greco-turkish war, 1921-1922

Relates the true story of Asa Jennings, a YMCA minister from upstate New York who arrived in Smyrna (now Izmir) in 1922 to teach sports to boys, but instead found himself working tirelessly to help rescue more than 250,000 refugees during the genocide of Armenian and Greek Christians.

In a quiet Greek village during the summer of 1922 five children, among them an American boy and girl, inhabit a private world which reflects the troubled world of their elders.

Draws on new archival research and interviews to examine the mass expulsions in Turkey and Greece in the years following World War I, describing how the Lausanne treaty resulted in the deportation of Orthodox Christians from Turkey to Greece and of Muslims from Greece to Turkey.