Site of ancient Smyrna, İzmir has a long and illustrious history. Its current incarnation is rather more modern, particularly in the swanky, bar-filled Alsancak area just north of the centre, the Konak shopping area to the south, and the coastal road that binds them together. However, a bustling bazaar district, parks and a clutch of grand old buildings are remnants of a glorious past. One negative point is that the weather, though mild for much of the year, gets stinking hot in the summer – there are no city beaches to escape to, but the Çeşme peninsula is not too far away.
Brief history
The site of modern İzmir was settled by aboriginal Anatolians as long ago as the third millennium BC. Around 600 BC, Lydian raids sent the area into a long decline; it was recovering tentatively when Alexander the Great appeared in 334 BC. Spurred by a timely dream corroborated by the oracle of Apollo at Claros, Alexander decreed the foundation of a new, better-fortified settlement on Mount Pagos, the flat-topped hill today adorned with the Kadifekale. His generals, Antigonus and Lysimachus, carried out Alexander’s plan after his death, by which time the city bore the name – Smyrna – familiar to the West for centuries after.
Roman rule endowed the city with impressive buildings, but Arab raids in the seventh century AD triggered several centuries of turbulence. Selçuk Turks held the city for two decades prior to 1097, when the Byzantines recaptured it. The thirteenth-century Latin tenure in Constantinople provoked another era of disruption at Smyrna, with Crusaders, Genoese, Tamerlane’s Mongols and minor Turkish emirs jockeying for position. Order was re-established in 1415 by Mehmet I, who finally incorporated the town into the Ottoman Empire, his successors repulsing repeated Venetian efforts to retake it.
Following World War I, Greece was given an indefinite mandate over İzmir and its hinterland. Foolishly, a huge Greek expeditionary force pressed inland, inciting the resistance of the Turkish nationalists under Atatürk. The climactic defeat in the two-year struggle against Greece and her nominal French and Italian allies was the entry into Smyrna of the Turkish army on September 9, 1922. The secular republic not having yet been proclaimed, the reconquest of the city took on the character of a successfully concluded jihad, or holy Muslim war, with three days of murder and plunder. Almost seventy percent of the city burned to the ground and thousands of non-Muslims died. A quarter of a million refugees huddled at the quayside while British, American, French and Italian vessels stood idly by, refusing to grant them safe passage until the third day.