The question of who was responsible for starting the burning of Smyrna continues to be debated, with Turkish sources mostly attributing responsibility to Greeks or Armenians, and vice versa. Other sources, on the other hand, suggest that at the very least, Turkish inactivity played a significant part on the event.
The majority of non-Turkish researchers agree that the fire was caused by Turkish soldiers in order to completely eradicate the Christian presence in Anatolia.
Sources claiming Turkish responsibility
George Horton
George Horton was the U.S. Consul General of Smyrna. He was compelled to evacuate Smyrna on 13 September, and arrived in Athens on 14 September. In 1926, he published his own account of what happened in Smyrna, titled The Blight of Asia. He included testimonies from a number of eyewitnesses, and quoted a number of contemporary scholars.
Origins of the fire Horton's account states that the last of the Greek soldiers had abandoned Smyrna during the evening of 8 September, since it was known in advance that Turkish soldiers would arrive on 9 September. He said that Turkish soldiers set the fire on 13 September:
The Turkish soldiers first cleared the Armenian quarter, and then torched a number of houses simultaneously behind the American Intercollegiate Institute. They waited for the wind to blow in the right direction, away from the homes of the Muslim population, before starting the fire. This report is backed up by the eyewitness testimony of Miss Minnie Mills, the dean of the Intercollegiate Institute:
This was confirmed by the eyewitness report of Mrs King Birge, the wife of an American missionary, who viewed events from the tower of the American College at Paradise:
Contemporary scholars quoted Horton quoted contemporary scholars within his account, including the historian William Stearns Davis: "The Turks drove straight onward to Smyrna, which they took (9 September 1922) and then burned." Also, Sir Valentine Chirol, lecturer at the University of Chicago: "After the Turks had smashed the Greek armies they turned the essentially Greek city (Smyrna) into an ash heap as proof of their victory."
Summary of the destruction of Smyrna
The following is an abridged summary of notable events in the destruction of Smyrna described in Horton's account: Turkish soldiers cordoned off the Armenian quarter during the massacre. Armed Turks massacred Armenians and looted the Armenian quarter. After their systematic massacre, uniformed Turkish soldiers set fire to Armenian buildings using tins of petroleum and flaming rags soaked in flammable liquids. Soldiers planted small bombs under paving slabs around the Christian parts of the city to take down walls. One of the bombs was planted near the American Consulate and another at the American Girls' School. The fire was started on 13 September. The last Greek soldiers had evacuated Smyrna on 8 September. The Turkish Army was in full control of Smyrna from 9 September. All Christians remaining in the city who evaded massacre stayed within their homes, fearing for their lives. The burning of the homes forced Christians into the streets. Horton personally witnessed this. The fire was initiated at one edge of the Armenian quarter when a strong wind was blowing toward the Christian part of town and away from the Muslim part of town. Citizens of the Muslim quarter were not involved in the catastrophe. The Muslim quarter celebrated the arrival of the Turkish Army. Turkish soldiers guided the fire through the modern Greek and European section of Smyrna by pouring flammable liquids into the streets. These were poured in front of the American Consulate to guide the fire, as witnessed by C. Clafun David, the Chairman of the Disaster Relief Committee of the Red Cross (Constantinople Chapter) and others who were standing at the door of the consulate. Mr Davis testified that he put his hands in the mud where the flammable liquid was poured and indicated that it smelled like mixed petroleum and gasoline. The soldiers who were observed doing this had started from the quay and proceeded towards the fire, thus ensuring the rapid and controlled spread of the fire. Dr Alexander Maclachlan, the president of the American College, together with a sergeant of the American Marines, were stripped and beaten with clubs by Turkish soldiers. In addition, a squad of American Marines was fired on.
Charles Dobson Charles Dobson, an Anglican chaplain in Smyrna, was convinced that the Turks started the fire. He wrote multiple reports stating this belief in response to Turkish denial of responsibility.
Winston Churchill Winston Churchill, future Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, then-Secretary of State for the Colonies, wrote in 1929: "Mustapha Kemal's Army...celebrated their triumph by the burning of Smyrna to ashes and by a vast massacre of its Christian population".Churchill, Winston, The Aftermath, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1929, p. 444.
Oran Raber Oran Raber, an assistant professor of botany at the University of Wisconsin, was visiting Smyrna as a tourist when the fire broke out. According to his statement, hundreds of Armenians had gathered in the Armenian church in their search for protection, but they still held on to their guns and ammunition. When they refused to surrender and come out, the Turks threw a bomb at the church, thereby setting it on fire and blowing up the ammunition of the Armenians. As such, instead of attempting to extinguish the fire, the Turks aided and directed it by petrol.
Other American eyewitnesses One of the witnesses in Marjorie Housepian Dobkin's account was the American industrial engineer Mark Prentiss, a foreign trade specialist in Smyrna, who was also acting as a freelance correspondent for the New York Times. He was an eyewitness to many of the events which occurred in Smyrna. He was initially quoted in The New York Times as putting the blame on the Turkish military. Prentiss arrived in Smyrna 8 September 1922, one day before the Turkish Army marched into Smyrna. He was a special representative of the Near East Relief (an American charity organization whose purpose was to watch over and protect Armenians during the war). He arrived on the destroyer USS Lawrence, under the command of Captain Wolleson. His superior was Rear Admiral Mark Lambert Bristol, U.S. High Commissioner to the Ottoman Empire from 1919 to 1927, present in Constantinople. Bristol was intent on securing economic concessions for the United States from Turkey and made a concerted effort to prevent any news report to appear to show any favor to the Armenians or Greeks. He once remarked that "I hate the Greeks. I hate the Armenians and I hate the Jews. The Turks are fine fellows."
The former American vice-consul to Persia was so incensed by Bristol's efforts to stifle news coming out of Smyrna, that he took out an op-ed in New York Times to write, "The United States cannot afford to have its fair name besmirched and befouled by allowing such a man to speak for the American soul and conscience."
Prentiss' initial published statements were as follows:Dobkin, Marjorie Housepian, Smyrna 1922: The Destruction of a City; New York, Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1971; p. 71.
Critics of Prentiss point out that Prentiss changed his story, giving two very different statements of events at different times. Initially, Prentiss had cabled his account, which was printed in The New York Times on 18 September 1922 as "Eyewitness Story of Smyrna's Horror; 200,000 Victims of Turks and Flames". Upon his return to the United States, he was pressured by Mark Bristol, a pro-Turkish American admiral who harboured viciously anti-Greek and anti-Armenian sentiments,Bristol wrote once: "The Armenians are a race like the Jews: they have little or no national spirit and have poor moral character. Armenians and Greeks have many flaws and deficiencies of character that do not fit them for self government". See: The original letters: Mark Lambert Bristol, 1868-1939, Rear Admiral & United States High Commissioner in Turkey, Letter to W. S. Benson, June 3, 1919 (First Sentence), Letter to Admiral W. S. Sims, December 12, 1919 (Second Sentence) For more info on Bristol's Turkophilia, Armenophobia and Hellenophobia, see: Dobkin, Marjorie (1988) Smyrna 1922: The Destruction of a City, p. 76 and Ureneck, Lou (2016). Smyrna p. 255. to put a different version on record. Prentiss then claimed that it was the Armenians who had set the fire. Bristol reported that during the Turkish capture of Smyrna and the ensuing fire the number of deaths due to killings, fire, and execution did not exceed 2,000.Freely, John. Children of Achilles: the Greeks in Asia Minor since the days of Troy. London, New York: I.B. Tauris, 2009, p. 213. He is the only one to offer such a low estimate of fatalities. William H. King even introduced a resolution in the U.S. Senate asking for an investigation into Bristol's pro-Turkish attitude.L. Ureneck, The Great Fire: One American's mission to rescue victims of the Twentieth century's first Genocide. Ecco, 2015. 63.
Theodore Bartoli Theodore Bartoli, an Italian resident of Smyrna, stated that from 11 September, Turkish soldiers had secretly placed bombs in Armenian houses with the intention of 'discovering' them later and using them as a pretext to massacre the inhabitants, rob their homes and set fire to their houses. Fighting between Armenian bands and Turkish soldiers continued throughout the next day, until on 13 September a large crowd of Armenians had barricaded themselves in the St. Stepanos Church. Demanding that they come out, the Turkish soldiers shot 500 Armenians as they left the church; the soldiers then went in, spread petrol on the floor and burnt the remaining Armenians alive in their church. Bartoli writes that the Turkish troops repeated this measure with two Greek churches. As such, according to this account, the Turks not only started the fire, but also actively spread it.
Non-contemporary sources
René Puaux A near-contemporaneous account is given by , correspondent for the respected Paris newspaper Le Temps, who had been posted in Smyrna since 1919. Based on multiple eyewitness accounts, he concluded that "by Wednesday [13 September] the putrefaction of the bodies, left unattended since the 9th in the evening, became untolerable, explaining what happened. The Turks, having pillaged the Armenian quarter and massacred a great portion of its inhabitants, resorted to fire to erase the trace of their actions."René Puaux, La mort de Smyrne (The Death of Smyrna), Editions de la Revue des Balkans, 4th edition (1922), p. 13 (in French) He also quoted a telegraph by Major General F. Maurice, special correspondent for the Daily News in Constantinople, concluding that "The fire started on the 13th, in the afternoon, in the Armenian quarter, but the Turkish authorities did nothing serious to stop it. The next day eyewitnesses saw a large number of Turkish soldiers throwing gasoline and setting houses on fire. The Turkish authorities could have prevented the fire from reaching the European quarters. Turkish soldiers, acting deliberately, are the primary cause of the terrible spread of the disaster."
Giles Milton British author Giles Milton's Paradise Lost: Smyrna 1922 (2008) is a graphic account of the sack of Smyrna (modern İzmir) in 1922 recounted through the eyes of the city's Levantine community. Milton's book is based on eyewitness accounts of those who were there, making use of unpublished diaries and letters written by Smyrna's Levantine elite: He contends that their voices are among the few impartial ones in a highly contentious episode of history.