From The Holy Mountain

by William Dalrymple

  '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.

  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.