From The Holy Mountain

by William Dalrymple

  'As his fame circulated everywhere,' wrote Theodoret, 'everyone hastened to him, so that with everyone arriving from every side and every road resembling a river, one can behold a sea of men standing together in that place. Not only inhabitants of our part of the world, but also Ismaelites, Persians, Armenians and men even more distant than these: inhabitants of the extreme west, Spaniards and Britons and the Gauls who live between them. Of Italy it is superfluous to speak. It is said that the man became so celebrated in the great city of Rome that at the entrance of all the workshops men have set up small representations of him, to provide thereby some protection and safety for themselves . . .'

  Theodoret, as the principal chronicler of the great Byzantine ascetics, was effectively the leading celebrity biographer of his day, and his works were read as far away as Anglo-Saxon Canterbury. But his subjects - suspended in cages, walled up in hermitages, buried in cisterns - presented a rather different set of difficulties to the figures whose peccadilloes and appetites are so minutely examined by hack biographers today. For if Symeon was the most famous of Theodoret's celebrity subjects, he was by no means the most eccentric. There was, for example, Baradatus, who Theodoret congratulates for having devised 'new tests of endurance'. On a ridge above his hermitage he constructed out of wood 'a small chest that did not even match his body and in this he dwelt, obliged to stoop the whole time. It was not even fitted together with planks, but had openings like a lattice; and because of this he was neither safe from the assault of the rains nor free from the flames of the sun, but endured both.'

  Eventually Baradatus's bishop persuaded him to come out of his latticed coffin, but far from going into ascetic retirement the hermit merely devised an even more unusual way to follow his calling. Baradatus decided that his new ploy was going to involve standing up all the time. But as this was a fairly common form of asceticism at the time (no less a figure than the youthful St John Chrysostom once pursued this method of self-punishment for two years without a break), Baradatus seems to have come to the conclusion that standing up for the rest of his life was, on its own, not going to be enough. He therefore decided to make things more difficult for himself. He covered his entire body 'with a tunic of skins - only around the nose and mouth did he leave a small opening for breath', so that in addition to having to stand all day he would also be baked alive in the sweltering Syrian midsummer heat: a sort of Byzantine boil-in-the-bag monk.

  This was, however, tame stuff compared to one of Theodoret's heroes, Thalelaeus, who constructed a cage, then hung the contraption in the air. 'Sitting or rather suspended in this, he has spent ten years up till now. Since he has a very big body, not even sitting can he straighten his neck, but he always sits bent double with his forehead tightly pressed against his knees.'

  When Theodoret went to visit this strange figure, he found him 'reaping the benefit of the divine gospels, gathering benefit therefrom with extreme concentration'. Only at this point does it seem to have occurred to Theodoret that this sort of behaviour was, perhaps, just a little strange. 'I questioned him out of desire to learn the reason for this novel mode of life,' wrote the Bishop. Thalelaeus had his answer ready: life, he said, was to be lived as uncomfortably as possible as an insurance policy against worse discomforts in the life to come: 'Burdened with many sins, and believing in the penalties that are threatened, I have devised this form of life, contriving moderate punishments for the body in order to reduce the mass of those awaited. For the latter are more grievous not only in quantity but also in quality, so if by these slight afflictions I lessen those awaited, great is the profit I shall derive therefrom.'

  In most other societies, ascetics like this might perhaps be regarded with a certain amount of suspicion; but in Byzantium it seemed that every village wanted some self-torturing hermit to live among them, to bring them good luck, to cure them of diseases and demons, and to intercede for them both at the wordly palace of Constantinople and the more distant court of Heaven. Hermits were considered especially lucky to have around when they were dying: that way the village could claim the corpse, and add to its stock of sacred relics. If Theodoret is to be believed, hundreds of eager Byzantine peasants seem to have hung around dying saints, waiting to slice up the old men as soon as they dropped off their perches - quite literally in the case of stylites.

  Theodoret records one such case, when word got out that a famous hermit named James of Cyrrhestica was reported to be dying. On a previous occasion when James had been seriously ill, Theodoret had had to exert all his episcopal authority to disperse a crowd of sickle-wielding relic-seekers. But a little while later, when James's condition suddenly worsened, Theodoret was away on business to Aleppo, and the people of Cyrrhus were forced to take the law into their own hands.

  'As many [peasants] were coming from all sides to seize his body,' wrote Theodoret, 'when they heard what was happening, all the men of the town, both soldiers and civilians, hastened together [to where James lived, on a hilltop four miles to the west], some taking up military equipment, others using whatever weapons lay to hand. Forming up in close order, they fought by shooting arrows and slinging stones - not to wound, but simply to instil fear [in their rustic rivals]. Having thus driven off the local inhabitants, they placed the hermit on a litter while he was quite unconscious of what was happening - he was not even conscious of his hair being plucked out by the peasants [as a relic] - and set off [with the comatose hermit] to the city.'

  As a result of a series of such pre-emptive swoops on dying ascetics, Cyrrhus became so clogged with relics that Theodoret lobbied to have it renamed Hagiopolis, the city of saints. On my map, the town's ruins lie forty-five miles to the north of Aleppo. Tomorrow I plan to drive out there, taking the Metropolitan's book with me, and see what is left of Theodoret's bishopric.

  Aleppo, 5 September

  There turned out to be no bus to Cyrrhus, so I decided to hitchhike instead. I woke early and filled a light pack with feta cheese, some flat bread and a bottle of weak Syrian beer. Then, taking a hotel taxi to the edge of town, I began to walk.

  It was a beautifully cool and surprisingly cloudy day - a welcome change from the blazing skies and enervating heat that had followed me ever since Athos. Before long I came to a roadside stall run by a solitary Bedu. The stall was made of palm fronds and sold nothing but branches of ripe dates. I bought a sprig and when, half an hour later, I was picked up by a Kurdish truck driver, we ate the dates together, spitting the stones out of the windows.

  As we headed north-west, the land grew slowly starker: the rich belt of walnut and pistachio trees that had shaded the roadsides on the northern edge of Aleppo gave way to more arid, mountainous territory. On small patches of arable land, teams of blinkered horses in harness pulled primitive wooden ploughs; peasant women in embroidered dresses and white kerchiefs scraped at the soil with picks while their daughters looked on, buckets in hand. Above them, on the edge of the slopes, you could see the ruins of deserted Byzantine watchtowers looking out over the thin soil that had once supported the rich vineyards whose dark Syrian wine was drunk in the taverns of late antique Antioch.

  After many miles, on the slope of a hill opposite the road, I saw the ruins of what looked like a large Romanesque basilica sitting in the middle of a small grove of olive trees. It was roofless and deserted, but otherwise almost miraculously intact. Intrigued, I asked my Kurdish friend to drop me off. The truck drove away in a cloud of black exhaust, and in the sudden silence I set off on foot towards the ruins.

  The basilica of Mushabbak sits in perfect isolation amid the olive groves, the last surviving witness to a period when these hills supported what must once have been a fairly dense Christian population. If a new wooden roof were raised over the nave, the floor were swept and the gables slightly repaired, the church would be ready for use tomorrow. But, like so many other churches across the Middle East, this astonishing basilica now acts as nothing more than a convenient sheep-pen: as I walked across the fields and through t
he olives, I could see a shepherd boy drawing water from a well to one side of the ruin. He poured the water into a trough which, as I drew nearer, I realised was actually the old church font. The boy salaamed, and led me inside.

  A pair of ewes and four lambs were tethered in the side-chapel. Nearby stood a saddled donkey and a growling sheepdog. Two arcades of massively-built round arches rolled forward along the austere nave towards a gently curving apse; although totally bare of ornament or decoration, there was great beauty in the perfect harmony of the church's proportions. The building was clearly very early Byzantine, dating from around the late-fifth century, but its similarity to Romanesque work was extraordinary, and in its plan and style it almost exactly prefigured the French ecclesiastical architecture of the early twelfth century. In many ways it would not have looked out of place on an Auvergne hillside; yet for all that, its spirit was somehow very different.

  When you think of French Romanesque - of Vezelay, Autun, Anzy-le-Duc or Moissac - you are left with an impression of teeming life: biting beasts entwined around capitals; tympana crowded with the twenty-four Elders of the Apocalypse busily fiddling on their viols; angels blowing the Last Trump; the dead resurrecting, emerging like uncurling crustaceans from their sarcophagi. The sculpture is playful, fantastic, anarchic, like those manuscript marginalia where the world is inverted and rabbits armed with crossbows hunt the hunters or chase the hounds.

  But here, in this stone husk of Byzantine Syria, a more restrained and puritanical spirit was at work. A chrismon — a small equal-armed cross - was carved in a laurel wreath above the central keystone of the arch. Otherwise there was no decorative sculpture to break the stern purity of the stonework. The capitals were non-figurative, and were carelessly, almost accidentally decorated with palmettes and scroll volutes. There were no mouldings above the windows, and no acanthus-work above the doors or around the apsidal arch. Like the lifestyles embraced by Theodoret's ascetics, the guiding spirit of this church was almost fanatically austere.

  This shared severity of outlook was no coincidence. For it was in such remote rural settlements that Theodoret's Syrian ascetics were most popular, most especially revered. In the towns, whose populations were better and more classically educated, opinion was sometimes divided about them: already in the fourth century the pagan orator Libanius thought of the monks as 'that black-robed tribe who eat more than elephants, sweeping across the country like a river in spate ravaging the temples and the great estates'. Libanius was clearly not alone in his feelings: in one of his sermons St John Chrysostom (a former pupil of Libanius who later turned against his pagan master) complained that 'wherever the people [of Antioch] gathered to gossip you could find one man boasting that he was the first to beat up a monk, another that he had been the first to track down his hut, a third that he had spurred the magistrate into action against the Holy Men, a fourth that he had dragged them through the streets and seen them locked up in jail'

  But in the farms and villages it was very different. There it was to the freelance and unordained holy men, and not to Imperial officials or the professional clergy, that the simple Byzantine peasants would turn when they were in trouble. As Theodoret once remarked, the holy men replaced the pagan gods: their shrines replaced the temples, and their feasts superseded the old pagan festivals. Theodoret's friend the cage-dwelling hermit Thalalaeus was an example of this. He moved into a still functioning pagan shrine and defeated all attempts to drive him out ('they were unable to move him since faith fenced him around and grace fought on his behalf). Then he managed to convert the local people with the aid of some supernatural veterinary work: Theodoret himself interviewed some converts who 'declared that many miracles occur through his prayer, with not only men but also camels, asses and mules enjoying healing'. This healing of the village pack-animals seems to have tipped the balance: Thalalaeus had found his way into the farmers' hearts, and with the assistance of his new converts he 'destroyed the precinct of the demons and erected a great shrine to the triumphant martyrs, opposing to those falsely called gods, the Godly Dead'.

  By their ability to endure physical suffering Byzantine holy men like Thalalaeus were believed to be able to wear away the curtain that separated the visible world from the divine; and by reaching through they gained direct access to God, something that was thought to be impossible for the ordinary believer. For by mortifying the flesh, it was believed that the holy men became transformed: 'If you will, you can become all flame,' said Abba Joseph in one of the stories of the desert fathers, holding up his hand to show fingers which had 'become like ten lamps of fire', radiant with the 'uncreated light of divinity', the same form of illumination that is shown surrounding the great saints in icons. In this heightened state the holy men were believed to be able to act as intercessors for their followers at the distant court of Heaven, and like the old gods had the power to give children to barren women, to cure the sick, and to divine the future.

  But perhaps the holy men's most important task was to fight demons. The world was believed to be besieged by invisible agents of darkness, and to sin was not merely to err: it was to be overcome by these sinister forces. Demonic activity was a daily irritation, and was believed to intrude on the most ordinary, domestic activities. A recently discovered papyrus fragment tells the story of the break-up of the marriage of a young Byzantine couple, a prosperous baker and the daughter of a merchant: "We were in time past maintaining a peaceful and seemly married life,' they wrote in their divorce petition, 'but, we have suffered from a sinister and wicked demon which attacked us from we know not whence, with a view to our being divorced from one another.' In much the same vein John Moschos tells the story of a nunnery in Lycia which was attacked by a troop of demons; as a result 'five of the virgins conspired to run away from the monastery and find themselves husbands'.

  Like the Muslim djinns which superseded them, Byzantine demons lurked especially in old temples and remote hillsides such as that around my isolated basilica: the Life of an Anatolian holy man named Theodore of Sykeon tells how a group of farmers digging into a mound of earth on a distant hillside inadvertently released a great swarm of demons that took possession not only of them, but of their neighbours and their animals; only a holy man like Theodore was able to drive the evil spirits back into their lair and seal them in. Monks and holy men were thought of as 'prize-fighters' against the Devil's minions, and only with their help - and their amulets, relics and remedies - could demons be fought or defeated. Across the east Mediterranean that tradition still continues: to this day Christian monks are believed to be powerful exorcists, a talent they share with their Islamic counterparts, the Muslim Sufi mystics.

  I thought of this as I walked along the empty country road, hoping for a lift to Cyrrhus. It was two hours before I had any luck. My saviour was Monsieur Alouf, an old francophile Arab with an astonishing resemblance to Omar Sharif. No one lived at Cyrrhus any more, he said as we drove off, but he knew the way as there was the shrine of a famous saint, Nebi (prophet) Uri, on the edge of the ruins. He was not busy today, added M. Alouf. If I wanted, for a small price he could drive me all the way there. He named a reasonable figure and I accepted his offer.

  We headed north along a narrow hill road. The further we drove, the more olives came to dominate the thin soil. As we crossed a narrow ridge, a great panorama of silver-grey trees unfolded before us, chequering the hills in a regimented gridiron. On some south-facing slopes, a few peasant families were beginning the olive harvest. Rickety wooden ladders were being propped against the gnarled old olive trees while sheets were laid out on the ground; tethered donkeys stood about nearby, their empty saddlebags ready to receive the harvest. Nearby, groups of baggy-trousered harvesters loaded olive sacks onto waiting horsecarts.

  We passed a waterfall in which some small children were splashing about, then crossed a pair of beautiful hump-backed Byzantine bridges. One of these, I knew, had been commissioned by Theodoret himself. We were on the edge of our destinatio
n.

  The sheer remoteness of the place was surprising, but in retrospect this was something I should have expected. In his private letters, Theodoret was always complaining about the provincial character of his bishopric. Brought up in a well-to-do family in metropolitan Antioch, he often found life in distant Cyrrhus frustrating. He begged his correspondents for gossip from Constantinople, and complained that there was not a decent baker anywhere in his bishopric. In one particularly revealing letter, he calls Cyrrhus 'a little city' whose ugliness he claimed to have 'covered over' by lavish spending. In another, addressed to his friend the sophist Isocasius, he writes of his excitement when a skilled woodworker arrived in town. In Antioch no one would have noticed such an unexceptional occurrence, but in Cyrrhus everyone in authority - the Governor, the General, Theodoret himself -wanted to employ him, and Theodoret promises to send the carpenter on to his friend as soon as he has finished with him.

  After three miles of increasingly precipitous mountain slopes, the shattered ruins of Cyrrhus rose quite suddenly from the olive groves. A jumble of broken buildings - the arc of a theatre, fragments of arcaded public buildings, a few random columns and pillar bases - littered the ground. Few buildings stood higher than a couple of courses. But dominating everything, crowning the horizon on a precipitous rock in the centre of the ruins, rose the jagged silhouette of the citadel which had been rebuilt and reforti-fied by Justinian as a defence against the Persians.

  M. Alouf dropped me off by the honey-coloured skeleton of one of the Byzantine gateways, and I climbed up towards the fort, following the line of the basalt-black town walls. Basking lizards scuttled between the stones. Although it was now midday it was still cool; grey clouds billowed over the citadel and a fresh breeze was blowing. Halfway up the hill I came across a great stumbling tortoise crunching amid the stones as he began, with infinite slowness, to dig in for the winter with a slow-motion breaststroke of legs and ebony claws. The weather was turning: summer was drawing to a close.