Old Smyrna

Old Smyrna (Greek Παλαιὰ Σμύρνα, Palaia Smyrna, Turkish Eski Smyrna) is an ancient Greek exonym first known to have been applied by Strabo (14.1.37) to a city of the endonym Σμύρνα, Smyrna. It had existed at the same location on the Bay of Smyrna, Turkey, since prehistoric times. Old Smyrna experienced what was termed dioecism (dioikismos), the removal of a city from its subordinate constituents, the reverse of synoecism, at the hands of its Lydian conquerors under their king, Alyattes, in 585 BC, in the Archaic Period of Greece. It is mentioned by Herodotus (1.16.2). Such a procedure, which was standard among the ancient Greeks, razes the center of the city and distributes the population to komai, or "villages," (where they may have lived anyway). Apparently they did not suffer andrapodismos, the massacre of the men and the sale of the women and children into slavery, but were allowed to live komedon, "in villages," albeit without a polis of their own.

The remains of Old Smyrna are known from several excavations in the neighborhood of Beyraki, İzmir. Its development can be traced for over 700 years. According to ancient sources, Smyrna was founded by Aeolians, but later conquered by Colophon and was therefore regarded as an Ionian city. Having become part of the Lydian empire in 585 BC, its territory became part of the Achaemenid Empire in 545 BC. Around 330 BC, the rulers of Macedon synoecised a new city from the villages of the old including any that had been founded since then.

The main difference besides the demographic changes of time is that a new site was chosen for the asty, or political center, about 4 km (2.5 mi) from the previous. Other than that it cannot be said that the polis was relocated. It had all the villages it would have had, had it not been dioecized. The old asty became a municipal unit of the new city. The ancients did not use the term new, however. Moderns have chosen it in opposition to Strabo's old, and politically there was a new city. The ancient sources chose to regard it as the same Smyrna. Only in 1930 did the more recent population break away from the ancient name, substituting the Turkish form, İzmir, instead. For all that, İzmir is derived from Smyrna.

Locality problems

There are a number of difficulties with the Strabo passage. Smyrna is razed and un-synoecized in 585 BC not to be reassembled for 400 years, which would be 185 BC. This reassembly, presumably of the villages, must be another synoecism. Different synoecisms create different cities, yet Strabo considers them in some way the same Smyrna, despite the distinction of one being "old." This turn of the phrase is far-fetched, as after 400 years neither the people nor their material objects can be the same in any significant way, any more than the city of New York continues York, England. İzmir also is considered Smyrna even though yet more different still.

There is, however, a common element. The territory of a polis is every bit as much the polis as the asty, or urban area. Smyrna's territory probably always was about the same; that is, the land around the Bay of Smyrna. Any polis in that territory would have to be Smyrna. If some other polis were there, its territory would belong to it, and have its name, not Smyrna's. Any number of differently named villages could be there.

Having reached this conclusion the investigators' next gambit was to identify villages of the komedon to see what geographic area they covered. The sources stating or implying borders as well as the boundary stones discovered by archaeologic survey were useful for this purpose. Hill is able to use this material to reconstruct the borders of the Ionian states.

For Smyrna, imagine that the border is a line leaving the north coast of the bay in a northward direction, ascending the slopes of the range enclosing the east end of the bay, veering always to the right in an ovoid line following the ridge or the upper slopes on the bay side until it comes around to the south of the bay and heads north to intersect it. The salient locations are as follows:

Not surprisingly the city of İzmir covers about the same territory as ancient Smyrna, except that İzmir extends over prograded land and has managed to inhabit more of the mountainous land. The territory must have filled up during the (new) Smyrna period. There was simply nowhere else to build. Currently over this relatively small territory are roughly 4 million people living on 12,012 km2 (4,638 sq mi). İzmir is the 3rd largest city of Turkey.

Smyrna's conquerors that did not actually inhabit it had some trouble declaring it to be null and void or reducing it to villages. It was already too crowded to fit the village mold. Strabo himself said that it existed on the mountains, and filled up the plains by the harbor, and had a city wall, but only partly fit within it. It is not correct to say that anyone abandoned it or moved out of it to somewhere else or that it was ever a single settlement that could change locations. A polis is by definition a synoecism of multiple settlements. Whatever the site at Beyrakli was, it was not the single site of a single settlement, Smyrna. That the political center moved from there to a few miles away, there is little scholarly doubt. However no source gives any hint of why the Macedonian sponsors made that decision.