Ada: Cut off from its backers, the royalist command still gambled. In nineteen twenty-one they launched an offensive deep into Anatolia, pushing toward Ankara.16
Theo: And this is against Mustafa Kemal's forces, the new Turkish nationalists.
Ada: It is. The Greek advance stalled at the Battle of the Sakarya. Then in August nineteen twenty-two, Kemal's counteroffensive broke the Greek army completely.16
Theo: And this is the part that still gets written about. Smyrna.
Ada: The great Greek city of Smyrna burned. And around one and a third million Anatolian Greeks were expelled, forced out of homes their families had held for thousands of years.16
Theo: From a treaty dream of two continents to that. In two years.
Ada: And it was Winston Churchill who drew the line all the way back. In his book from nineteen twenty-nine, he wrote that it was perhaps no exaggeration to say that a quarter of a million persons died of this monkey bite.13
Theo: A quarter of a million. From one animal in a vineyard. When you say it out loud it sounds absurd.
Ada: It does. But walk the chain back. A dog fight, a bite left under iodine, surgeons too frightened to cut, a dead king, an election, a hated monarch restored, allies walking away.
Theo: Every link is small. A nervous doctor. An embarrassed young man asking people to keep quiet. And the whole Near East tilts on it.
Ada: That's what stays with me. History turning not on some grand design, but on fear and chance and a man who just didn't want to look foolish in the papers.
Theo: And if you ever want to stop us and ask about any of it, the Treaty of Sevres, Smyrna, Venizelos, you can interrupt any episode and ask us anything.
Ada: Thank you for walking this one with us, Historai. From a stick in a vineyard to a burning city.
Theo: This was Historai - where history answers back.