From The Holy Mountain

by William Dalrymple

  After a few minutes the door was flung open and the small, round figure of Gregorios Yohanna Ibrahim walked in, backwards. In his hand he held a portable telephone into which he was talking animatedly, while at the same time waving goodbye to a young couple with his free hand. He turned a pirouette and advanced towards me, his free hand extended. As he did so he finished his telephone call, snapped shut the phone with a flick of his thumb, and popped it into his cassock pocket.

  'Mr William?' he said. 'I've been expecting you. I received a letter from Mar Gabriel telling me you were coming. Come, let me show you something which will interest you.'

  The Metropolitan took me over to a trestle-table at the side of the room, pausing only to sign a document that a bowing functionary offered him. On the trestle lay some architect's plans.

  'At the moment there are no functioning Syrian Orthodox monasteries in Syria,' he said, unrolling the blueprints. 'But now I'm going to rebuild Tel Ada. For many years this has been my dream. It was the monastery that the young St Symeon Stylites joined when he first left home. According to the great fifth-century Bishop Theodoret of Cyrrhus - you know his History of the Monks of Syria. I will lend you a copy - there were once 150 monks at Tel Ada, but it has been a ruin for nearly thirteen hundred years. Little is left. We bought the land from the farmer in 1987 and have just had our plans authorised by the authorities in Damascus. Look.' The Metropolitan pointed to a geometric shape at the centre of his blueprints. 'The church is to be based on St Symeon's church at Qala'at Semaan: it will be an open octagon and in the middle will be our stylite's pillar.' 'As a symbol?'

  'No, no. It will be the real thing. It will have a stylite on top of it.'

  'Are you being serious?' 'Perfectly serious.'

  'But how are you going to find a stylite?'

  'We have one already. Fr. Ephrem Kerim has volunteered to be our first pillar-dweller. He is in Ireland presently, at Maynooth, finishing his thesis. When he has his doctorate he wishes to mount a pillar.'

  'I don't believe it,' I said.

  'But it is true.'

  'I thought stylites had died out hundreds of years ago.'

  'No,' said the Metropolitan, shaking his head. 'According to my researches there were still stylites in Georgia in the eighteenth century. It's a bit of a gap, but hardly unbridgeable.'

  'And your friend, Fr. Ephrem, is really prepared to spend the rest of his life perched up on ...'

  'He is determined to become as like St Symeon as he can,' said Mar Gregorios. 'But if he does find it too difficult, I know several keen young novices who will be happy to take it in turns to be stylites with him.'

  'A kind of relay stylitism?'

  'If you like.'

  I frowned: 'But...'

  'It is good to imitate the saints,' said the Metropolitan, anticipating my objections. 'They are an example to all of us.'

  'Isn't it a bit exhibitionist to stand on a pillar?' I said.

  'On the contrary,' said Mar Gregorios. 'For the stylites of old the opinion of this world was nothing. The saints became stylites for their own good, for the salvation of their own souls. For them the material world, their own bodies, were of no account. The spirit was all that mattered. To punish their bodies on columns gave emphasis to the world of the spirit.'

  'Do you think you will become a stylite,' I asked.

  'No,' replied the Metropolitan, smiling. 'I am too old.'

  I gave him the parcel containing the postcards, and as he opened it he quizzed me about the situation in the Tur Abdin.

  'It's very bad,' he said when I described what I had seen. 'The Turks ... why do they do this? What have we ever done to them?' He shook his head. 'My father was from the Tur Abdin, my mother's family from Diyarbakir. After the massacres they were the only surviving children from both their families. All their brothers and sisters were killed. In 1921 my grandfather managed to get his children across the border to Qamishli; they crossed at night with a small group of friends. The French were here and my parents thought they would protect them. In Turkey there was still terrible insecurity - Kurdish tribesmen were still circling the country killing and enslaving any Christians they found. My mother's parents had crossed the year before and she was born here in Aleppo.

  'So you are a refugee on both sides of your family?'

  'I was born in Qamishli,' replied the Metropolitan. 'My father had been a landowner in the Tur Abdin, but of course after he came to Syria he had nothing: everything had to be left behind. So he worked the land of a rich Syrian family. Eventually he became their foreman. But despite this we have never thought of ourselves as refugees. Syria was where the Suriani had come from: the ruins and graves of our forefathers lie all around. We have always thought of ourselves as citizens, not refugees.'

  'And do you think the Christians are safe in Syria today?'

  'Christians are better off in Syria than anywhere else in the Middle East,' said Mar Gregorios emphatically. 'Other than Lebanon, this is the only country in the region where a Christian can really feel the equal of a Muslim - and Lebanon, of course, has many other problems. In Syria there is no enmity between Christian and Muslim. If Syria were not here, we would be finished. Really. It is a place of sanctuary, a haven for all the Christians: for the Nestorians and Chaldeans driven out of Iraq, the Syrian Orthodox and the Armenians driven out of Turkey, even some Palestinian Christians driven out of the Holy Land by the Israelis. Talk to people here: you will find that what I say is true.'

  What Mar Gregorios said was indeed what I had been told ever since I had crossed the Syrian border. I heard more of the same at lunch today with Sally Mazloumian. Sally's husband, the great Krikor ('Coco') Mazloumian, owner and manager of the Baron for as long as anyone could remember, had died last year, leaving Sally widowed and shipwrecked in Syria with her family 'spread out across the world like United Nations: Aleppo, Geneva, New York...' Krikor had been succeeded as manager by his pipe-smoking, labrador-patting eldest son, the only member of the next Mazloumian generation to stay on in Syria. He was now known, like his father before him, simply as Baron Mazloumian.

  The Mazloumians' house lay immediately beside the hotel, in the same compound. Gathered there, under the framed photographs of a succession of turn-of-the-century Mazloumians, were a dozen Aleppo Armenians, all of whose parents and grandparents had been survivors of the Armenian genocide, who had somehow escaped from the death-marches across the desert and found shelter in the narrow alleys of Aleppo. They had gathered, as they did every Sunday, to see Sally, to toast the memory of her late husband, and to raise their glasses to Armenia.

  The elderly people sat back in the faded chintz armchairs and talked about old times. As they did so their stories came spilling out: the usual, familiar litany of indescribable Armenian tragedies: grandmothers raped, uncles beaten to death, aunts dying in the desert from thirst and starvation, all set against the counterpoint of how Syria provided refuge for the few straggling survivors.

  'When the Ottoman army surrounded them, the Armenians of Zeitun defended themselves for two months,' said one man. He was old and grey, but his eyes were bright and animated as he told his story. 'Then the Catholicos from Sis came and persuaded them to surrender. He said: "I have promised that you will all give in your guns, and the army has promised you will be safe." My grandfather did not believe the word of Turks, so he and my father stayed in the redoubt. But his wife, who thought the Catholicos should be obeyed, took all my uncles and aunts and went back to their village. That night they were all clubbed to death

  Everyone competed to tell their tales. 'There's not one Armenian family in Aleppo that hasn't got a better story than Dr Zhivago,' said Sally proudly. 'But don't expect any of them to give you a properly ordered account. They get much too excited.'

  'My grandfather was saved by a friend,' said a well-dressed businessman with an American accent. 'Khachadurian was a shoemaker who made special boots for the Ottoman army. He was an Armenian, but he was important to the milita
ry so he was spared. They gathered the Armenians into a walled graveyard, but the shoemaker came in and started taking boys out. He said, "This is my son-in-law, this here is my nephew, that is my grandson. I need them all for my business. If you Turks want your boots you must let me have my workers." He saved thirty in all, so many that he could barely feed them all: my father had only one piece of bread each day, and that he had to share with his sister.'

  Quite suddenly and unexpectedly the businessman began sobbing. His transatlantic self-assurance crumpled like a punctured balloon. He bowed his head. Sally said: 'It's all right, Sam. Don't continue. It's all right.'

  'When the fighting started, my father fled to the mountains,' said an old widow, filling the silence. 'They had begun collecting Armenians for "deportation". Although he was only twelve, my father guessed what was happening. So he ran off up the hill above his house, barefoot in the snow. He was lucky: 90 per cent of the Armenians in the columns did not make it. There were forty-seven people in my father's family. They all died. Only he was left.'

  Sam, the businessman with the American accent, lifted his head. 'I want to finish,' he said, dabbing his cheeks. 'I met Khachadurian in 1962 in Beirut. He was ninety years old, completely blind. My father was with me: he kissed Khachadurian's hand and told me to do the same. He said: "Without that man I would be dead now. And you would never have been born."

  'Both my parents walked to Aleppo,' chipped in another old man, as determined as the others to tell his story. 'My father was naked by the time he got here - his rags got so full of holes they just fell off. The Arabs clothed him. Later my parents found shelter in the Jewish Quarter, the Hayy el-Yehudi. Ten Armenian families put all their resources together and rented one room ...'

  'When my grandfather first came here all the Armenians were still poor,' said a younger woman, a musician, who had just returned from giving a concert in Yerevan. 'They had arrived penniless, but they worked night and day just to make sure that their children were educated.'

  The massacres, everyone agreed, had changed the face of Aleppo: before the First World War there were only three hundred Armenian families in the town; by 1943 Armenian numbers had topped 400,000.

  But as I had already learned, the Armenians were not alone. Between 1914 and 1924 similar waves of Suriani (and to a smaller extent Greek Orthodox) refugees followed in their wake. The influx turned Aleppo into a Noah's Ark, a place of shelter and safety for all the different Christian communities driven out of Anatolia by the Turks. The officials of the French Mandate welcomed the exiles, partly out of genuine sympathy for their plight, and partly in the hope that the Christian refugees would act as a break on the new Arab nationalism. Moreover, the French felt that the Christians would naturally be more enthusiastic supporters of their rule, and systematically gave them preferment in government jobs.

  After Syria's independence in 1946, this inevitably led to a backlash. Although Michel Aflaq, one of the founders of the Ba'ath Party, was a Christian, as was Faris al-Khuri, a leading figure in the Syrian Nationalist movement who later became Prime Minister, anti-Christian feeling was widespread (and, in the post-colonial circumstances, understandable). There were attempts to make Islam the official religion of the country, and at one stage the imam of the Great Mosque in Damascus declared that as far as he was concerned, an Indonesian Muslim was closer to him than al-Khuri, his own (Christian) Prime Minister. The increasingly Islamic tone of the Syrian establishment led to perhaps a quarter of a million Christians leaving Syria throughout the 1960s; from Aleppo alone as many as 125,000 Armenians emigrated to Soviet Armenia. These refugees included the current Armenian President, Levon Ter Petrosyan.

  The period of uncertainty for Syria's Christians came to an end with Asad's coup d'etat in 1970. Asad was an Alawite, a member of a Muslim minority regarded by orthodox Sunni Muslims as heretical and disparagingly referred to as Nusayris (or Little Christians). Asad kept himself in power by forming what was in effect a coalition of Syria's many religious minorities - Shias, Druze, Yezidis, Christians and Alawites - through which he was able to counterbalance the weight of the Sunni majority. In Asad's Syria Christians have always done well: at the moment, apparently, five of Asad's seven closest advisers are Christians, including his principal speechwriter, as are two of the sixteen cabinet ministers. Christians and Alawites together hold all the key positions in the armed forces and the mukhabarat. While the official population figures are distrusted by everyone I spoke to, the Christians themselves estimated that they now formed slightly less than 20 per cent of Syria's total population, and between 20 and 30 per cent of the population of Aleppo, giving that city one of the largest Christian populations anywhere in the Middle East.

  The confidence of the Christians in Syria is something you can't help noticing the minute you arrive in the country. This is particularly so if, like myself, you cross the border at Nisibis: Qamishli, the town on the Syrian side of the frontier (and the place where Metropolitan Gregorios Yohanna Ibrahim was brought up) is 75 per cent Christian, and icons of Christ and images of his mother fill almost every shop and decorate every other car window - an extraordinary display after the furtive secrecy of Christianity in Turkey. Moreover Turoyo, the modern Aramaic of the Tur Abdin, is the first language of Qamishli. This makes it one of a handful of towns in the world where Jesus could expect to be understood if he came back tomorrow.

  The only problem with all of this, as far as the Christians are concerned, is the creeping realisation that they are likely to expect another, perhaps far more savage, backlash when Asad dies or when his regime eventually crumbles. The Christians of Syria have watched with concern the Islamic movements which are gaining strength all over the Middle East, and the richer Christians have all invested in two passports (or so the gossip goes), just in case Syria turns nasty at some stage in the future.

  'Fundamentalism is building up among the Muslims,' said a pessimistic Armenian businessman I met while wandering in the Aleppo bazaars. 'Just look at the girls: now they all wear the hijab: only five years ago they were all uncovered. After Asad's death or resignation no one knows what will happen. As long as the bottle is closed with a firm cork all is well. But eventually the cork will come out. And then no one knows what will happen to us.'

  In the meantime, while the Christians nervously sing Asad's praises, most of the Sunni majority continue to grumble about his repressive Ba'athist government and the ruthlessness of his secret police, although several Muslims I talked to did admit to a grudging admiration for their dictator's sheer shrewdness and tenacity. In the absence of any legal opposition, disaffected Syrians have taken refuge in a series of jokes at the expense of the Alawite ruling clique. The taxi driver who took me back from the Syrian Orthodox cathedral told me this Asad story as we crawled through the bazaars behind an ambling train of pack-mules:

  'My cousin is a taxi driver in Damascus. One day he was waiting by some traffic lights when a limousine with clouded glass windows smashed into his rear. The back of the taxi was completely wrecked. My cousin is a hot-blooded man - we all are in my family - so he jumped out and began to harangue the occupants, calling them sons of unmarried mothers, brothers of incontinent camels, fathers of she-goats and so on. After two minutes of this, the rear window of the limousine lowered half an inch, and a visiting card was thrust through the crack. On it was written a single telephone number. My cousin started shouting, "What is the meaning of this?" but the window was wound up again and the limousine swerved around him and his concertina-ed taxi, leaving him shouting into space.

  'My cousin was determined to get some compensation from the rich man who owned the car, so the following day he went to a phone box and rang the number that had been written on the card. He started by softening the man up with a few pleasantries, then went on to demand a new taxi, saying that fifteen people depended on the money he brought home, that his wife was sick and that his daughter was getting married the following year.

  'There was no response t
o this, so my cousin began to get angry again, comparing the man to the vomit of an Israeli dog and the worms which wriggle in the belly of a wild pig. He had been speaking like this for five minutes when suddenly a quiet voice on the end of the line said: "Do you have any idea who you are talking to?"

  '"No," replied my cousin.

  '"You are speaking to Hafez al-Asad," said a sinister voice. "As you may be aware, I am the President of the Syrian Arab Republic."

  '"I know who you are," said my cousin without hesitation, "but do you have any idea who you are talking to?" '

  "No," said the voice, surprised.

  "Thank God for that," said my cousin, slamming down the phone and running back to his car as fast as he could, before the mukhabarat could trace the call and treat him to an extended stay at President Asad's pleasure.'

  Aleppo, 4 September

  I sat up last night reading the book lent to me by the Metropolitan, The History of the Monks of Syria by Theodoret, Bishop of Cyrrhus. Theodoret turns out to be a near contemporary of John Moschos, and if this book is anything to go by, even more eccentric in his tastes.

  If Theodoret is to be believed, the greatest celebrities of his day were not singers or dancers or even charioteers, but saints and ascetics. St Symeon Stylites the Elder, whose pillar lay a few miles west of Aleppo, was a case in point.