Quotes & Sayings About Izmir

(And did I mention how in summer the streets of Smyrna were lined with baskets of rose petals? And how everyone in the city could speak French, Italian, Greek, Turkish, English, and Dutch? And did I tell you about the famous figs, brought in by camel caravan and dumped onto the ground, huge piles of pulpy fruit lying in the dirt, with dirty women steeping them in salt water and children squatting to defecate behind the clusters? Did I mention how the reek of the fig women mixed with pleasanter smells of almond trees, mimosa, laurel, and peach, and how everybody wore masks on Mardi Gras and had elaborate dinners on the decks of frigates? I want to mention these things because they all happened in that city that was no place exactly, that was part of no country because it was all countries, and because now if you go there you'll see modern high-rises, amnesiac boulevards, teeming sweatshops, a NATO headquarters, and a sign that says Izmir ... ) — Jeffrey Eugenides

He trusts Malcolm, but Malcolm doesn't want trust: he wants someone to show the silvery, stripey marble he's found from a small quarry outside Izmir and argue about how much of it is too much; and to make smell the cypress from Gifu that he's sourced for the bathroom tub; and to examine the objects - hammers; wrenches; pliers - he's embedded like trilobites in the poured concrete floors. — Hanya Yanagihara

People tried and failed to combine the words Izzy and Ymir. The closest they came was Izmir, but that had been the name of a city in Turkey. — Neal Stephenson

Turkish." Vocabulary was deleted, new words added. Place-names all over the country were Turkified (for example, "Smyrna" became "Izmir"), which only added confusion and another obfuscating layer to the buildup of historical sediment. — Eric Bogosian