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

Many other more anonymous figures seem to have followed in his footsteps. The ‘seven monks of Egypt [who lived] in Disert Uilaig’ in the west of Ireland were proudly remembered in manuscripts of the Irish Litany of Saints, along with coracle-fulls of other nameless ‘Romani’ (i.e. Byzantines) and ‘the Cerrui from Armenia’. All these diverse figures seem to have found their way to the most extreme ends of the Celtic fringe, where they were revered for centuries to come: indeed so holy was the reputation of these travelling Byzantines that according to the Irish Litany of Saints even to read their names over a sick man was believed to prevent ‘boils, and jaundice and the plague and every other pestilence’.

If an intermittent flow of living monks from east to west was possible, then the flow of inanimate books was greater still. Up to the eighth century, The Life of St Antony of Egypt by Athanasius of Alexandria was probably the most read and imitated book in Europe after the Bible, and what was true of manuscripts in general was particularly true of manuscript illumination: that early Irish and Northumbrian gospel books took as their principal model work from the Byzantine east Mediterranean is now beyond question.

At Cambridge I spent my final year specialising in the study of Hiberno-Saxon art, and what above all pushed me on to try and get through to the Tur Abdin was the knowledge of the extent to which the early medieval art of Britain was indebted to the artists of the scriptoria of the monasteries there. For though these monasteries now lie forgotten and half-deserted in an obscure corner of a predominantly Muslim country, some scholars believe that work produced in the Tur Abdin may well once have provided the inspiration for the very first figurative Christian art in Britain.

As I lay on my hard monastic bed, unable to sleep, I turned over in my mind an art historical controversy I had once studied in some detail. The debate revolved around a most intriguing tale.

In the mid-sixteenth century Stephanos, the Catholicos of Armenia, prepared to make a journey which he hoped would change the history of the east Mediterranean. Finding his Patriarchal seat of Echmiadzin surrounded on the east by the resurgent Persian Empire, and on the west by the new Ottoman dynasty, he saw his people facing the same fate as had befallen the Byzantines a century earlier: conquest followed by a bitter subjection under the dusty sandal of Islam. Like the Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Palaeologus, the Patriarch saw only one hope for his people: that he should travel to Europe, somehow forge an alliance with the West, and so surround the Turkish armies in a Christian pincer movement.

Manuel had travelled to the West in vain: though he had acquiesced to many of the doctrinal demands of the Catholic Church at the Council of Florence, and had even been received with honour by King Henry IV of England at a grand banquet at Eltham on Christmas Day 1400, he came back to Constantinople empty-handed, without securing the dispatch of a single Western knight to defend the eastern frontiers of Christendom. Fifty years later, in 1453, his successor Constantine XI Paleologus died fighting on the walls of Byzantium as the Turks finally burst into what had once been the capital of the Christian world.

Catholicos Stephanos thought he could do better; and he hung his hopes on the support of the Pope, Paul III Farnese. Stephanos’s spies had told him that Pope Paul had made it his special pontifical objective to liberate the oppressed churches of the Orient. They also told him that the Pope had a special interest in the study of scripture, and that he had called a council of scholars to establish once and for all the authentic text of the Bible. Stephanos knew that if he was to succeed in his mission he would have to establish a personal rapport with the Pope, and for this reason he cast around for a suitable present for the Roman Pontiff. Eventually his advisers hit upon a brilliant idea.

Someone in Echmiadzin had heard that in the libraries of the monasteries of the Tur Abdin there lay an astonishing collection of early Christian gospel manuscripts. One of these was a copy of the Diatessaron, a very early and very unusual gospel harmony – the four canonical gospels united into a single life of Christ – originally composed by the priest Tatian in the early second century A.D. For a century or so the Diatessaron had been the standard New Testament text in use in the Church of Antioch, but as copies of the original gospels became more widely available, it slipped out of common use and eventually came to be seen as a heretical text. At some stage it seems to have been ordered that manuscripts of Tatian’s work were to be destroyed, and only in the obscure recesses of a few remote monastic libraries did copies of the Diatessaron survive.

Stephanos sent an envoy hundreds of miles south from the Caucasus to Mesopotamia to locate one of these last Diatessaron manuscripts. When eventually one was found, it was agreed that a local scribe, a Syrian Orthodox priest, should copy out the text. It was this copy that was taken to Rome by Stephanos. According to a colophon in the manuscript, the scribe was a native of Hasankeif, a town on the Tigris, a few miles south of Diyarbakir near Deir el-Zaferan. The overwhelming likelihood is that the original manuscript from which the papal copy was made came from the monastic library of Deir el-Zaferan.

In the event the Catholicos’s embassy to the West was a fiasco. Stephanos never saw the Pope, and within a century his people, like the Byzantines before them, had been conquered and their land divided between the Persians and the Turks. The copy of Tatian’s Diatessaron was never presented to the Holy Father, only getting as far as the office of his secretary. Later it found its way from the Vatican to the Bibliotheca Medicea Laurentiana in Florence.

Four hundred years later, in the winter of 1967, the Danish art historian Carl Nordenfalk was at work in the Laurentian Library when he came across the manuscript and began to browse through its pages. Suddenly he found himself staring at a set of illustrations that made him stop dead in his tracks. Nordenfalk was a specialist in Celtic manuscripts, and he saw immediately that these illustrations in the Diatessaron were iconographically identical to those in the first of the great illuminated Celtic gospel books, the Book of Durrow. The Diatessaron pictures also had a close relationship with a slightly later Celtic manuscript, the Gospels of St Willibrord.

In the Book of Durrow each gospel is preceded by a whole-page illustration showing the sacred symbol of the Evangelist who wrote the book (in this early case, a man to represent St Matthew, an eagle for St Mark, a bull for St Luke and a lion for St John). Most scholars would accept that these paintings in the Book of Durrow, probably executed in the last years of the sixth century A.D., are the first figurative paintings in British art.

Although the style of the Diatessaron and the two Celtic Gospel Books are very different – as you would expect from two manuscripts drawn centuries apart – the poses of the symbols, the angles at which they were drawn and the attitudes they strike are identical with each other, and totally different to anything else in Christian iconography. Moreover, both sets of manuscripts open with nearly identical full-page illuminations showing a double-armed cross embedded in a weave of intricate interlace. The same pattern also found its way onto a Pictish cross-slab, the Rosemarkie Stone, which still lies on the Beauly Firth, a few miles north-east of Inverness.

It took several months of intense study before Nordenfalk felt confident that he had worked out how an obscure mid-sixteenth-century copy of a manuscript from eastern Turkey could have such a close relationship with a pair of Celtic gospel books which were probably illustrated on the isle of Iona, off the distant west coast of Scotland, some eight centuries earlier.

Nordenfalk’s thesis was that the illustrations of the Book of Durrow were based on an earlier copy of the Diatessaron which had somehow reached Iona from the Levant in the early Middle Ages. He even had a suspect for the carrier of the manuscript from east to west.

In his History, the Venerable Bede records that one winter night at the very end of the seventh century, a Frankish galley on its way back from the Holy Land was wrecked off the coast of Iona; a storm had blown the ship around the north coast of Scotland until it came to rest, as fate would have it, on the shores below the island’s abbey church. Bede records that on board the vessel was a Gaulish nobleman named Arculph, who dictated a description of the holy places of the Levant to Adamnan, Iona’s Abbot. (A copy of the manuscript of Arculph’s descriptions, entitled De Locis Sanctis, later reached Bede’s own scriptorium in Jarrow and became a source of much future Anglo-Saxon comment – both factual and legendary – on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean from Constantinople to Alexandria.) ‘It is extremely tempting to assume,’ wrote Nordenfalk, ‘that [a copy of] the illustrated Diatessaron was among the books in Arculph’s baggage.’

The realistic portraits in such an Eastern manuscript would have come as a revelation to Celtic monks familiar only with the geometric whorls and trumpet spirals of pagan Celtic art. Nordenfalk proposed, not unreasonably, that the arrival of the Diatessaron was the spark which ignited the almost miraculous blaze of Celtic book illumination during the seventh and eighth centuries, a process which culminated in such masterpieces as the Lindisfarne Gospels and the Book of Kells.

In his excitement Nordenfalk went on to make several other, much wilder claims for the Florence Diatessaron which were later questioned by rival academics. But the core of his thesis has never been successfully challenged. There can be no doubt that the miniatures and interlace patterns of the Florence Diatessaron, a manuscript originally illuminated in a monastic scriptorium somewhere in the Tur Abdin, comes from the same family of manuscripts as those contained within the Book of Durrow and the Gospels of St Willibrord.

Somehow, perhaps in the baggage of a shipwrecked Frankish nobleman, a set of pictures probably originally drawn in a monastery in eastern Turkey came to form the seed from which sprung the first Christian figurative paintings ever drawn in the British Isles. It is a considerable cultural debt, and one that is little known, and certainly unrepaid.

This evening, an hour before vespers, the monks, the novices and the schoolchildren got out the ladders and began the harvest of Mar Gabriel’s pistachio trees.

The orchards stood on a ripple of narrow terraces sloping down from the front gate of the monastery. On the lower terraces the grapes were growing black with sweetness and the sheaths of the almonds were near to bursting; but the pistachio trees were so ripe that they would clearly rot if they were not picked that week. So the boys swarmed around the pistachio trees, trying to clamber up into the boughs without using step-ladders, pulling themselves up and swinging over to the ends of the branches. There hung the clusters of green buds which enclosed the soft white nuts. The boys plucked at the trees and threw down the buds to the novices who stood below, holding tin buckets.

As they scrabbled around, the harvesters were chatting to each other in Turoyo, the modern dialect of Aramaic still spoken as the first language of the Suriani. It had a completely different sound to Turkish or Kurdish or any other Anatolian tongue I had ever heard, sounding instead far closer to the guttural elisions of Hebrew or Arabic. Jesus must have sounded much like this when, as a boy, he spoke Aramaic in the carpenter’s shop at home or chatted to his friends beside the Sea of Galilee.

After half an hour plucking at the buds, I took a rest and looked on from the edge of the terrace. Afrem came over to join me. He pointed out the burned earth of the slopes of the Izlo Mountains ahead of us, dramatically lit up now in the last light of the sun. ‘You see over there?’ he said. ‘Those were all olive groves. Now they have been burned. It will be years before any trees that are replanted will be ready to harvest.’

‘You think there will be a chance to replant them?’

‘We have to hope,’ he said. ‘Without hope we cannot live.’

Yacoub came up and joined us. He put down his bucketful of pistachio buds and sat with his legs dangling over the edge of the terrace.

‘We should be thankful,’ he said. ‘Here they’ve only burned the trees. Further east, towards Hakkari, they’ve been clearing all the villages too: seven or eight this year alone. Since the trouble with the PKK began ten years ago they have cleared many Muslim villages, and nearly twenty-five Christian ones.’

Afrem said that a refugee from one of the destroyed Christian villages, a priest, Fr. Tomas Bektaş, was being sheltered by the monastery until he found somewhere to live. He said I should talk to him, and promised to introduce me after dinner.

Afrem kept his promise. After we had all eaten in the monastic refectory – the normal bracing Suriani dinner, a haunch of boiled goat with salty porridge and sticky rice, followed by pekmez, a thick slurry of pressed grapes considered the greatest of delicacies in polite Suriani society – the monks withdrew as usual to take coffee on the roof terrace. Fr. Tomas was sitting a little to the side. He was an unremarkable-looking man with a small toothbrush moustache and a nervous tick which made him wink his right eye every few seconds. Afrem had warned me that the clearance of his village had led to Fr. Tomas having a major nervous breakdown from which he had yet to fully recover, and that the priest might not want to talk about what had happened to his village: ‘He will get nightmares again,’ said Afrem.

In the event, however, Fr. Tomas poured out his heart without hesitation. I sat back on my stool, and the priest talked. ‘It was the middle of winter,’ he said. ‘One day an army officer in a Land-Rover dug his way through the snowdrifts. We gave him tea and then he simply told us that we had twenty days to leave. At first we did not understand what he meant. He said we had all been helping the PKK, that we had been supporting them with food and giving them guns. It was all nonsense, of course: what business do we have with the Kurds?

‘The next day I went to the sub-governor in Silopi and pleaded for Hassana, but he would not receive me. His assistant said, “He does not want to speak.” So I had to return to my village and tell my people that we had to leave, that there was no choice.

‘We all left on the last day, all two hundred of us: thirty-two families in all. My family was the last. I was the priest: I had to make sure they all left safely.

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