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

At this point the barefoot gardener reappeared with the new visitors. They were three men, all Turks, dressed in casual holiday clothes: T-shirts, slacks and trainers. They ignored us and began looking around the cloister, making a great show of examining the pot plants and the architecture. It was only when the back pockets of all three men simultaneously burst into crackles of static from hidden walkie-talkies that what was already obvious to Mas’ud and Abouna Symeon became clear to me: the men were plainclothes security police.

A few minutes later, I was still looking at the extraordinary sculpture in the church when the old monk, Abouna Abraham, appeared at the door. He seemed anxious and began nervously turning off the lights, indicating as politely as he could that my visit should be drawing to a close. Abouna Symeon, however, was determined not to be intimidated by this latest batch of uninvited visitors, and asked me upstairs to see the rooms of the old Patriarchs. I followed him up the steps onto the roof terrace.

‘Look!’ said Symeon. ‘On the top of the ridge. Do you see: the ruins of five more monasteries.’

I looked up to where he was pointing. On the rim of the crags high above Deir el-Zaferan rose the jagged silhouette of several lines of ruins.

‘On the left, do you see that cave? That’s the Monastery of St Mary of the Waterfall. And those ruins? That’s the monastery of St Jacob. Next to it, that’s St Azozoyel. Then those cells: that’s St Joseph, and the last one – another St Jacob’s.’

‘So many monasteries …’

‘Two hundred years ago there were seven hundred monks on this mountain. The community has survived so long – survived the Byzantines, the Persians, the Arabs, Tamurlane, the Ottomans. Now there are just the two of us left.’

‘Do you think you’ll be the last?’

‘God alone knows,’ said Symeon, leading me over to the other side of the terrace. ‘But I certainly hope I’ll outlive Fr. Abraham.’

From the battlements we looked south, over the olive-covered hillsides, past the monastic vineyard and on down to the flat plains of Mesopotamia. We stood in silence.

‘It’s very lovely, isn’t it?’ said Symeon. ‘When I went abroad to do my studies it was this view I always remembered when I thought of home: these vineyards stretching away into the distance.’

‘Does the monastery make its own wine?’

‘The fundamentalists don’t like us doing it. In Dereici village ten miles from here they shot a Christian winemaker. After that most of the village vintners abandoned their vines. But that’s not why we stopped. The old monk who used to superintend the vintage died six years ago. Now the grapes are too small and bitter for wine. They’re a lot of work and there are simply not enough Christians left in the villages to help us harvest and dress the vines properly. Even the man who is looking after them now is off to Germany next month. His relatives are all there already, and his visa has finally come through.’

‘Is the exodus speeding up?’ I asked.

‘Certainly,’ he said. ‘It’s partly economic. Life is hard here at the best of times, and the stories of the wages and social welfare payments they get in Sweden and Germany have got around by now. But our people also have political problems. I can’t ever remember things being as bad as they are at present. Our people are caught in the crossfire between the government and the PKK. And now there is the Hezbollah too.’

‘Here? I thought the Hezbollah were in Lebanon.’

‘They’ve just set up here. The authorities seem to tolerate them as a counterweight to the PKK. They help the government in many ways, but of course they hate the Christians. Three or four months ago they kidnapped a monk in Idil district. He was on his way to officiate at a wedding when two gunmen in a car stopped the minibus he was on and ordered him out. They buried him up to his neck, and later hung him upside down in chains. They kept him for two weeks, until a ransom was paid.

‘Sometimes the Hezbollah kidnap Christian girls from remote farms and villages and force them to marry Muslims. They say they are saving their souls; it happened to four girls last year. Another Hezbollah unit has taken over Mar Bobo, a Christian village near here: about ten or fifteen gunmen live there now. They’ve seized the roof of the church as their strongpoint, and they make the Christian women wear veils. They say we should go back to Europe where Christians come from, as if we were all French or German, as if our ancestors weren’t here for centuries before the first Muslim settled here. Now our people live in fear. Anything can happen to them.’

‘Can’t you tell the police?’

‘If anyone did the Hezbollah would kill the family … Wait: look!’

Fr. Symeon pointed to a dust cloud now rising on the track from Mardin.

‘More visitors.’

‘It’s the army,’ said Symeon. ‘Two Land-Rovers.’

Below us, Mas’ud had also spotted them and was rushing over to his car.

‘What’s he doing?’ I asked.

‘I think he’s turning his tape machine off. It was playing a Kurdish nationalist song. The soldiers might have arrested him if they heard it.’

The Land-Rovers pulled to a halt by the monastery walls, and armed soldiers began to pour out, some carrying heavy machine guns.

‘My God,’ said Symeon. ‘Is it war?’

But the soldiers did not enter the monastery. Instead they fanned out into the olive groves, jumping over the fence. One soldier kicked down a gate as he passed; another began to throw stones at a pomegranate tree, attempting to dislodge the ripe fruit. Symeon shouted down at them to stop: ‘Use the gate! Don’t break the fence.’

He turned to me: ‘Look at them! Breaking the tree to get at the fruit. Smashing our fencing. This is too much.’

‘Is this all because of my visit?’

‘I fear so,’ said Symeon.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I’d better go.’

‘You must go anyway. The sun is beginning to go down. You won’t get to Mar Gabriel unless you leave now.’

We walked down through the cloister to the car.

‘I’m very sorry for all this,’ I said.

‘Just make sure you tell the outside world what is happening here,’ said Symeon. ‘Go quickly now. God be with you.’

Mas’ud pulled away. When I looked behind me I could see the short black-robed figure of Symeon gesticulating at an officer, as the soldiers closed in around him.

The shadows were lengthening into a deep blue slur, spreading softly over the ridges and gullies of the Izlo Mountains. In the narrow river valleys shepherds were leading their flocks through rich groves of fig, walnut and pistachio trees. Women were fetching cooking water from roadside pumps; donkeys with bulging pack-saddles were ambling along the road. It was so easy to forget the troubles: only the continuous gauntlet of checkpoints and the occasional shell of an incinerated vehicle lying abandoned by the roadside reminded one of the dangers that the imminent twilight would bring.

We were making good time. It had just passed 4.30 and we were nearing Midyat, the nearest town to Mar Gabriel. In the distance on the left we could see the church towers of the Christian half of the town, flanked on the right by the minarets of the new Muslim quarter. On the edge of Midyat a large checkpoint had been erected, with a strip of sharpened nails laid out across the road like a fakir’s bed in a cartoon; behind it stood a slalom of oil cans. A line of bored soldiers were sitting in the shade, watching the cars zigzag through the obstacles. We were three quarters of the way through before one of the men – an officious looking conscript with a shaven head – decided to pull us in.

The man asked for our documents. He looked through my passport, pausing suspiciously at one of my Indian visas as if he had just uncovered conclusive evidence of my Kurdish sympathies. He examined Mas’ud’s ID, turning it over with a growing sneer on his face. Then he asked Mas’ud for the documents concerning the car. Mas’ud fumbled around in the glove compartment looking for them. It was clear we were in for trouble.

The conscript chose to take exception to something written on Mas’ud’s driving licence, and spent the next forty-five minutes cross-questioning him. I began to look nervously at the sinking sun and the minute hand on my watch. Eventually Mas’ud passed over a large banknote, folded up in his ID card. The man looked at it, and for an awful five seconds I thought he was about to expose Mas’ud’s attempt to bribe him. But he slipped it into his pocket without his colleagues seeing, and after complaining about the state of Mas’ud’s tyres, let us go. Mas’ud drove away muttering violent Kurdish curses under his breath.

It was now after 5.30. The sun was sinking behind the hills as we headed into the desolate country on the far side of Midyat. The road was now little better than a track; it contained no other traffic and was surrounded by no signs of habitation. There was no noise, no birdsong. It was completely silent; unnervingly so.

It was only when I began to look carefully at the shadowy country through which we were passing that I realised what it was that was so unsettling about it. It was not just barren: it had been deliberately laid waste. The olive groves on the upper slopes were not naturally so twisted and gnarled: someone had actually burned them, so that their skeletons formed a charred and jagged silhouette on the skyline. It was like a Paul Nash picture of Arras or Ypres in 1916. We were passing through scorched earth.

‘The soldiers have done this,’ said Mas’ud.

‘Why?’

‘If they think the PKK are using trees or buildings for cover, the army burns them. It’s partly to hurt the guerrillas, partly to punish the local people for allowing the PKK to use their land. Further east, around Hakkari, whole districts have been laid waste. Many villages have been destroyed.’

Eventually we rose over the crest of a low hill. There was just enough light to distinguish ahead of us the crenellated ghost of Mar Gabriel’s monastery. The huddled buildings stood alone and exposed on a bare and stony hillside, surrounded by a high wall; as we drew near the rising moon silhouetted the cupolas and spires of the churches, and illuminated a tall tower to one side.

A moonwashed gateway rose out of the gloom; and from beyond came the faint but comforting sound of monastic chant. A porter opened the narrow wicket, and as we unloaded our baggage from the car, the monks and nuns began to stream out of vespers. In the lead was the Archbishop; and a little behind him, dressed in a blazer, was a layman. He came up and introduced himself. It was Afrem Budak, to whom I had talked on the telephone. He was welcoming, but clearly also a little angry.

‘You should have been here at least an hour ago,’ he said quietly, shaking his head. He took my rucksack. ‘The risks you take yourself are your business. But you could have got us all into trouble if something had happened to you.’

THE MONASTERY OF MAR GABRIEL, 23 AUGUST

I am sitting outside my cell, under a vine trellis. For the first time I am sleeping in a monastery which John Moschos could have stayed in, hearing the same fifth-century chant sung under the same mosaics. Facing me is the south wall of what is probably the oldest functioning church in Anatolia. It was built by the Emperor Anastasius in 512: before Haghia Sophia, before Ravenna, before Mount Sinai; it was already eighty years old by the time St Augustine landed at Thanet to bring Christianity to Anglo-Saxon England. Yet some parts of the monastery date back even earlier, to the abbey’s original foundation in 397 A.D.

There is only a handful of churches anywhere in the world this old. It is incredible that it has survived at all, but that it has survived intact and still practising when Persians, Arabs, Mongol and Timurid hordes have all come and gone, Constantinople has fallen to the Turks and Asia Minor has been completely cleared of Greeks – this is little short of a miracle.

One of the monks, Brother Yacoub, has just dropped by, and handed me a bunch of grapes freshly picked from the trellis. He is now standing behind me, watching me write. After years of visiting ruined churches across the length of Anatolia, finding these monks wearing almost identical robes to those John Moschos may himself have worn, still inhabiting a building of this antiquity, feels almost as odd as stumbling across a long-lost party of Roman legionaries guarding some remote watchtower on Hadrian’s Wall.

I had had my first unforgettable glimpse of the interior of the churches and buildings of Mar Gabriel on the night of my arrival. After our baggage was brought in, the monastery gate was locked and bolted behind us. I ate supper with the monks in their ancient refectory and afterwards drank Turkish coffee in the cool of a raised roof terrace near the Archbishop’s rooms. By nine o’clock the monks were beginning to return to their cells, and Yacoub, a gentle novice of my own age, offered to show me around before I retired for the night.

Yacoub led the way, holding a storm lantern aloft like a figure in a Pre-Raphaelite painting. The electricity supply had failed some time before, a common occurrence, explained my guide, due sometimes to ‘load-shedding’ by the electricity company, and sometimes to the PKK’s irritating habit of blowing up the region’s generating stations. I followed Yacoub down a wide flight of stairs, along a vaulted corridor and into the thick, inky blackness of the crypt. In the flickering light of the lantern, shadows danced along an arcade of arches.

‘This is the Cemetery of the Martyrs,’ said Yacoub. ‘During the Gulf War this was our bomb shelter. On the floor there: see that capping stone? That’s where Mar Gabriel’s arm is buried.’

‘What happened to the rest of him?’ I asked.

‘I’m not entirely sure,’ said Yacoub. ‘In the fifth and sixth centuries our monastery used to fight many battles with the local villagers for the remains of our more saintly fathers. Sometimes monks were killed trying to defend our stock of relics.’

‘And you think maybe the villagers got the rest of Mar Gabriel?’

‘Maybe. Or perhaps one of the monks hid the rest of the body and took the secret of its resting place with him to the grave.’

‘Do the villagers still take an interest in your relics?’ I asked.

‘Certainly,’ said Yacoub. ‘And not just the Christians: we get Muslims and even Yezidis [Devil-propitiators] coming here to pray to our saints. Many of the Muslims in this region are descended from Suriani Christians who converted to Islam centuries ago. They go to the mosque, and listen to the imams – but if ever they are in real trouble they still come here.’

Yacoub bent down with the lantern and pointed to a small aperture below the capping stone of the grave. ‘You see here? This is where the villagers come and take the dust of the saint.’

‘What do they do with it?’

‘It has many uses,’ said Yacoub. ‘They keep it in their houses to get rid of demons, they give it to their animals and their children to keep them healthy during epidemics …’

‘They actually eat the dust?’

‘Of course. It is pure and full of blessings.’

‘What sort of blessings?’

‘If ever they dig a new well, for example, they place some of the dust of the saint in it so that the water will remain pure for ever.’

I told Yacoub that in Istanbul I had seen barren women come to a shrine of St George if they wanted children. Did the same happen here?

‘Mar Gabriel is good for sickness and demons only,’ replied Yacoub. ‘If they want children they go upstairs.’

‘Upstairs?’

‘To the Shrine of St John the Arab. Come, I’ll show you.’

Yacoub led the way out of the crypt. At the top of the stairs, in a niche covered by a close-fitting arch of dark basalt, stood a small plinth, similar to the one downstairs.

‘This is his tomb,’ said Yacoub. ‘Or rather it is the tomb of his torso.’

‘The villagers have been at your bones again?’

‘No. The nuns this time.’

‘The nuns?’

‘Yes,’ said Yacoub. ‘They are in charge of the tomb, and they keep St John’s skull in their quarters.’

‘What on earth do they do with it?’

‘When the local women come, the nuns fill a bowl of water and place it for an hour on the tomb. Then they take St John’s skull and, saying the appropriate prayers, they fill the skull with water, then pour it onto the woman’s head. This makes the lady have a baby.’

‘And people believe all this?’

‘Why not?’ said Yacoub. ‘The nuns think it never fails.’

Yacoub led me out of the shrine into the starlight outside. ‘At the moment, because of the troubles, not so many are coming,’ he said. ‘But before, in the days of peace, there would be long queues every Sunday: people would come from as far as Diyarbakir, especially after they were married. Now of course it is dangerous to travel. Also the Hezbollah are telling the Muslims that they must not come to a Christian shrine.’

We walked over to the main church and Yacoub opened the great door. Amid the herringbone patterns of the brick vaults, the light of the storm lantern picked out the glittering mosaics with an almost magical brilliance. As we drew nearer, the shapes of crosses, vine scrolls and double-handled amphorae glinted in the dancing flame. With Yacoub still holding his lamp aloft, we passed through the sanctuary and into a small side-chapel. In the back wall were two openings, one near the ceiling, the other at shin-height.

‘At the end of his life Mar Gabriel walled himself up behind here,’ said Yacoub. ‘His food was put through that hole at the bottom. If he wanted to take communion he would stick his hand through there at the top.’ Yacoub pointed to the upper hole. ‘Mar Gabriel was a great ascetic,’ he said. ‘Behind that wall he punished his flesh in order to liberate his soul. Come and see what I mean.’

Before I had time to demur, Yacoub had pushed the lamp through the small lower aperture and wriggled in after it. Left in total darkness, I had no option but to follow. Lying flat on my back and pulling in my stomach, I found I could just fit through the hole. Yacoub extended a hand and helped me to my feet.

‘Look here,’ he said, pointing to a narrow slit in the wall. ‘Sometimes our Holy Father Mar Gabriel felt he was not being hard enough on himself, that he was sinking into luxury. So he would squeeze into this slit and spend a month standing up.’

‘Why?’

‘He used to say no slave should sit or lie down in the presence of his master, and that as he was always in the presence of his Lord he should always stand up. At other times, to remind himself of his mortality, he would bury himself in that hole in the corner.’

‘That’s a bit extreme, isn’t it?’

Yacoub was already on the floor, about to wriggle his way back to the church.

‘I don’t understand what you mean,’ he said, before disappearing into the blackness. ‘Mar Gabriel was a very great saint. We should all try to follow his example.’

The day at Mar Gabriel starts at 5.15 with the tolling of the monastery bells, announcing the service of matins. After four days enjoying the monks’ hospitality but sleeping late, I thought I had better make an appearance. So this morning when the bells began to peal, rather than covering my head with the nearest pillow, I rolled out of bed, dressed by the light of a lantern, then picked my way through the empty courtyard towards the echo of monastic chant.

It was still dark, with only a faint glimmer of dawn on the horizon. In the church the lamps were all lit, casting a dim and flickering light over the early Byzantine mosaics of the choir. I kicked off my shoes by the door and stood at the back of the church. To my right four nuns dressed in black skirts and bodices were prostrating themselves on a reed mat. Ahead of me a file of little boys stood in line, listening to an old monk. He had a long patriarchal beard and stood chanting from a huge hand-written codex laid on a stone lectern to the north of the sanctuary. Each phrase rose to a climax, then sank to a low, almost inaudible conclusion.

Slowly the church began to fill up; soon the line of boys stretched right across the length of the nave. Another monk, Abouna Kyriacos, appeared and walked up to the sanctuary. He started chanting at another lectern, parallel but a little to the south of the other, echoing the old monk’s chant: a phrase would be sung by the first monk, then passed over to Kyriacos who would repeat it and send it back again. The chant passed from lectern to lectern, quick-paced syllables of Aramaic slurring into a single elision of sacred song.

By now some of the older boys had also begun to go up to the lecterns and were standing behind the monks, joining in with them. The chant rolled on, as deep and resonant as Gregorian plainsong, but with a more Oriental feel, the strangely elusive monodic modulations reverberating under the rolling Byzantine vaults.

Before long an unseen hand was pulling back the curtains from the sanctuary; a boy holding a smoking thurible rattled its chains. The entire congregation began a long series of prostrations: from their standing position, the worshippers fell to their knees, and lowered their heads to the ground so that all that could be seen from the rear of the church was a line of upturned bottoms. All that distinguished the worship from that which might have taken place in a mosque was that the worshippers crossed and recrossed themselves as they performed their prostrations. This was the way the early Christians prayed, and is exactly the form of worship described by Moschos in The Spiritual Meadow. In the sixth century, the Muslims appear to have derived their techniques of worship from existing Christian practice. Islam and the Eastern Christians have retained the original early Christian convention; it is the Western Christians who have broken with sacred tradition.

The white light of dawn was filtering in through the great splayed Byzantine windows in the south wall. Inside the church, the tempo of the chant was now sinking. The curtains closed; silence fell. A last eddy of prostration passed through the congregation. The Archbishop appeared and the boys queued to kiss his cross.

Slowly the church emptied; from outside you could hear the birds stirring in the vine trellising.

However alien and eccentric Eastern asceticism sometimes seems, it had an extraordinary influence on the medieval West; indeed the European monks of the early Middle Ages were merely provincial imitators of the Eastern desert fathers. The monastic ideal came out of Egypt, that of the stylite from Syria. Both forms travelled westwards, stylitism, amazingly enough, getting as far as Trier before being abandoned as impossible in a northern climate, with the aspiring German stylite eventually yielding to pressure from his bishop to come down before he froze to his pillar. It was as clear and unstoppable a one-way traffic, east to west, as the reverse cultural invasion of fast food and satellite television is today.

What has always fascinated me is the extent to which the austere desert fathers were the models and heroes of the Celtic monks on whose exploits I was brought up in Scotland. Like their Byzantine exemplars, the Celtic Culdees deliberately sought out the most wild and deserted places – the isolation of lonely bogs and forests, the bare crags and islands of the Atlantic coast – where they could find the solitude that they believed would lead them to God.

Moreover, despite the difficulties of travel, the links between the monastic world of the Levant and that which grew up in imitation of it in the north of Europe were unexpectedly close. Seventh-century Rome had four resident communities of Oriental monks and many Eastern church fathers travelled ‘beyond the Pillars of Hercules’ to the extreme west. Theodore, the seventh Archbishop of Canterbury, was a Byzantine from Tarsus who had studied at Antioch and visited Edessa; his surviving Biblical commentaries, written in England, show the extent to which he brought the teaching of the School of Antioch and an awareness of Syriac literature to the far shores of Anglo-Saxon Kent.