Dispatch from İzmir: a Levantine tapestry

The consulate, reconstructed after the 1904 earthquake, has converted its sea-view chambers into the Arkas Art Center, which is currently hosting an extensive exhibit titled “Smyrna in the 18th and 19th Centuries: A Western Perspective,” curated by Jean Luc Maeso and Mujde Unustasi and featuring paintings, sketches, photographs, maps, documents and journals from Westerners who traveled to Smyrna. Contributions were made by numerous museums and collections such as Paris’s Louvre, Amsterdam’s Rijksmusuem and the collection of the İzmir Italian Consulate.

The images and documents of the exhibit produce, unsurprisingly, a portrait of both their subjects and their creators. Consider the fig. No doubt an integral part of the city’s history and culture, it nonetheless figures in travelers’ accounts with a strange fervor. A French poster amplifies the “Fête des Figues Smyrne” into a scene of exaggerated chaotic revelry, camels trampling merchants, a crowd bursting with intoxicated celebration. One visitor, apparently enthralled by the process of packing and preserving the fruits, remarks: “The older denizens of Smyrna don’t merely say that something happened a long time ago, they exclaim ‘I’ve slapped quite a few figs since that happened’.” Here is a glimpse into local life, yes, but it’s likewise a reflection of the Western traveler’s selective focus on cultural slices of life rather than, say, on politics -- a focus that pervades the exhibit.

The term “Western perspective” both succeeds and fails to capture what Maeso and Unustasi have brought together. The umbrella notion of Orientalism does run through the exhibit as a constant theme, often seen simply in the hyper-curiosity of visitors over mundane aspects of life, rendered exotic in their thinking. But other themes emerged to mark the Western experience of Smyrna as a “the”: the grateful arrival from a treacherous corsair-stalked sea-crossing into the city’s beautiful, embracing harbor. There is the obsession with panoramic views of the city, perhaps owing to the residual delight from that first sighting, or more darkly, from a need to know and conquer the exotic scene. There is a fascination with blending and liminality -- “There she is,” a pair of French travelers say in contemplating Smyrna, “modern and barbarous, very new and very old, Greek, French, Italian and Turkish, strangely composite and multilingual.”

But Western eyes -- belonging to travelers, merchants, artists, historians, diplomats -- also have their idiomatic angles and investments. A key example of this is their discord over the very meaning of the term “Levantine.” Having just read Philip Mansel’s “Levant,” I felt I had a fairly strong grasp on Levant as a contested term, polysemous and internally contradictory. Mansel famously defines it as “an area, a dialogue and a quest.” But wandering the Arkas, I realized I was left with the rather foundational question of who counts as Levantine. Maeso and Unustasi refuse to provide a neat, singular answer to this question, instead offering multiple definitions of the term from Westerners to emphasize its instability. Was it merely a way to say “Levant expat”? Did it include Turks? Greeks? Non-Muslim minorities? Do we distinguish between European travelers and those who became, in Edhem Eldem’s term, “Ottomanized”?

I was delighted later to find that Mansel himself had visited the exhibit and offered his own perspective. “The Fondation Arkas is helping to transform Izmir’s memory of itself, by reminding the city of its global past,” he writes. This seems fair. The İzmır Ethnographical Museum barely acknowledges the existence of people other than Turks, with only a brief mention of Levantine architecture, and a swift definition of Levantines as “minorities.” The APİKAM, the İzmir Municipality’s museum of local history, is far more embracing of the city’s multicultural heritage, with a current exhibit paying tribute to the French, Greek and Armenian hospitals as indispensable supports in the city’s quest for public health. But Maeso and Unustasi’s emphasis on cultural interaction was unique in what I saw in İzmir, and surely constitutes a gift to the city.

Sadly, the Arkas exhibit will only be on view until Dec. 29. So joining the infinite list of reasons to go to İzmir (I was enchanted), here is a compelling argument for visiting soon.