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Ionian Vision: Greece in Asia Minor 1919-1922
MICHAEL LLEWELLYN SMITH, 1998
London, Hurst
xxi + 401 pp., hb. L40.00, ISBN 185065 413 1; pb. L14.95, ISBN 1 85065 368 2
Michael Llewellyn Smith first published his study of the Greek-Turkish war which followed the First World War, in 1973. The book started as a doctoral thesis on the interplay between Greek domestic politics and foreign policy. It was based on Greek as well as British sources and gave a sympathetic account of the political mistakes which led to the Greek defeat in Turkish Anatolia in 1922. That defeat ended the co-existence of Greeks and Turks in a multi-ethnic environment, except for the 100,000 or so Greeks who were then left in Turkish Istanbul and a similar number of Turks (known officially as 'Muslims') in Greek western Thrace. Yet this compassionate account of what Greeks call to this day 'the catastrophe' was well received in Turkey-where it was published under the apt title of 'The Illusion of Ionia' (lyonya Hayah). It was a tribute to the scholarly fairness of Llewellyn Smith's work.
The book has now been reprinted in facsimile, with a new introduction written in Athens in 1998, where Michael Llewellyn Smith had been posted as British ambassador. There is also a short addition to the bibliography. Had the author the means to consult and incorporate Turkish sources, a more rounded picture might have emerged. But this would not have affected his analysis or altered his conclusions, which remain as valid as when they were first written. The book was well worth reprinting in its original form, and many stand to benefit from it-not just students of the perennially difficult relationship between Greece and Turkey, but everyone who is interested in current affairs and, particularly, the current resurgence of ethnic nationalism.
The Greek-Turkish war of 1919-1923 (hostilities ended in October 1922 and...