Smyrna in Flames, A Novel

SKU: PR233967

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Condition: BRAND NEW
ISBN: 9781942134756
Format: Trade paperback (US)
Year: 2022
Publisher: Mandel Vilar Press


Description:


This powerful and moving historical novel is inspired by the written recollections and the memories that haunted the author’s father, Nicias Aridjis,—a captain in the Greek army, who returned from the fields of battle to Smyrna, 50 miles northwest of his hometown of Tire, in 1922 just as Turkish forces captured this cosmopolitan port city. Smyrna in Flames , by the internationally acclaimed Mexican writer and poet Homero Aridjis, lays bare the unimaginable events and horrors that took place for nine days between September 13 and 22—known as the Smyrna Catastrophe. After capturing Smyrna, Turkish forces went on a rampage, torturing and massacring tens of thousands of Greeks and Armenians and devastating the city—in particular, the Greek and Armenian quarters—by deliberately setting disastrous fires.

After years of fighting in World War I and the Greco-Turkish War, Nicias enters a Smyrna under siege. He desperately moves through the city in search of Eurydice, the love of his life whom he left behind. Wandering the streets, the sounds of hopelessness commingle in his mind with echoes of the ancient Greek poets who sang of the city’s past glories. Images and voices, suggestive of Homeric ghosts adrift in a catastrophic scenario, conjure up a mythological, historical, geographical quest that, in the manner of classical epic, hovers between the heroic and the horrible, illustrating the depths and depravity of the human soul.

Making his way from district to district, evading capture, Nicias observes the last vestiges of normal life and witnesses unspeakable horrors committed by roaming Turkish forces and irregulars who are ran

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