Ernest Hemingway’s early career as a journalist was heavily marked by his reporting on war. Novels like A Farewell to Arms (published in 1929) or For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) were heavily influenced by the author’s first-hand experience with the tolls of war and displacement. The Greco-Turkish War was one of these conflicts, which Hemingway covered from the front lines – and also influenced writers such as Louis de Bernières and Loren Edizel. The Greco-Turkish War is an incredibly polarizing conflict. To the Turks, it is a part of their war of independence, and to the Greeks, it is the great catastrophe that marked an end to their Megali Idea of expansion. At its core, however, the conflict was a three-year war (1919-1922) between Greece and its allies, and the Turkish National Movement. In the aftermath of World War I, with Turkey still part of the Ottoman Empire, two forces clashed with distinct goals: Greece sought to gain power over the peninsula of Anatolia – once part of the Ancient Greek empire – and the Turkish Nationalist Movement aimed to establish an independent Turkish state. The conflict ended with the signing of the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923, but the previous years were filled with humanitarian crises, followed by a population exchange that displaced well over a million people.Throughout the war, the city of Smyrna (now İzmir) became a point of intense conflict, leading to The Great Fire of Smyrna in 1922 – that Hemingway described in his short story “On the Quai at Smyrna.” His story focuses on the displacement of refugees and the nightmarish conditions they had to endure when evacuating. The narrator begins by recalling how the Greek refugees would scream every night, how a Turkish officer had told him about women who held onto their dead children for six days at a time, refusing to let them go:

THE STRANGE THING WAS, HE SAID, HOW they screamed every night at midnight. I do not know why they screamed at that time. We were in the harbor and they were all on the pier and at midnight they started screaming. We used to turn the searchlight on them to quiet them. That always did the trick. (Hemingway 1996, 1)

The short story sheds light on the dehumanization perpetrated by the soldiers, which made the displacement and atrocities possible. Both sides managed to strip the people of the opposing side of their humanity, which would lead to the deportation and killing of native peoples in historically pluricultural lands. İzmir,part of the Anatolian peninsula, was one of the most heavily targeted areas during the Greco-Turkish War. The region had several factors that made it susceptible to attack: it was the headquarters of the Turkish Nationalist Movement, led by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, but also a desired target for nationalist Greeks aiming to regain territories of the late Byzantine Empire. Anatolia’s strategic importance was ideal for both Turkey and Greece, from its location bridging between Asia and Europe to its diverse population, which that housed both Greeks and Turks. In fact, the Greek population of Smyrna was greater than the one in Athens. The conflict directly affected both the Turkish people of Anatolia and the native Pontic Greeks, who suffered hundreds of thousands of casualties.Louis de Bernières’ novel Bird Without Wings, written in 2004, follows various characters through the Anatolia of the early 20th century, including those in Smyrna. While the novel’s main focus is not the Greco-Turkish War, it uses the conflict as a contextual background by exploring the points of view of not only Greeks and Turks but also Armenians and other groups that had to endure life in Anatolia throughout the conflict. While Hemingway encapsulates the horrors of war and the ease with which we dehumanize victims, Bernières humanizes every group affected by this conflict. His characters experience stories that are painfully human but also incredibly ordinary – from romance to family ties, human connections unfold in a pluricultural land besieged by war and the fall of the Ottoman Empire.

Bernières was not the only one to write about life before the fire of Smyrna: in her book The Ghosts of Smyrna, Loren Edizel tells the story of a family and the effects the fire had on them. While the Greek army invades them from one side and the Turkish forces stop them from the other, the Levantine family endures hardships and see their neighbourhood disappear. İzmir had always been a territory of mixed cultures and religions, but the toll of the war ended up affecting all its citizens. Through the eyes of Niko, a young boy, we see a flourishing and diverse society made up of Greeks, Turks, Armenians and Jewish people alike break into tensions. The fire becomes the final explosion, the tangible outcome of the conflict building up in Smyrna.The effects of the conflict in Anatolia were certainly long-lasting, as well as in the rest of the Turkish territories with extensive Greek populations. In the novel Not Even My Name, Thea Halo tells the story of her mother, Sona Halo, who lived through the systemic displacement and killing of Pontic Greeks in post-war Anatolia. At first Sona, the narrator, talks about how her village of Greek-speaking Christians and the nearby Turkish village lived in peace, but with the years, as World War I and the Greco-Turkish war progressed, the men in her family and neighbourhood started being taken into labour camps, many never to return. Sona concludes the second part of her story by describing how Turkish officers forced them to leave the land with only what they could carry by foot, not even knowing their destination. The third section of the novel focuses on the painful journey of the exiles, who were punished for demanding water while witnessing the daily deaths of their fellow Greek and Armenian people. Sona’s daughter, Thea, manages to shed light on one of the most denied genocides in history, which affected hundreds of thousands of not only Pontic Greeks but also Armenians. The Greco-Turkish War left behind thousands of deaths, with both sides committing atrocities that deeply affected their populations. For years, both Greece and Turkey continued to suffer the consequences of this war over land, and their peoples saw separation and displacement through generations. Consequently,the population of Turkish Greeks saw their numbers go from 200,000 to 2,000 in the last century, long after the war was over. The fight between the two nations did not end with the passage of years; in fact, through the 1950s Greece and Turkey saw bombings and state-sponsored mobs designed to increase hatred between the countries.
Needless to say, the Greco-Turkish War is an often-ignored conflict that is key to understanding the current dynamics between the countries. From the displacements of Greeks in Istanbul to the current state of Cyprus, many political affairs cannot be fully understood without considering the background of tension that exists between the governments of both nations.

References
de Bernières, Louis. 2005. Birds Without Wings: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.
Edizel, Loren. 2013. The Ghosts of Smyrna: A Novel: TSAR Publications.
Halo, Thea. 2001. Not Even My Name: A True Story: St. Martins Press-3PL.
Hemingway, Ernest. 1996. In our time: Scribner.