September 9, 1922

Capture of Smyrna

Turkish cavalry enters İzmir, ending the city’s Greek occupation

The last Greek troops left on the evening of 8 September. Turkish cavalry rode into the same city at about eleven the next morning.

Eleven in the morning, along the quay

Greek troops completed their evacuation of Smyrna — modern İzmir — on the evening of 8 September 1922. Turkish cavalry entered at approximately 11 a.m. the next morning.

A surviving photograph in the Mark L. Bristol papers catches the entering soldiers on horseback along İzmir's quay. Units under Nureddin Pasha removed the Greek flag from the government building and raised a Turkish flag.

Mustafa Kemal Pasha was not with the first cavalry: the Turkish Ministry of Culture chronology dates his entry to 10 September.

The fire came four days later

The Great Fire was not part of the 9 September entry. U.S. records date the fire to 13 September.

By 10 September American officials were reporting the city occupied and relaying urgent warnings from relief workers: an estimated 150,000 refugees, about 20 percent of them needing sporadic assistance, and imported food cut off.

Responsibility for starting the fire remains heavily disputed and should not be attached casually to an account of the entry.

Control changed hands; the war did not end

Military control of İzmir passed to the Ankara-based nationalist movement and the main Anatolian campaign was effectively concluded, but hostilities did not formally cease. The Mudanya Armistice followed on 11 October.

The claim that Greece had been promised Anatolian territory for supporting the Entente during the war is also misleading. The May 1919 landing at Smyrna was authorised after the war by the Allied Supreme Council, and contemporary Allied documents described the occupation as provisional, creating no future territorial right.

"Liberation" and "fall" encode opposing national memories; what the record supports is the transfer of military control and the civilian emergency that followed.

Sources

Researched 24 Aug 2026 9 sources not yet audited

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