Word: smyrna
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...their announced ranks. A large number were simply counterfeit, like the Italian named Tassi, who said he had been Napoleon's engineer in chief but who confessed, when it became explosively clear he did not know how to handle artillery, that he was really a bankrupt saddler from Smyrna. Such magnificoes were very proud, Howarth relates, and they fought a great number of duels among themselves over matters of military precedence. Otherwise, there being no army for them to lead, they did little damage-even to the Turks...
Onassis was not to the villa born. The son of a Greek tobacco merchant, he grew up in the Turkish city of Smyrna. At age 17 he left his family, who by then had fled to Greece, and traveled by steerage to Argentina with less than $60 in his pocket. By the time he was 23, he had parlayed his earnings from odd jobs (such as dishwashing and working as a telephone lineman) into a million-dollar business that included cigarette manufacturing, dealing in rugs, hides and furs, and operating a decrepit tramp freighter. His formula: 20-hour work days...
...Smyrna tumbled its terrorized Greek population into the sea; as on the island of Crete earlier and many years later in Cyprus, the people's hatred and suspicion flared and fighting between Turks and Greeks followed. George Seferis had been born at the beginning of the century in the Ionian village of Skala, where he lived until 1914. The ravage delayed his return for 36 years, and sometimes he called himself a seafarer, perpetually seeking roots. The similitude aptly echoed reality, for Seferis traveled and he wrote--offering manuscripts like a wayward sailor tosses corked "bottles...
Seferis breathed desolation everywhere in Turkey. As he traveled towards Smyrna, the landscape grew familiar but his anticipation was tempered with foreboding. The changes Turkish soldiers couldn't rend, time worked more subtly and bewilderingly--it even shrunk the walls and roads. He remembered that...
Skala, unlike the larger and important town of Smyrna, was entirely deserted, and Seferis's childhood flickered on its broken facade. He tried to capture it whole in the form of a huge plane tree--but it had died. He looked for it in his initials scratched on a wall, but he couldn't find them anymore. Irretrievable roots...He left for the last time, a seafarer...