My father Alexander J. Cassar rarely spoke about his traumatic early childhood. He was born in the Aegean coastal city of Smyrna now Izmir a wonderfully cosmopolitan place with a majority Greek population as well as Armenians, Europeans, Levantines, Turks and Jews. Smyrna was famed among other things for its great harbour and bustling bazaars. After the occupation the Greek army, not content with this plum city, had continued to push eastwards into Anatolia where there were large Greek populations in all the towns and villages.
This sparked the Greco-Turkish War of After a series of victories, the Greeks were routed by Turkish troops and forced back to Smyrna where the Turks set the city ablaze in revenge. The waterfront became a living hell as , Greek soldiers and desperate refugees driven from their villages amassed on the quayside. My father Alexander Cassar escaped by sea on a British warship that was among the vessels stationed in the harbour watching as the horror unfolded. As I grew older I became more and more curious to learn about what had happened during that terrible time years ago when Smyrna was destroyed.
This memoir is an attempt to piece together the threads of the lives of my family that were so brutally disrupted and then slowly rebuilt. My story begins in the late 19th century with the emigration of my great grandparents from Malta. The epidemic is believed to have started in Ottoman Turkey before spreading to Egypt and arriving in Malta β then a British protectorate β on infected ships from Alexandria. The ships were quarantined but stolen goods, which began to circulate in the islands, brought the disease onshore.
Before the plague Malta was thriving thanks to the presence of the British navy during the Napoleonic wars and the relocation of British factories from Sicily and Naples to the islands of Gozo and Malta. The main industry in was cotton.
During the plague, which lasted a year and killed 5 per cent of the population of the two islands, quarantine restrictions stopped the production and export of cotton in its tracks as looms were close down and people were banned from gathering and moving between the villages, towns and ports. Some ports imposed quarantines on Maltese ships until while other factors such as the growing popularity of Egyptian and Indian cotton, which could be produced far more cheaply, contributed to the economic decline.
