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W.

W. Empire pod UK.com. Hello and me.

welcome to Empire with me Anita Arnan and me William Durrenpool.

Was that the pause creeping back? That was the pause. That was the pause. Why? It just, you know, you need a little bit of a buildup to begin the show. That's how it works.

It's the whiff of naphthalene. You've had it in mothballs and just waiting to produce it when I'm lulled into a sense of security.

Exactly.

Okay, anyway, look, this week we're going to have two episodes and they're going to focus on the city of Smyrna. This is because in of itself it's a really

important story, it's a story that you almost certainly don't know. But this is also a crossroads in history. It tells the story of the Greek Turkish war,

the rise of Atta Turk, and it will explain the Turkish republic that we have today.

This story in a sense, rounds off the story

that we've been telling in the whole of this series.

We started with the arrival of the Seljuk Turks in Anatolia in the 12th century.

We've taken you through the conquest of Constantinople, the expansion of the Ottoman Empire

into the Balkans, the high point of Lopanto and the siege of Vienna, and then this

slow contraction, the extraordinary events of the First World War, the heroic defense at Gallipoli, but the horrific

massacres of the Armenians. And this is really the end of the story. What

happens after the First World War ends, after the Allies have taken Constantinople

and are beginning to divide up the spoils?

And this is a story which is crucial to understanding Turkey today, but a story which almost no one I think outside

...