Smyrna: Paradise is Burning, the Asa K. Jennings story

Directed by Mike Damergis

In August and September of 1922, the beautiful port of Smyrna became Ground Zero for one of the greatest human tragedies. It was the last violent episode in a ten-year holocaust that had killed three million people—Armenians, Greeks, and Assyrians, all Christian minorities—on the Turkish subcontinent between 1912 and 1922. It would also serve as a marker of the end of the Ottoman Empire. Humanity was on fire...from the ashes of despair rose heroes, like the Reverend Asa K. Jennings, the frail YMCA employee, who fed, sheltered and led an evacuation of nearly 350,000 people from Smyrna to neighboring islands and mainland. How could one frail man, with nothing more than faith in his heart, become the Shepard of hundreds-of-thousands of refugees?