Forgetting the Smyrna Fire

Abstract

This article is on the role of collective memory in the construction of a nationalist narrative in Turkey. Through an analysis of how the Great Fire of Izmir that took place at the end of the Anatolian war in 1922 is remembered and/or forgotten, it attempts to understand the spatial and temporal rupture between what belonged to the Empire and what is imagined to be belonging to the nation. It is argued that this fire was not an accidental calamity, but a symbolic act of punishment, an act of chastising the ‘infidel Izmir’. The destruction of the city through fire is presented as an act of creative destruction, an attempt to build places of (counter)memory, to open up a hollow landscape upon which the new nation's imprint, its Muslim and Turkish identity, could be carved. This analysis aims to fill a significant gap in terms of understanding the social and cultural consequences of this neglected event in Turkey's history.