📍Smyrna, Izmir, Turkey
1906 – 1922“I was born Aristotle Socrates Onassis in Smyrna — now Izmir — in what was then the Ottoman Empire in 1906, into a prosperous Greek merchant family. Smyrna was one of the great cosmopolitan port cities of the Mediterranean: Greek, Turkish, Armenian, Jewish and Levantine communities living in proximity and conducting business across every boundary. The catastrophe of 1922 — the Greek-Turkish War and the burning of Smyrna — destroyed my family's world: we fled as refugees, my father was imprisoned, and the comfortable merchant life was over. I arrived in Buenos Aires at seventeen with almost nothing, worked in a cigarette factory, traded in tobacco, and began building the shipping empire from those most unpromising beginnings. Smyrna gave me the cosmopolitan ease with different cultures and languages that made me effective wherever I went; the catastrophe of 1922 gave me the hunger.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today
Sources: Fraser, N. Aristotle Onassis (1977), Lippincott; Evans, P. Aristotle Onassis (1986), Summit Books; Gage, N. Greek Fire: The Story of Maria Callas and Aristotle Onassis (2000), Knopf