MAPS OF HISTORY · ON THIS DAY · May 15 · 1919

ON THIS DAY · 15 MAY 1919

Smyrna

15 May 1919 — Greek troops land under Allied warships to claim western Anatolia. The Ottoman partition ignites the Turkish War of Independence — proof, within months, that the peacemakers’ map would not draw itself.

THE MOMENT IN CONTEXT

This is the new map: a dozen states where four empires stood — Finland to Yugoslavia, a reborn Poland after 123 years of partition — drawn in a Paris conference hall by exhausted victors, on Wilson’s promise of “self-determination” applied to a continent where peoples do not live in neat blocks. The result: some 25–30 million Europeans become national minorities inside someone else’s nation-state — three million Germans in Czechoslovakia, three million Hungarians outside Hungary (Trianon leaves Hungary a third of its old territory; no country on this map remembers 1920 more bitterly), Germans in Poland’s corridor, Ukrainians in Poland, everyone in Yugoslavia. Minority-protection treaties are signed and shelved. Outside Europe there is no self-determination at all: the Ottoman and German territories become “mandates” — watch the grey-tan hold — and the Turkish War of Independence (the Smyrna marker) burns for four more years before the peacemakers’ Anatolian map is torn up at Lausanne.

From Chapter 12 — The Peace That Failed of The Great War, 1914–1918 (FEB 1919).

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THE ATLAS THAT SHOWS IT

The Great War, 1914–1918

12 CHAPTERS · AN INTERACTIVE SITUATION MAP