constitution. Abdul Hamid, ruthless, paranoid, and reclusive, had suspended it three decades earlier, and there was a sense among the army officers, the “Young Turks,” that a return to constitutional government would revive the empire’s fortunes by wresting it from the backwardness of the aging sultan. The return of constitutional government created a brief moment of celebration among the peoples of the multicultural and multireligious Ottoman Empire—Moslems, Greeks, Armenians, and Jews. There was a surge of Ottomanism—the idea that the empire’s many different people could live together as equals and in peace in a Moslem state. The goodwill was brief. Conservative Moslems led a countercoup on behalf of the sultan; the Young Turks put it down, and this time the military leaders forced Abdul Hamid’sabdication. The Young Turks replaced him with his brother, Mehmet V, a puppet.
The doctrine of a liberal and tolerant Ottomanism rapidly evaporated, and soon it became clear that the Young Turks saw the expulsion of Christian minorities and creation of a homogeneous Moslem nation as the way to rescue the empire. They enforced their vision with brutality. Horton watched as Turkish authorities executed a terror campaign against Christians around Salonika and the backcountry of Macedonia. Christians began to disappear without explanation or were found dead in their fields. Horton put his reporting skills to work, documented the terror, and sent numerous descriptions of the harassment and killing back to Washington. Nor was the killing limited to the Balkans. Nearly thirty thousand Armenian and Assyrian Christians were slaughtered in pogroms in Adana, a region in southern Anatolia. These episodes of religious cleansing, however, were mere preliminaries to the slaughter that would follow.
In 1911, the State Department transferred Horton again, this time to Smyrna. He swooned at his good fortune. Smyrna was the legendary birthplace of Homer, and the Aegean coast of Asia Minor once had been home to the Ionian Greeks who counted among their citizens the philosophers Thales, Pythagoras, Anaximander. His favorite poet, Sappho, had written her love lyrics on the island of Lesbos, near Smyrna, and classical allusions everywhere scored the landscape—Phocaea, the Greek city-state celebrated by Herodotus for its resistance to the Persians in 500 BC, still stood at the tip of Smyrna’s harbor. Herodotus himself, the father of history, had born in nearby Halicarnassus.
Horton moved into the America consulate at Smyrna, a mansion at 17-23 Galazio Street with his third wife, Catherine, a beautiful and cultivated Greek woman twenty-five years his junior whom he had met in Athens. His energy, eccentricity, and friendly personality won favor with Turks and Greeks of the city, and he pursued his interests—he played golf at the club in Paradise, went woodcock shooting on nearby estates, and occasionally joined the archaeological dig at Sardis, the ancient capital of the Lydian Empire and its famously rich king, Croesus. Within the year, at age fifty-one, he was a father again. Nancy, hissecond daughter, grew into a bright blond girl, and the Hortons sent her to the French convent school in the city. *
IN THE FIRST FEW DAYS of September, the Turkish nationalist army had continued to draw closer to Smyrna, bringing its cavalry, infantry, and artillery forward in a rapidly moving line. By September 3, it had taken the city of Ushak, only one hundred and twenty miles distant by way of the Casaba Railroad, and General Nikolaos Trikoupis, the senior Greek commander in the field, had been taken prisoner.
By September 3, Smyrna’s newspapers stopped publishing the reassuring false reports planted by the Greek authorities and plainly reported news of the Greek army’s retreat. A tremor went through the Christian and expatriate residents of the city. The Asia Minor Defense League, a local organization of Greeks, distributed guns and
The doctrine of a liberal and tolerant Ottomanism rapidly evaporated, and soon it became clear that the Young Turks saw the expulsion of Christian minorities and creation of a homogeneous Moslem nation as the way to rescue the empire. They enforced their vision with brutality. Horton watched as Turkish authorities executed a terror campaign against Christians around Salonika and the backcountry of Macedonia. Christians began to disappear without explanation or were found dead in their fields. Horton put his reporting skills to work, documented the terror, and sent numerous descriptions of the harassment and killing back to Washington. Nor was the killing limited to the Balkans. Nearly thirty thousand Armenian and Assyrian Christians were slaughtered in pogroms in Adana, a region in southern Anatolia. These episodes of religious cleansing, however, were mere preliminaries to the slaughter that would follow.
In 1911, the State Department transferred Horton again, this time to Smyrna. He swooned at his good fortune. Smyrna was the legendary birthplace of Homer, and the Aegean coast of Asia Minor once had been home to the Ionian Greeks who counted among their citizens the philosophers Thales, Pythagoras, Anaximander. His favorite poet, Sappho, had written her love lyrics on the island of Lesbos, near Smyrna, and classical allusions everywhere scored the landscape—Phocaea, the Greek city-state celebrated by Herodotus for its resistance to the Persians in 500 BC, still stood at the tip of Smyrna’s harbor. Herodotus himself, the father of history, had born in nearby Halicarnassus.
Horton moved into the America consulate at Smyrna, a mansion at 17-23 Galazio Street with his third wife, Catherine, a beautiful and cultivated Greek woman twenty-five years his junior whom he had met in Athens. His energy, eccentricity, and friendly personality won favor with Turks and Greeks of the city, and he pursued his interests—he played golf at the club in Paradise, went woodcock shooting on nearby estates, and occasionally joined the archaeological dig at Sardis, the ancient capital of the Lydian Empire and its famously rich king, Croesus. Within the year, at age fifty-one, he was a father again. Nancy, hissecond daughter, grew into a bright blond girl, and the Hortons sent her to the French convent school in the city. *
IN THE FIRST FEW DAYS of September, the Turkish nationalist army had continued to draw closer to Smyrna, bringing its cavalry, infantry, and artillery forward in a rapidly moving line. By September 3, it had taken the city of Ushak, only one hundred and twenty miles distant by way of the Casaba Railroad, and General Nikolaos Trikoupis, the senior Greek commander in the field, had been taken prisoner.
By September 3, Smyrna’s newspapers stopped publishing the reassuring false reports planted by the Greek authorities and plainly reported news of the Greek army’s retreat. A tremor went through the Christian and expatriate residents of the city. The Asia Minor Defense League, a local organization of Greeks, distributed guns and
Similar Books
