30.09.2017


During the years of World War I American writer Ernest Hemingway left for Europe, took part in the War and was seriously injured. In September 1922 by assignment of the Canadian “Toronto Daily Star” newspaper’s editorial office, Hemingway left for Turkey as a reporter.

In September 1922 the Kemalist troops organized a real carnage in Smyrna, setting on fire the Armenian and Greek quarters. The aim was to terrorize the Christian population of the city and made them to leave it. The districts were covered with the corpses of Armenians and Greeks. Those, who tried to survive and be saved by Italian, British and American worship witnessing the fire, were sunk in the sea. The author was shocked by the atrocities organized by the Turkish government, sufferings of Armenians and Greeks living in Smyrna. In a short Story collection “In our Time” printed in 1925, in a short story called “On the Quai at Smyrna”, where Hemingway wrote.

“… It’s impossible to convince them to give the death children back. About 6 days they kept death children and didn’t give them. We couldn’t do anything. We had to snatch them from Turks... All of them were on the cliff, and the scene was not like an earthquake or something like that, it was something else, they could never understand Turks. They could never know what was going to do the old Turk…

… I can’t forget the port of Smyrna. The waters of Smyrna were full of everything. It was the first time in my life, that in the night I had nightmares. Maternity women weren’t as terrible, as those whose children were death. With them it was easier. It was astonishing that few people died”.

In 1954 Ernest Hemingway received the Nobel Prize in Literature.