From the Holy Mountain: A Journey in the Shadow of Byzantium

A week later I left Sivas and went to see a cousin who was working as an agricultural engineer in Erzerum, attempting to reintroduce silk farming to the region. Over dinner one night I happened to mention what I had seen, whereupon my cousin said that he had had a similar experience himself only the previous month. He told me that for four years he had been in the habit of taking an annual fishing holiday in the village of Maydanlar in the hills to the north of Tortum. On previous occasions he had admired a magnificent collection of early medieval Armenian cross-stones (known as khatchkars) which lay piled up near the village well; but this year the stones had all vanished. When he asked the villagers what had happened to them they became visibly nervous and would not tell him; it was only when he was alone with one old man that he learned what he believed to be the real story. Government officials from Erzerum had come through the village the previous month; they had asked the villagers for the whereabouts of any Armenian antiquities, and then proceeded to smash the stones up. Afterwards they had carefully removed the rubble.

I had heard other similar stories of the mysterious disappearance of Armenian remains, and the following year, working as a journalist on the Independent, I was able to investigate the subject in some detail. The trail led from the Armenian community in Paris, through Anatolia, to the library of the Armenian community in Jerusalem. By the end I had amassed a body of evidence which showed the alarming speed at which the beautiful, ancient and architecturally important Armenian churches of Anatolia were simply vanishing from the face of the earth.

An incomplete inventory of actively used Armenian churches compiled by the Armenian Patriarchate of Constantinople in 1914, immediately before the genocide, recorded 210 Armenian monasteries, seven hundred monastic churches and 1,639 parish churches, a total of 2,549 ecclesiastical buildings. A 1974 survey of the 913 buildings whose locations were still known found that 464 had completely disappeared, 252 were in ruins and only 197 remained in any sort of sound condition. Since then there had been several new discoveries, but the condition of most of the others had continued to deteriorate dramatically. Many still standing in 1974 had begun to crumble, while some extremely beautiful buildings had collapsed and completely disappeared.

There was nothing very sinister in the cause of the condition of many of the buildings. Some had been damaged by earthquakes; and the explosion of Turkey’s population had caused a demand for building materials which the churches readily supplied; others had been fatally undermined by Turkish peasants digging for ‘Armenian gold’, the legendary El Dorado of riches supposedly buried by the Armenians before they were ‘deported’ in 1915.

Nevertheless it was clear that the Turkish antiquity authorities had not exactly gone out of their way to stop the Armenian monuments from falling into decay. During the 1980s numerous Seljuk and Ottoman mosques and caravanserais had been restored and consolidated, but this treatment had not been extended to one single Armenian church. The Armenian monastery on the island of Aghtamar in Lake Van, arguably the most famous monument in eastern Anatolia, had belatedly been given a guardian, but this had not stopped the building’s decay: five of the main sculptures – including the famous image of Adam and Eve – had been defaced since the guardian’s appointment, and there had been no attempt to consolidate the building in any way. One British architectural historian I talked to maintained that there was a ‘systematic bias’ in what the Turks restored or preserved.

Moreover it was clear that academics – both Turkish and foreign – were strongly discouraged from working on Armenian archaeological sites or writing Armenian history. A British archaeologist (who, like almost everyone I talked to on this subject, begged to remain nameless) told me, ‘It is simply not possible to work on the Armenians. Officially they do not exist and have never done so. If you try to get permission to dig an Armenian site it will be withheld, and if you go ahead without permission you will be prosecuted.’ The truth of this was graphically illustrated in 1975 when the distinguished French art historian J.M. Thierry was arrested while making a plan of an Armenian church near Van. He was taken to police headquarters where he was fiercely interrogated for three days and three nights. He was released on bail and managed to escape the country. In his absence he was sentenced to three months’ hard labour.

Fear of this sort of thing severely restricts the investigation of Armenian remains and leads to a kind of selective blindness in those scholars whose professional careers demand that they continue to work in Turkey. In 1965 plans were announced for the building of a huge hydro-electric scheme centred on the Keban dam, near Elazig in the south-east of the country. The artificial lake this created threatened a number of important monuments, and a team of international scholars co-operated in the rescue operation.

Five buildings were of particular importance: a pair of fine Ottoman mosques, a small Syrian Orthodox church, and two Armenian churches, one of which contained exceptional tenth-century frescoes. The rescue operation is recorded in the Middle East Technical University (Ankara) Keban Project Proceedings. The report describes how the two mosques were moved stone by stone to a new site. The Syrian Orthodox church was surveyed and excavated. The two Armenian churches were completely ignored. Although the most ancient and perhaps the most interesting of the threatened monuments, they did not even receive a mention in the report. They now lie for ever submerged beneath the waters of the lake.

Those who flout the unspoken rules on Armenian history still find themselves facing almost ludicrously severe penalties. In early December 1986 Hilda Hulya Potuoglu was arrested by the Turkish security police and charged with ‘making propaganda with intent to destroy or weaken national feelings’. The prosecutor of the Istanbul State Security deemed that her offence merited severe punishment, and asked for between a seven-and-a-half- and fifteen-year jail sentence. Her crime was to edit the Turkish edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, in which was included a footnote reading: ‘During the Crusades the mountainous regions of Cilicia were under the hegemony of the Armenian Cilician Kingdom.’ It would be impossible to find a respectable academic anywhere in the world who could possibly take issue with the historical accuracy of this statement, but in the view of the prosecutor, Potuoglu was guilty of distorting the facts on a politically sensitive issue: the Britannica quickly joined the index of forbidden books, along with such other politically dubious publications as The Times Atlas of World History and The National Geographic Atlas of the World.

During the 1970s and early 1980s it was clear that the censorship of publications dealing with the Armenians had been dramatically stepped up. The reason for this was the rise of ASALA – the Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia – which in the early eighties began attracting international attention with a series of terrorist attacks, directed mainly at Turkish diplomats. The resulting publicity succeeded in bringing the issue of the Armenian genocide back onto the political agenda. This culminated in 1987 in the passing of a resolution in the European Parliament which recognised that the refusal of Turkey to acknowledge the Armenian genocide was an ‘insurmountable obstacle’ to the consideration of its bid to join the European Community.

The Turkish government argued that although some Armenians may have been killed in disturbances or deportations during the First World War, so were many Turks. Moreover, the Turks insisted, there were never very many Armenians in Anatolia in the first place, and the numbers supposedly massacred – around one and a half million – actually exceeded the total Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire. In 1989 the previously classified Ottoman archives relating to the period were opened up to a select group of Turkish scholars and combed for material to prove the Turkish case. The Turkish Foreign Minister claimed that when the process of declassification is complete, ‘allegations of an Armenian massacre will be no more than a matter of political abuse’.

None of this, of course, created a particularly favourable environment for the conservation of the principal legacy left by the Armenians in Turkey, the hundreds of Armenian churches and gravestones which still littered eastern Anatolia. It is probably no coincidence that it was at exactly this time that reports of deliberate Turkish government destruction of Armenian remains began to multiply. The stories were always difficult to corroborate, for what witnesses there were in these remote regions tended to be illiterate Turkish peasants, and after the destruction of a building it is extremely difficult to distinguish what is alleged to be dynamiting from what could well be earthquake damage.

There are however a small number of intriguing incidents which are difficult to explain away. At Osk Vank, for example, the village kaymakam (headman) told J. M. Thierry that a government official from Erzerum had come to the village in 1985. The official asked for help in destroying the church, but the kaymakam refused, saying it was far too useful: his people used it as a garage, granary, stable and football pitch.

Another case concerns the once magnificent group of churches sitting astride a deep canyon near Khitzkonk, south-east of Kars. In photographs taken at the beginning of the century, five superb churches can be seen. After the massacres the area was closed off to visitors, and was not reopened until the 1960s. When scholars returned, only one church, the eleventh-century rotunda of St Sergius, was still standing; the other four were no more than one or two courses high. Two had been completely levelled and the stones removed. The peasants told of border guards arriving with high explosives. More reliable witness to what had happened was contained in the remaining building: the cupola was untouched, but the side walls had been blown outwards in four places where small charges appeared to have been laid.

Certainly Armenian scholars are convinced that a deliberate campaign is under way to destroy all evidence of the Armenians’ long presence in eastern Anatolia. As my friend George Hintlian, curator of the Armenian Museum in Jerusalem, put it: ‘You can attribute disappearing churches to earthquakes, robbers, Kurds, Islamic fundamentalists, men from outer space or anything else you care to blame. The end result is exactly the same. Every passing year another Armenian church disappears and for this the Turkish authorities can only be pleased. They have already changed all the Armenian village names in eastern Anatolia; the churches are all we have left. Soon there will be virtually no evidence that the Armenians were ever in Turkey. We will have become a historical myth.’

THE MONASTERY OF MAR GABRIEL, TUR ABDIN, 18 AUGUST

Mas’ud, the driver I had been recommended, turned up at the hotel at seven in the morning.

We left Diyarbakir by the Mardin Gate and drove down into the brilliant green of the river valley. The Tigris, at its lowest in midsummer, was no wider than the Tweed at Berwick. Its banks were marshy with reeds and lined by poplars and cedars; beyond stretched fields of ripe corn. A fisherman on a flat skiff was spearing fish, like the gold figure of Tutankhamen in the Cairo museum; nearby children were wading in the shallows.

A little downstream, a black basalt bridge several hundred yards wide spanned the river. The central piers – built of great blocks of stones each the size of a coffin – were early Byzantine; the outer ones were more delicate, the work of Diyarbakir’s Arab conquerors: the fine kufic inscriptions they carved to record their work still decorated the upper registers. I had just got out my camera to take a picture of the bridge, with the grim black bastions of Diyarbakir crowning the hill in the background, when Mas’ud hissed at me to stop: ‘The men in the white car are plainclothes security police,’ he said.

I looked where he was indicating. A little behind us a white Turkish-made Fiat had pulled in opposite the fishing skiff. The passenger door was open and a burly Turk was standing looking at us. ‘They followed us down from the hotel. If you photograph the bridge they may arrest you.’

I was unsure whether Mas’ud was imagining things, but still put the camera away and got back in the car. We drove on; the white car stayed where it was.

The road followed the slowly meandering banks of the Tigris; soon the walls of Diyarbakir slipped out of view behind a curve in the river. We passed a ford where a shepherd was leading a string of long-haired Angora goats over the rushing water; nearby a party of peasants were dressing a vineyard full of young vines. On either bank the land was rich and fertile; above the sky was bright blue, and a light breeze cooled the already intense heat of the sun. It was difficult to imagine that this peaceful, plentiful countryside held any threat to anyone.

Then, turning a corner, we saw a barricade blocking the road in front of us. A group of men in ragged khaki uniforms, some topped with chequered keffiyehs, stood behind a line of petrol cans. Some held pistols, others snub-nosed sub-machine guns; a few held assault rifles.

‘Police?’ I asked.

‘Inshallah, village guards,’ said Mas’ud, slowing down. ‘Just hope it’s not PKK. You can’t tell at this distance. Either way, hide that notebook.’

We slowed down. The men walked towards us, guns levelled. They were village guards. The leader exchanged a few words with Mas’ud and waved us through without checking our documents. But at a second checkpoint a few miles later we were not so lucky. The commando at the barricade indicated that we should pull in. We did as we were instructed and parked beside a large single-storeyed building.

The building had once been a police station but had now been taken over by the army. Troops were milling around in full camouflage. To one side, in front of a fortified sandbag emplacement, stood a six-wheeled Russian armoured personnel carrier; on the other were two light tanks and four or five Land-Rovers with their canvas back-covers removed and heavy machine guns mounted over the cabins.

The commando took our documents – Mas’ud’s ID and my passport – and left us waiting in a corridor, saying he had to get permission from his superior before we could proceed. After half an hour a telephone rang, and shortly afterwards a group of maybe twenty soldiers jumped into the Land-Rovers and set off at speed. We continued to stand in the corridor.

Eventually we were admitted to a room where an officer was sitting behind a desk. He spoke a little English, told us to sit down, and offered us tea. Then he asked me what I was doing and where I was going. I told him my destination, but following the advice of the journalists in Istanbul, I did not produce my press card, which I kept in my pocket. The officer scribbled down a few details, repeated the advice that we should be off the road by four at the latest, and handed back our documents.

‘Be careful,’ he said.

We saw what he meant a few miles later. By the side of the road lay the fire-blackened hulk of a car. It had been burned the previous week, said Mas’ud, at a PKK night-time roadblock.

Soon after we passed the skeleton of the car, the road left the Tigris and the landscape began to dry out. The vines disappeared and were replaced by fields of sunflowers; a few coppices filled the valley bottoms. Then they too vanished and we entered a plain of rocky, barren scrub. A convoy of six APCs passed us from the opposite direction. We drove on, passing a succession of roadblocks and more armoured convoys.

Shortly before lunchtime we drove through Mardin, then turned off the main road onto a track; over a hillock, surrounded by silver-grey slopes of olive groves, rose the unmistakable silhouette of the melon-ribbed cupolas of Deir el-Zaferan, the Saffron Monastery.

Until the First World War, Deir el-Zaferan was the headquarters of the Syrian Orthodox Church, the ancient Church of Antioch. The Syrian Orthodox split off from the Byzantine mainstream because they refused to accept the theological decisions of the Council of Chalcedon in 451 A.D. The divorce took place, however, along an already established linguistic fault-line, separating the Greek-speaking Byzantines of western Anatolia from those to the east who still spoke Aramaic, the language of Christ. Severely persecuted as heretical Monophysites by the Byzantine Emperors, the Syrian Orthodox Church hierarchy retreated into the inaccessible shelter of the barren hills of the Tur Abdin. There, far from the centres of power, three hundred Syrian Orthodox monasteries successfully maintained the ancient Antiochene liturgies in the original Aramaic. But remoteness led to marginalisation, and the Church steadily dwindled both in numbers and in importance. By the end of the nineteenth century only 200,000 Suriani were left in the Middle East, most of them concentrated around the Patriarchal seat at Deir el-Zaferan.

The twentieth century proved as cataclysmic for the Suriani as it had been for the Armenians. During the First World War death throes of the Ottoman Empire, starvation, deportation and massacre decimated the already dwindling Suriani population. Then, in 1924, Ataturk decapitated the remnants of the community by expelling the Syrian Orthodox Patriarch; he took with him the ancient library of Deir el-Zaferan, and eventually settled with it in Damascus. Finally, in 1978, the Turkish authorities sealed the community’s fate by summarily closing the monastery’s Aramaic school.

From 200,000 in the last century, the size of the community fell to around seventy thousand by 1920. By 1990 there were barely four thousand Suriani left in the whole region; now there are around nine hundred, plus about a dozen monks and nuns, spread over the five extant monasteries. One village with an astonishing seventeen churches now only has one inhabitant, its elderly priest. In Deir el-Zaferan two monks rattle around in the echoing expanse of sixth-century buildings, more caretakers of a religious relic than fragments of a living monastic community.

Nineteenth-century travellers who visited Deir el-Zaferan often thought it looked more like a fortress than a monastery, and they had a point. Standing under the great ochre battlements, I hammered on the thick, heavily reinforced beaten-metal gate while Mas’ud locked the car. After a few minutes a young monk’s bearded face peered suspiciously at us through an arrow-slit. Soon afterwards there was a rattling of bolts and chains and the gate swung open. Abouna Symeon stared at us with amazement.

‘You had no trouble getting here?’ he said in English.

I described our journey.

‘Things are very bad at the moment,’ he said. ‘We have not had any visitors for many months. No one will come. There is no security in these mountains.’

Abouna Symeon led us up a dark gallery which opened into a wide and shady cloister. In the bright light of the cloister-garth a flat-capped (but barefoot) gardener was watering pots full of geraniums and anemones. To his side rose an astonishing arcaded portico, supported on two deeply cut pilasters rising to a pair of elaborate Corinthian capitals. It was late Roman, yet, astonishingly, it was still employed for its original purpose, and was inhabited by the direct spiritual descendants of the original builders. Here bands of classical acanthus decoration, of a quality equal to the finest Byzantine sculpture surviving in Istanbul, covered sanctuaries in which the Aramaic liturgy was still chanted, unchanged from the day they were built. It was odd to think that these barren and remote hills, now terrorised by troops and guerrillas, and home only to poor and illiterate peasant farmers, were once places of considerable sophistication.

‘It is beautiful,’ said Abouna Symeon, coming up behind me. ‘But for how much longer? Maybe the next time you come sheep will be grazing here.’

‘Is that likely?’

‘All our people are leaving. One by one our monasteries and our Christian villages are emptying. In the last five years – what? – twenty villages around here have been deserted. Perhaps nine are left; maybe ten. None has more than twenty houses. If the door were open – if the rest of our people could get visas for the West – they would all go tomorrow. No one wants to bring up their children in this atmosphere. They want to go to Holland, Sweden, Belgium, France. Not many years are left for us here.’

We walked through the cloister. At one end sat another monk, a much older man, wearing the characteristic Syrian Orthodox black hood embroidered with thirteen white crosses representing Jesus and his apostles. He was bent over a desk, peering shortsightedly at the page in front of him, and in his hand he held a pen. As we drew near I saw that he was writing in Aramaic with a thick, broad-nibbed pen. I was just about to introduce myself when he looked up.

‘You are Mr William?’

‘Yes …’

‘And this is Mr Mas’ud?’

‘Yes. How … ?’

‘The police telephoned from Mardin five minutes ago to see if you had arrived. They said we should phone them when you got here.’

‘They followed us from the first checkpoint as far as Mardin,’ said Mas’ud. ‘Another white car.’

‘We were being followed again? Why didn’t you tell me?’

Mas’ud shrugged: ‘Always they do this.’

As we were speaking the telephone rang again. Symeon went to answer it. Mas’ud and I looked at each other.

‘That was the police again,’ said Symeon on his return. ‘They told us to find out where you are going and to tell them when you leave.’

‘You must see the monastery and leave quickly,’ said the old monk. ‘We don’t want the police in here.’

‘Anyway, you haven’t got much time if you are to get to Mar Gabriel by nightfall,’ said Symeon. ‘For your own sake you must hurry.’

We left the old monk at his writing desk and Symeon took us down some stairs into the darkness of a vaulted undercroft. It was built of huge quoins with a stone roof, and constructed without mortar. Inside it was hot and damp. We stood in silence, waiting for our eyes to adjust to the semi-darkness.

‘This was built about 1,000 B.C.,’ said Symeon. ‘There was a pagan sun temple here before the monastery. Then when Christianity …’ He broke off suddenly. ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘That banging. Can you hear?’

In the dark of the crypt we listened to a distant clash of metal against metal.

‘It’s the front gate again,’ said Symeon. ‘But who can it be?’

We climbed the stairs and Symeon sent the gardener off to see who had come. We were now standing next to a great Roman doorway, above which was sculpted an equal-armed Byzantine cross, set in a classical laurel wreath which in turn rested on a pair of confronted dolphins.

‘What’s this?’ I asked.

‘In the sixth century it used to be the medical school. It was famous even in Constantinople. Later it became a mortuary. We call it the House of Saints.’

He took us inside. In the middle of the room, a ribbed dome rose from a rectangle of squinches. The walls were lined with an arcade of blind arches, each niche forming a separate burial chamber.

‘All the Patriarchs and all our fathers are buried in here,’ said Symeon. ‘It is said the monastery contains the bones of seventeen thousand saints.’

He led us through a rectangular Roman doorway into the small, square monastery church. Every architectural element was decorated with an almost baroque richness of late antique sculpture: over the omega-shaped sanctuary arch, friezes of animals tumbled amid bucolic vine scrolls and palmettes; feathery volutes of windblown acanthus wound their way from the capitals to the voussoirs of the arches, and thence down exuberant and richly carved pilaster strips. The church was sixth-century, yet the architectural tradition from which it grew was far older: the same decorative vocabulary could be seen on Roman monuments two hundred years earlier at Ba’albek and Leptis Magna. At the time of its construction, this sculpture must have appeared not just astonishingly rich; it must also have seemed deliberately conservative, even nostalgic, a deliberate attempt at recalling the grand old Imperial traditions during a time of corruption and decline.