From The Holy Mountain

by William Dalrymple

  The men here are a rough-looking bunch, scowling, ill-kempt and unshaven. But - looking around the motley crew filling the tables around me, and glimpsing my own reflection in the mirror - who are we to talk?

  9 a.m.: Antioch: a gridiron of dirty alleyways surrounded on three sides by the crescent cliffs of Mount Silpius. As we leave the bus for the last time and stumble into the glare of the bus station the smirking Neanderthal offers us a last splash of eau de cologne. I shake my head, but get the horrible stuff poured all over me anyhow.

  Buyuk Antakya Oteli, Antioch, n August

  Cleansed, vowing never again to go on a night bus, nor ever again to touch eau de cologne, I went to bed for the rest of the morning, lulled to sleep by some of John Moschos's more soporific miracle stories: tales of doughty Byzantine hermits fending off the advances of demonic temptresses and saucy 'Ethiopic boys'.

  With the exception of the mosaics in the museum and a few fragments of the much-rebuilt town walls, it seems that barely one stone remains from what was once the third greatest metropolis in the Byzantine Empire and briefly, under Julian the Apostate, its capital. Of the city's famous buildings - Constantine's Golden Octagon, the Council Chamber where Libanius declaimed, the great hippodrome that could seat eighty thousand people - nothing now remains. Like Alexandria, its traditional rival, Byzantine Antioch is now just a city of memory, forgotten but for the conjectures of scholars.

  There is a reason for this. The city is built in the centre of an earthquake zone and has been levelled again and again, at least once every two hundred years. Today it is a sleepy, provincial place, architecturally undistinguished but for a few fine late-Ottoman villas decorated with carved wooden balustrades and with vines tumbling over the shuttered windows. Other than the occasional archaeologist, no one really bothers to come to Antioch any more: not the Turkish politicians, not the journalists, not the tourists, not even the PKK.

  It is odd to think that all Europe, much of the Middle East and the entire length of the North African coast was once ruled from this little market town, today a forgotten backwater even by Turkish standards. Perhaps one day Los Angeles or San Francisco will be like this.

  When John Moschos visited Antioch in the 590s, there were already many signs that the city was in serious decline. The School of Antioch, once one of the most sophisticated of all theological schools, was no longer in its prime. The days of John Chrysostom and Theodore of Mopsuestia were long past, even though it was probably at this time that Theodore of Tarsus came to the city to receive his training in the Antioch tradition of Biblical exegesis, a training he later brought with him to Anglo-Saxon England when he was appointed the seventh Archbishop of Canterbury. Antioch's port, Seleucia ad Pieria, was beginning to silt up, and the great trade of the Mediterranean had begun passing the city by. The bazaars were empty but for local agricultural produce, and refugees were setting up shacks where once great caravans of merchants traded in silks and spices from Persia, India and the East.

  Moreover, corruption had set in, and the city had the most dubious reputation. When the Emperor framed a troublesome Bishop of Antioch for consorting with a prostitute, no one for a minute doubted the bishop's guilt. The Antioch theatre was famed for its great aquatic spectacles featuring (as one source puts it) 'large numbers of naked girls from the lower classes', and the city's eighteen public baths were as disreputable as any in the Empire. St John Chrysostom, later the scourge of Constantinople, began his career as moral watchdog in Antioch, where he attacked the institution of 'spiritual partnerships' between monks and nuns and for good measure went on to accuse the city's upper-class women of habitually exposing themselves before the eyes of their servants, 'their softly nurtured flesh draped only in heavy jewellery'.

  But it was sorcery that was the declining city's greatest vice. In an age when demons were considered to fill the air as thickly as flies in a Turkish market (Gregory the Great always used to recommend making the sign of the cross over a lettuce in case you swallowed a demon that happened to be perched on its leaves), in Antioch things had come to such a pass that demonic activities were rife even among the clergy - or so it was whispered. The Antioch hippodrome was a famous centre of such witchery: not only were all kinds of magic practised there against horses and charioteers, but the galleries were packed with nude classical statues believed to be the haunt of those demons who specialised in exciting the carnal passions. Indeed the Byzantine version of the Faust tale involved a Jewish necromancer leading a presbyter to the hippodrome in the middle of the night. The presbyter has been sacked from his position as oikonomos (treasurer) by the new bishop. The necromancer succeeds in conjuring up Satan himself, who promises to help the presbyter regain his former position if he first agrees to become the Servant of Darkness, and kisses his cloven foot in submission. The presbyter does as he is bidden, and sells his soul to the Devil.

  Surrounded by similar stories, the worried Antiochians looked for guidance not to their clergy, nor to the Byzantine governor or the magister militum. Instead they turned to St Symeon Stylites the Younger, a renowned hermit who had set up his pillar a few miles outside the city. From there he issued a series of dreadful threats and warnings to the faithful, calling on them to repent and mend their ways.

  His powers were remarkable. According to his anonymous hagiographer the dust from his clothes was more powerful than roasted crocodile, camel dung or Bithynian cheese mixed with wax -apparently the usual contents of a Byzantine doctor's medicine chest. This dust could cure constipation, cast leprosy on an unbeliever, bring a donkey back to life and restore sour wine to sweetness. It was clearly a particularly handy thing to have on board ship in the event of a storm. A certain Dorotheus, a cleric at Symeon's monastery, sailed during the forbidden period of the year in the midst of winter, trusting to the protection of his stylite master. Far out to sea, however, the vessel ran into a tremendous storm which lashed it with waves so high they rolled over the deck. The Captain was in despair, but Dorotheus took some dust which had been blessed by St Symeon and sprinkled the ship with it; 'a sweet fragrance filled the air, the churning sea was pacified, a fair wind filled the sails and safely brought the ship to its destination.'

  Symeon was clearly not a man to be trifled with. An Antiochian brickmaker who privately voiced his view that Symeon's miracles might not be the work of God but instead of the Devil found that his hand promptly turned putrid, and 'it was only after he shed many tears of repentance that he was forgiven and restored to health'. Symeon could have an equally dramatic effect on other parts of the body. Moschos tells a story of a renegade monk who gave up the habit, left his monastery in Egypt and settled in Antioch. One day, on his way back to town from a trip to the coast, the ex-monk decided to visit Symeon's pillar. He had no sooner entered the enclosure than the stylite pointed him out amid the crowd of assembled pilgrims: 'Bring the shears!' cried Symeon, miraculously divining his visitor's monastic past. 'Tonsure that man!'

  Packing him off back to his Egyptian monastery, Symeon promised the man a sign that he had been granted divine forgiveness. It duly arrived: one Sunday, back in his cloister, when the monk was celebrating the Eucharist 'one of his eyes suddenly came out'. This, oddly enough, was considered a good thing, at least by Symeon's more ardent admirers. 'By this sign,' comments a breathless Moschos, 'the brethren knew that God had forgiven him his sin, just as the righteous Symeon had foretold.'

  After lunch, refreshed, I set about trying to find a driver willing to take me to what remains of the stylite's pillar on the Wonderful Mountain, a few miles south of modern Antakya.

  In the main bazaar - a vaulted Ottoman street that still follows the line of the old Byzantine corso — I met a pious and thickly bearded driver named Ismail. He owned an ancient and much repainted Dodge truck, currently coloured lemon-yellow. We haggled for long enough for both of us to feel we were being swindled, and after Ismail had attended midday prayers we drove off in the truck, jolting out of Antioch, heading due south.r />
  Olives were everywhere: long regimented lines of trees forming neat chequerboard patterns against the ash-coloured soil of the hills. But for the occasional minaret poking up beyond the groves and the groups of baggy-trousered peasants loading firewood onto carts, it could have been Umbria. In the valley to our left shepherds and their barking dogs were leading herds of long-eared goats and sheep, bells tinkling, through the mulberries and aloes. Within a few minutes the perfect pyramid of Mons Mirabilis rose up through the morning haze.

  Bouncing off the main road onto a track, we climbed a dry wadi in a cloud of dust. We passed an old couple with mattocks in their hands, hoeing a barren terrace. The track continued to spiral steeply upwards; slowly a great vista opened up around us. Ahead lay the distant metallic glint of the Mediterranean; to the south, Mount Cassius and the olive groves of Syria; to the north, the hot, flat, plains of Cilicia. Immediately below us, through the heat haze, we could see the meandering course of the sluggish Orontes, and on either side lines of dark green cypresses.

  When John Moschos came here, all the peaks within view were crowned by stylites, and competition between them was rife: if one was struck by lightning - something that clearly happened with a fair degree of frequency - the electrocuted hermit's rivals would take this as a definitive sign of divine displeasure, probably indicating that the dead stylite was a secret heretic. Judging by what Moschos has to say in The Spiritual Meadow, visiting these pillar saints was a popular afternoon's outing for the pious ladies of Antioch's more fashionable suburbs. The most chic stylite of all was undoubtedly Symeon, whose pillar lay a convenient palanquin's ride from the waterfalls of Daphne, the resort where Antony took Cleopatra for their honeymoon.

  Today it seems that no one comes to Symeon's shrine. There are only a handful of Christians left in Antioch, and they have better things to worry about than the ruins of a forgotten hermit. The broken pillar is surrounded now by the ruins of the churches, monasteries, pilgrims' hostels and oratories that sprang up around it, a crumbling panorama of collapsed walls and fallen vaults. The only intruders are shepherds looking for somewhere to shelter their flocks during storms. Even the dirt track no longer reaches the pillar. I left Ismail bobbing up and down on his prayer carpet at the end of the path, and climbed up to the summit on my own.

  Rising to the crest of a hogsback ridge, I could see above me the lines of honey-coloured masonry that marked the exterior wall of the stylite's complex. But it was only as I got much nearer to the ruin that I began to take in the true scale and splendour of the building: high on that empty hilltop with the wind howling over the summit lay a vast cathedral, constructed with great skill out of prisms of finely dressed stone. It was built with deliberate extravagance and ostentation: the basket capitals of solid Proconessian marble were lace-like and deeply cut; the pilasters and architraves were sculpted with an imperial extravagance. It was strange: a ragged, illiterate hermit being fawned over by the rich and highly educated Greco-Roman aristocracy; yet odder still was the idea of a hermit famed for his ascetic simplicity punishing himself in the finest setting money could buy. It was like holding a hunger strike in the Ritz.

  I clambered into the basilica over a pile of fallen pillars and upended capitals; as I did so a thin black snake slithered from a marble impost, through a patch of poppies, down into the unseen dark of an underground cistern. I sat down where it had been lying, and opened up The Spiritual Meadow to read Moschos's description of the teeming crowds that once thronged the site to look at Symeon, to hear his pronouncements and, possibly, even to be healed. Once the road between Antioch and the coast was jammed solid with devotees and pilgrims coming from all over the Mediterranean world. Now it was just the snake and me.

  The complex was based on that of the original St Symeon Stylites, St Symeon Stylites the Elder, who first ascended his pillar near Aleppo a century earlier in an effort to escape the press of pilgrims around him. His pillar was originally just a refuge from the faithful; only by accident did it become a method of voluntary self-punishment and a symbol in itself. The building around the original St Symeon's pillar was erected by the Emperor after the stylite died, so that his pillar became a relic and the church which enclosed it a huge reliquary. But here on Mons Mirabilis there was a crucial difference: the church was built around a living saint. In one of the most unlikely manifestations of Christian piety ever witnessed, it was a living man - a layman, not even a priest - who was the principal object of reverence in the church.

  The stump of the pillar rises still from a plinth in the middle of an octagon, around which are stacked tiers of stone benches. In a normal Byzantine episcopal church such stone benches, reserved for the senior clergy of the church and called the synthronon, would be placed around the apse and would look onto the altar. But in this church conventional worship was relegated to the flanking side chapels; here the main nave looked not towards the altar (and thus to God) but towards the saint himself. The stylite had become like the Christian version of the Delphic oracle: raised up on his pillar at the top of the highest mountain, a literal expression of his closeness to the heavens, he spoke what all assumed to be the words of God. The Byzantines were constantly haunted by the spectre of heresy, but no one in Antioch ever seems to have suggested that in behaving in this way the stylites or their followers were doing anything in the least bit uncanonical. Even when the Egyptian monks tried to excommunicate Symeon, the rest of the Byzantine Church assumed - perhaps not inaccurately - that they were just motivated by jealousy: after all, the stylites had rather stolen the desert fathers' thunder.

  The sun was lowering in the sky, sinking towards the Mediterranean. In the distance, to the east, lightning played on the horizon. But even though it would soon be dark I lingered in the ruins, pacing through the complex in the dusk and wondering at the oddness of the world John Moschos inhabited: sophisticated enough to build this astonishing classical basilica, yet innocent enough to believe that these strange, ragged men shrieking from their pillars were able to pull aside the heavy curtain of the flesh and gaze directly on God. Standing on their pillars, they were believed to be bright beacons of transcendence, visible from afar; indeed in some cases we hear of disciples claiming to be unable to bear the effulgence of the holy man's face, so bright had it become with the uncreated light of the divine.

  The Byzantines looked on these stylites as intermediaries, go-betweens who could transmit their deepest fears and aspirations to the distant court of Heaven, ordinary men from ordinary backgrounds who had, by dint of their heroic asceticism, gained the ear of Christ. For this reason Byzantine holy men and stylites became the focus for the most profound yearnings of half of Christendom. They were men who were thought to have crossed the boundary of reality and gained direct access to the divine. It is easy to dismiss the eccentricities of Byzantine hermits as little more than bizarre circus acts, but to do so is to miss the point that man's deepest hopes and convictions are often quite inexplicable in narrow terms of logic or reason. At the base of a stylite's pillar one is confronted with the awkward truth that what has most moved past generations can today sometimes be only tentatively glimpsed with the eye of faith, while remaining quite inexplicable and absurd when seen under the harsh distorting microscope of sceptical Western rationality.

  Back in Antioch, the incipient storm had not yet broken and a stuffy afternoon had turned into a heavy and swelteringly hot night. In the backstreets, many families had settled themselves outside, laying straw mats and old kilims out on the pavements. Grandmothers sat on stools at the back, knitting; women in head-scarves brought out steaming pilaffs to their cross-legged husbands. The richer families sat in a semi-circle in front of televisions, often placed on the bonnet of a conveniently parked car. The noise of televised gunshots and the murmur of Turkish soap operas mingled with the whirr of cicadas.

  I got Ismail to drop me off, and wandered in the dark through the narrow streets, under the projecting wooden balconies of the old houses and the vin
e trellising of the bazaars. Down alleys, through arched doorways, you could catch glimpses of the hidden life of the courtyard houses: brief impressions of bent old ladies flitting from kitchen to zenana; old men in flat caps gossiping under palms, sticks in their hands.

  After nearly an hour I found a cafe with a marble Ottoman fountain, and there I washed off the dust of the afternoon and settled down to drink a glass of raki. From inside came the acrid smell of Turkish tobacco and the sharp clack of backgammon. Gnarled old men with moustachless Islamic beards pushed barrows of figs and pomegranates along the cobbles. Flights of dark-skinned teenagers kicked balls amid the uncollected rubbish of unlit alleyways; smaller children pulled toys made of old crates, with wheels cannibalised from long-rusted prams or bikes. Through the dark, from another part of town, came the thump of drums from an unseen circumcision ceremony.

  Later, walking back to the hotel, I took a wrong turning and stumbled by accident across the Greek Orthodox church. It was a substantial eighteenth-century building, Italianate and flat-fronted, with a small belfry facing onto the courtyard. The whole complex lay hidden by a discreetly narrow arch, and was guarded by an old Turk in a pair of baggy shalwar trousers.

  The priest was away in Istanbul, but from the doorkeeper I learned that the Christian community now numbered only two hundred families. In his lifetime, he said, as many as fifteen thousand Christians had left the town for new lives in Syria, Brazil, Germany and Australia. As with the Istanbul Greeks, it was just the poor and the old who were left. If I wanted to know more, he suggested, I should try to find the Italian Catholic priest who had recently come to live in the town; he didn't know the address, but had heard it was somewhere nearby in the old Jewish quarter.