Submitted by scott on Tue, 04/24/2012 - 13:22

The crew of the Quaker City has some fun at the expense of the pilgrims, conducting parodies of the meeting with Alexander II. They sail from Constantinople to Smyrna, modern day Izmir. This is where journalist, writer, and adventurer Ian Strathcarron picks up the scent. He has written a book, Innocence and War Mark Twain's Holy Land Revisited, After an extended prologue on the making of Mark Twain and how he found himself on the Quaker City Excursion Strathcarron joins the route, moored in the harbor of Izmir. I expect to insert comments derived from Innocence and War as we proceed with the chapters of The Innocents Abroad. I had hoped to be able to clip portions of Strathcarron's book but that will not be possible. My copy is in Amazon's Cloud Reader which does not allow cutting and pasting nor even printing. I'll have to proceed the old fashioned way and actually type in passages that seem important.

Smyrna, Asia Minor, September 5, 1867: Daily Alta November 17, 1867
Reading Date
March 20, 2012
SL Venue
Botanical Gardens Story Telling Pavilion

Twain Chapter Comments

Izmir (Turkish: İzmir) is a large metropolis in the western extremity of Anatolia. The metropolitan area in the entire Izmir Province had a population of 3.95 million as of 2010, making the city third most populous in Turkey. Izmir metropolitan area extends along the outlying waters of the Gulf of İzmir and inland to the north across Gediz River's delta, to the east along an alluvial plain created by several small streams and to a slightly more rugged terrain in the south. The ancient city was known as Smyrna, and the city was generally referred to as Smyrna in English, until the Turkish Postal Services Law of 1930 made "Izmir" the internationally recognized name.  

The city of Izmir is composed of several metropolitan districts. Of these, Konak district corresponds to historical Izmir, this district's area having constituted the "Izmir Municipality" (Turkish: İzmir Belediyesi) area until 1984, Konak until then having been a name for a central neighborhood around Konak Square, still the core of the city. With the constitution of the "Greater Izmir Metropolitan Municipality" (Turkish: İzmir Büyükşehir Belediyesi), the city of Izmir became a compound bringing together initially nine, and since recently eleven metropolitan districts, namely Balçova, Bayraklı, Bornova, Buca, Çiğli, Gaziemir, Güzelbahçe, Karabağlar, Karşıyaka, Konak and Narlıdere. Almost each of these settlements are former district centers or neighborhoods which stood on their own and with their own distinct features and temperament. In an ongoing processus, the Mayor of Izmir was also vested with authority over the areas of additional districts reaching from Aliağa in the north to Selçuk in the south, bringing the number of districts to be considered as being part of Izmir to twenty-one under the new arrangements, two of these having been administratively included in Izmir only partially.  

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Izmir 

QC arrived at Constantinople, at daybreak.  

3 Sept QC party, probably including SLC, visited Scutari during the day;

QC departed Constantinople, 10:00 p.m.

 5 Sept  QC arrived at Smyrna, 10:00 a.m.