Édmond-Édouard Boissonnas and Édouard Chapuisat’s Smyrne (1919)

Abstract

This article revisits the Mediterranean port city of Smyrna (today’s Izmir) in 1919 as it stood on the cusp of monumental change. Édmond-Édouard Boissonnas’s photographs and Édouard Chapuisat’s accompanying textual frames in the album Smyrne capture the city just as the Greek army landed there to begin their occupation of Asia Minor in a doomed bid to defeat the Ottoman Turks and create a new Byzantine empire. The article argues for the propagandist, transnationalistic aim of Smyrne in support of the Greek state’s irredentist agenda based on what Astrid Erll identifies as the ‘isomorphy between territory, social formation, mentalities and memories’. ‘Civilised’ Greeks are pitted against ‘backward’ Turks, and those who do not fit the narrative at all – Jews and Armenians – are excluded. The article concludes by reflecting on the afterlife of the album on a Greek heritage website which now offers the potential for reconciliatory nostalgia for both Greeks and Turks.