories (such as the Soviet Union), in and across countries under Axis occupation during the Second World War, unilateral expulsions of minorities from states (as we see today with the Rohingyas of Myanmar), and also in our own time the post facto mechanisms for relocation of Syrian war refugees.

With today’s Syrian crisis it could be said that Turkey suffers effects of the 1922-1923 forced migrations in reverse. It is in Turkey that the largest numbers of Syrian refugees today reside – a fact that feeds Turkish resentment over external and domestic politics of post-imperial Europe.

In fact, mass movements of Balkan and Ottoman “nationalities” had taken place as early as 1912-1913 with the short wars involving Greece, Serbia, Bulgaria and the Ottoman empire. The Greek government Hellenised its northern frontier in 1913-1914 by expelling Albanians, Macedonians, Bulgarians and some Ladino-speakers of Thessaloniki (that is, Salonikans identified as Jews).

Before the outbreak of the world war, Greek prime minister Venizelos discussed plans with Ottoman leaders for large-scale pre-emptive population exchanges to solve what world leaders widely perceived as “The Nationality Problem”. The 1923 Lausanne treaty, applying to the whole former Ottoman empire, sealed a population transfer that was both haphazard and highly bureaucratised. The process was dwarfed in scale by forced migrations and resettlements over the next hundred years.

Resettlement and compensation for lost property on either side of the Greco-Turkish conflict of 1919-1922 was a mess for decades. The Smyrniotes in Greece formed a notoriously poor and aggrieved population that remained an element in Greek politics – and a bearer of a distinct culture – until the early twenty-first century, when concerns of second and third-generation exiles were overshadowed by wider Greek discontent about the European Union, such as the harsh terms of economic bailouts since 2010.

Managing memory

Stories of Smyrna 1922 have been kept alive, often with more pathos than Ambler’s treatment, by Greeks in Toronto, New York, Chicago and Melbourne. It appears that Greeks in Athens or Thessaloniki today commemorate Smyrna 1922 less intensely than those in London or in Melbourne, a “sister city” of Thessaloniki.

Memories and commemorations are tricky things. As we know, government commemorations of edifying events and atrocities at convenient intervals of 75, 100, or 500 years are part of the work of “public memory”. Public memory is best understood not as a stable cognitive formation but instead as an unpredictable psycho-social process whose outcomes both foster and erode social cohesion. Monuments, museums and national festivals are among the instruments of public memory formation used by modern states.

Nikolai Koposov refers to “memory wars” in Memory Laws, Memory Wars (2017) as an underlying condition of contemporary society, echoing Ernest Renan’s famous pronouncement in Qu’est ce qu’une nation?’ (‘What Is a Nation?’,1882) that living together in a nation-state is a continuous plebiscite. Poland, Spain, Lithuania, Hungary and France are among countries that have enacted ‘memory laws’ since 1990 to help stabilise public understanding of territorial fragmentation and reconstitution, civil war, invasion, collaboration with foreign occupiers, regime changes and other events that claimed lives and appropriated property of thousands or millions.

Many but not all memory laws provide for legal coercion of national citizens articulating historical claims that threaten to destabilise the social consensus that contemporary regimes claim to represent. The build-up to the present Russia-Ukraine war involved retaliatory memory laws (2010-2014) by each state: Russia criminalising speech by its citizens that casts doubt on Russian (and Soviet) commitment to de-nazification and elimination of fascism; Ukraine passing laws to actively de-memorialise its Soviet (communist) past and to censor those who point to many Ukrainian patriots’ active support of fascism before and after 1941.

State efforts in memory management take many forms and they compete with claims and historical representations by private citizens and civil society organisations, as well as by parties of legitimate political opposition. Citizens are no less “memory agents” than governments, but state leaders retain considerable flexibility in determining which public claims about the past are not harmful as well as those that are. Koposov has argued that all memory laws with criminal penalties can repress speech that is merely objectionable or disagreeable to some; their effect will be to dampen honest debate and impede reconciliation.

The recent actions of US states to prohibit teaching Critical Race Theory are essentially memory laws, and these can be opposed, contested in courts, as infringements of free speech. Even tightly targeted state efforts, such as periodic revision of school history textbooks and curricula in India and other countries, run the hazard of alienating those who identify with stories that are officially excluded and replaced. Re-naming of streets and cities to serve memory refashioning by a current regime can produce backlash, though the absence of protest (for instance, in India and Ukraine) is remarkable too.

The past decade has seen circulation of claims on the internet and in print media that the 1923 Lausanne treaty contains a secret ‘expiration’ clause. According to some Turkish versions of this conspiracy theory, Greeks will attempt to reoccupy Istanbul (Constantinople) and Asia Minor from 2023 to restore their Byzantine glory. Another version says that Turkey could reclaim parts of Thrace or islands ceded to Greece; and Islamists have suggested that Epirus, emptied of its Muslims 1913-1923, could be one region in play for the restoration of an Ottoman caliphate.

Setting aside the questions of whether such rumours originate in Turkey and whether they are driven by (Turkish or other) state actors, Turkey has a comparatively weak regime of memory law, as indeed does Greece. Turkish Law 5816 prohibits disparaging Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and his legacy. A Greek memory law of 2014 for prosecuting denial of genocides and crimes against humanity removes denialist statements from the realm of free speech; it denies constitutional protection to denialists. But the Greek law has not been much used. In neither country can it be concluded that memory law significantly shapes or manages public memory, but the reproduction of memories continues.

Someone reading The Mask of Dimitrios today and ignorant of details of the 1919-1922 Greco-Turkish War might find “1922” affecting, and they could be inspired to learn more about the miserable conflicts of which Smyrna 1922 formed one episode. At any rate, it is the population displacements, ethnic cleansing projects and genocides of the long twentieth century that make Ambler’s “1922” all too familiar. Stories of Smyrna continue to be created and it is not only actual descendants of victims of forced migrations who can relate to them.

Ta Klemmena (The Stolen)

A Tsigana [Romani woman] once told me
that she is from Aivali [Turkey]
and I remembered
the recollections of my grandfather.
He was eating sweets in Smyrna
and my grandmother’s spices
were inside the house
of my fathers. . .

— A translation from the Greek of a lyric by Diana Tsavolou, 2007.

Denys Leighton is Professor and Dean in the Jindal School of Languages and Literature, OP Jindal Global University. Among other things, he teaches and writes about European and world history.