From The Holy Mountain

by William Dalrymple

  Alone of the buildings of the city, the citadel stood intact: the great round corner bastions and the square turrets of the wall-walk that connected them still rose in several places to their original height. I clambered up onto the parapet, sending loose rubble rolling down the hill behind me, and sat there munching my bread and cheese, looking down over the broken remnants of Theodoret's city.

  In the middle, a little to the north of the citadel, you could see the outline of Theodoret's cathedral, the great church of Saints Cosmas and Damian, a long apsidal-ended basilica standing out clearly from amid the square foundations of the city's smaller secular buildings. To one side of the cathedral stood what must have been the bishop's palace. It was to this building, I thought, that Theodoret would have returned from one of his interviews, thrilled that some wiry old hermit had let him break down the sealed door of his cell, or that some famously bad-tempered stylite had granted him permission to place a ladder against his pillar and climb up for a chat. On the other side of the cathedral, linked to the south wall of the apse, stood the foundations of a small annexe, probably a shrine. I wondered, as I headed off down the hill, whether it was here that the hermit James had eventually ended up, despite all his efforts to resist Theodoret's attempts to add him to the Cyrrhus relic collection.

  Outside the walls, at the opposite end of the town to the cathedral, rose the silhouette of a late antique martyrium. It had a six-sided pyramidal roof and its stone was of a wonderfully rich colour, like the crust on Cornish clotted cream. Sometime in the thirteenth or fourteenth century a.d. this elegant classical building had been walled around and converted into the shrine of a Sufi saint. The shrine was still functioning, and it was there that I had agreed to meet M. Alouf.

  I found him sitting cross-legged on a carpet in the prayer hall of the small mosque that had been built beneath the tower. He was talking to the Sheikh who looked after the shrine, a limping old man with a stick, baggy shalwar trousers and a thin grey beard; his keffiyeh was wound into a turban with its end trailing down the back of his neck. From the ceiling immediately above the Sheikh dangled a bunch of dried yellow flowers. I asked my friend what they were there for.

  'The Sheikh says they are to stop anyone ever again putting the evil eye on the mosque,' said Alouf.

  'Someone has put it on before?' I asked.

  'Sadly yes,' replied the Sheikh. 'Before we put those up, two thieves came and stole all the carpets, the clock, the fan and the loudspeaker from the mosque. Come and see.'

  He led us through a door into the vaulted burial chamber of the tomb. Cuckoo-like, the cenotaph of the Muslim saint had been placed immediately above the spot where the original Roman occupant must have been laid.

  'This is where the sick people come to spend the night,' said the Sheikh. 'In the morning they are cured, thanks to Nebi Uri. It is a holy place but those thieves dug down here. They thought they would find money, but all they did was to desecrate the grave. Afterwards I said to Nebi Uri, "You must take more care of yourself," and I struck his tomb twice with my stick to show that I meant it.' 'You talk to the saint?' I asked.

  'Of course,' said the Sheikh, laughing indulgently, as if I were questioning him about something so obvious that only a foreigner could possibly ask it. 'Every day.'

  'How?'

  'He comes to me in dreams,' said the Sheikh. 'He gives me advice and instructions: "Don't leave my shrine, look after it, make it nice." '

  'What does he look like?'

  'He has a round face, a thick black beard ...'

  'And his clothes?'

  T don't know: I see only his face,' said the Sheikh. 'Twenty years I have been Sheikh here. And before me my father, and before him his father.'

  'For many generations?'

  'Many. I am Abdul Mesin, my father was Maamo, his father Sheikho, Sheikho was the son of Misto, Misto was the son of Maamo, son of Ishan ... Before that I don't remember. It is far away.'

  'Tell me about Nebi Uri,' I said.

  'You don't know about Nebi Uri?' asked M. Alouf, surprised. 'But he is revered by Christians also. Many Christians -Armenians, Suriani, Catholics - come here to pay their respects. Nebi Uri is in your Bible as well as our Koran, I think.'

  'He is?'

  'He was the leader of the Prophet David's army,' said the Sheikh. 'David had him killed so that he could marry Nebi Uri's beautiful wife. Two angels, Mikhail and Jibrael, appeared and asked David why he needed an extra wife when he already had ninety-nine others. You know this story?'

  'Yes. I think we Christians know Nebi Uri as Uriah the Hittite.'

  It was an unlikely tangle of tales: a medieval Muslim saint buried in a much older Byzantine tomb tower had somehow been confused with the Biblical and Koranic Uriah; perhaps the saint's name was Uriah, and over the passage of time his identity had been merged with that of his scriptural namesake. More intriguing still was the fact that in this city, long famed for the shrines of its Christian saints, the Muslim Sufi tradition had directly carried on from where Theodoret's Christian holy men had left off. Just as the Muslim form of prayer, with its bowings and prostrations, appears to derive from the older Syriac Christian tradition that I had seen performed at Mar Gabriel, and just as the architecture of the earliest minarets unmistakably derives from the square late-antique Syrian church towers, so the roots of Islamic mysticism and Sufism lie with the Byzantine holy men and desert fathers who preceded them across the Near East.

  Today the West often views Islam as a civilisation very different from and indeed innately hostile to Christianity. Only when you travel in Christianity's Eastern homelands do you realise how closely the two religions are really linked. For the former grew directly out of the latter and still, to this day, embodies many aspects and practices of the early Christian world now lost in Christianity's modern Western incarnation. When the early Byzantines were first confronted by the Prophet's armies, they assumed that Islam was merely a heretical form of Christianity, and in many ways they were not so far wrong: Islam accepts much of the Old and New Testaments, and venerates both Jesus and the ancient Jewish prophets.

  Certainly if John Moschos were to come back today it is likely that he would find much more that was familiar in the practices of a modern Muslim Sufi than he would with those of, say, a contemporary American Evangelical. Yet this simple truth has been lost by our tendency to think of Christianity as a Western religion rather than the Oriental faith it actually is. Moreover the modern demonisation of Islam in the West, and the recent growth of Muslim fundamentalism (itself in many ways a reaction to the West's repeated humiliation of the Muslim world), have led to an atmosphere where few are aware of, or indeed wish to be aware of, the profound kinship of Christianity and Islam.

  It is this as much as anything else that has made the delicate position of the contemporary Eastern Christians - awkwardly caught between their co-religionists in the West and their strong cultural links with their Muslim compatriots - increasingly untenable in recent years. Hence the vital importance of the syncretism which still exists at shrines like that of Nebi Uri. Such popular syncretism - Christians worshipping at Muslim shrines and vice versa - was once much more general across the Middle East, but now survives only in a few oases of relative religious tolerance. The practice emphasises an important truth about the close affinity of the two great religions easily forgotten as the Eastern Christians

  - the last surviving bridge between Islam and Western Christianity

  - emigrate in reaction to the increasing hostility of the Islamic establishment.

  'Very many Christians still come here,' continued the Sheikh, breaking into my thoughts. 'Mainly they are sick people who want to come and get healing. We had one Christian girl last week. She was sick for many months - her head was bad - and Nebi Uri appeared to her in a dream. So she came here and spent the night on the tomb. The next day she was healed. Last Friday she returned with a sheep, all covered with flowers and ribbons and with its horns dyed with henna. After praye
rs they cut its throat. Then they cooked it and everyone ate it.'

  'Does this happen often?'

  'Every week. I say some prayers over the animal, then afterwards the people slaughter it themselves, just over there by the wall.'

  'And it's always sheep?'

  'No,' said M. Alouf. 'Usually it is, but sometimes people slaughter a young camel, an ox-calf or a young goat. Whatever it is, it must be a good animal - not a dog - and it must be young and healthy. It must not be ill or pregnant.'

  'Afterwards,' said the Sheikh, 'they drag the animal round the grave three times and pour some of the blood over Nebi Uri's grave and onto the doorway leading into the chamber. It is to thank Nebi Uri for fulfilling their wish.'

  'Before they come,' explained Alouf, 'they will always have promised such-and-such an animal to Nebi Uri if he performs some favour for them. So when he does what they want they must fulfil their promise.'

  'We believe that if they give a different - or less good - animal or do not come at all, then Nebi Uri will punish them,' said the Sheikh.

  'How?'

  'The punishment can take many forms,' said M. Alouf. 'He can give an illness or cause a djinn to take possession of the person. There are many forms of misfortune he can visit on the man who breaks his vow.'

  'Once a man who had died was brought here to be buried. They left him by the well outside to wash him. But some time before he had made a promise to Nebi Uri and not honoured it. So when they brought him here the spring dried up and they could not wash the corpse. Nebi Uri did not want him near him. He had rejected him and the man had to be buried elsewhere. The next day water reappeared in the well'

  'If a saint rejects a dead man it is the worst thing that can happen,' said Alouf. 'We regard that as a very great insult to the honour of a family.'

  'But if a man is generous and gives a good sheep to fulfil his vow,' said the Sheikh, 'then we believe that that person will ride that sheep at the Day of Judgement. The sheep will carry him into Paradise.'

  'And the Christians believe this too?'

  'There is no difference between ourselves and the Christians on this matter,' said the Sheikh, 'except that sometimes the Christians make the sign of Christ over the forehead of the person whom they want Nebi Uri to cure.'

  As we were talking the Sheikh had led us up a flight of monolithic stairs onto the vaulted and arcaded terrace on the roof of the Byzantine mausoleum. Each side of the hexagon was broken by a great arch, from which sprung the pyramid above us. Through one of the arches I looked out over the rustling trees of the tomb compound. At the gate of the shrine a tractor was unloading a trailer-full of Kurdish workers. The old men were streaming inside for Friday prayers while the children waited with their mothers by the well-head outside.

  The Sheikh stood facing south, raised his hands to his ears and called the azan. His soft and gentle voice, undistorted by amplification, drifted out over the ruins of Theodoret's cathedral, over the olive trees and the shattered graves of the myriad saints and martyrs of Hagiopolis, to the lavender-blue hills of the Kurd Dagh beyond.

  Aleppo, 9 September

  This morning, my last in Aleppo, I stumbled by accident upon the most unexpected survival from Byzantium that I have yet come across on this trip. Hidden away in a church in the grimy backstreets of the city, like a rare fossil secreted in some obscure quarry-face, there survives, apparently unpolluted by changes in fashion, an ancient form of plainsong that appears to be the direct ancestor of Gregorian chant. If so, extraordinary as it seems, it may represent one of the principal roots of the entire Western tradition of sacred music.

  It was Metropolitan Mar Gregorios who first put me onto the trail. During our meeting he had mentioned in passing that among the different groups that had taken shelter in the winding bazaars of Aleppo were the Urfalees: the descendants of the Syrian Christians of Urfa, ancient Edessa. In what I had read of Urfa's recent history, and from what I had picked up when I visited the town last month, I had understood that the town's Syrian Orthodox community had suffered the same fate as its unfortunate Armenians. But apparently this was not the case. Although a great many of the Urfa Suriani were indeed massacred during the First World War, there were still enough left in 1924, when Ataturk retook the town from the French, to make the Turkish leader worried about Urfa's ethnic purity. He therefore ordered the immediate expulsion of all those Christians who had so far failed to succumb to the Ottomans' bayonets.

  The Urfalees had left Edessa in a succession of great wagon-caravans, and somewhat to their own surprise, made it safely across the Syrian border. There they were escorted by the French Mandate officials to a field full of tents on the outskirts of Aleppo. They are there still, although as with the refugee camps of the Palestinians constructed twenty-three years later, the tents have given way to a jumble of ragged concrete buildings. Mar Gregorios had told me that one last survivor of the original exodus was still alive, and he arranged a meeting.

  I found Malfono Namek's flat up a steep staircase off the narrow, grubby lanes that now make up the Hayy el-Surian, the Quarter of the Syrian Orthodox. Malfono [Teacher] Namek had a thin, ascetic face, a small toothbrush moustache and an alert owl-like expression. He wore a 1930s pinstripe suit, like those worn by bootleggers in Al Capone films. After we had drunk tea, I asked Malfono Namek whether - as he must have been very young at the time - he could remember anything of the Urfa he had left in 1924.

  'Anything?' said Malfono Namek. 'I can remember everything! I even remember what we were reading in school the day the order to leave came through from Istanbul. If I went back to Urfa today I would know my quarter, my street, my house! It is still my town, even though I have been in Syria for seventy years now.'

  The old man thumped the table: 'I would go back tomorrow,' he said. 'But of course the opportunity has never come.'

  'How old were you when you had to move?'

  'I was twelve. We were each allowed to take one suit of clothes, a couple of blankets and food for one week. Everything else -churches, convents, lands, schools, possessions, money - it all had to be left behind. I remember well: it was wintertime so I wore shalwar and a thick jacket. I remember saying goodbye to our Turkish friends and leaving the house and . . .'

  He frowned: 'When I think of this I feel so angry ... It was the Turkish government's fault. Many of our Turkish neighbours were very sad to see us go. They were very sorry for us. You know I still have one friend left alive in Urfa? We write to each other. It is seventy years since we last saw each other, but still we correspond. It was the Turkish government: they called us gavour [infidels] and said we had to go. It was they who hated the Christians, not the people of Urfa.'

  I asked if, at the time, he had realised what was happening.

  'No, not at all!' said Malfono Namek. To my astonishment he threw back his head and laughed. 'At the time I was far too excited. We left in wagons for Ain al-Arab, where we were to catch a train. I was very happy: I had never seen a train. And when we arrived I was very pleased. I had never even imagined such a big and magnificent town existed anywhere on earth. Aleppo was much bigger than Urfa. It had such splendid buildings, and gas street-lighting at night. I saw carriages for the first time, and automobiles: at that time there were maybe ten or fifteen cars in the streets of Aleppo, while none had ever been seen in Urfa. Instead of streetlights, we had been used to carrying paraffin lamps from house to house. For a boy of twelve it was very exciting.'

  The old man shook his head. 'The disillusion came later, when we found there was nothing for us except tents. It was February and very cold and there was nothing to eat. I was unhappy in our tent. There was no money, no light, no water. I could not understand the language. All of a sudden we felt strangers ... It took many years for us to feel at home here. In fact it was only recently that we Urfalees finally got a proper church of our own.'

  'You don't pray with the other Suriani?'

  'No, no,' said Malfono Namek. 'We have to have our own chu
rch as we have our own liturgical practices, and because our chant is very different from - and much older than - the music of the other Sudani.'

  When I questioned him further, he said that the people of Urfa had scrupulously preserved the traditional chants of ancient Edessa, and in particular the hymns composed by St Ephrem the Syrian, the greatest of the town's saints. An Italian musicologist was currently in Aleppo, he said, studying the Urfalees' chants; if I accompanied him to vespers in the Urfalees' church, Gianmaria

  Malacrida would probably be there and I could talk to him afterwards.

  The old man put on a Homburg hat and, reaching for his stick, led me slowly down the stairs. Together we walked through the lanes of Aleppo, Malfono Namek chivalrously tipping the brim of his Homburg whenever we passed one of his friends. The streets were narrow and medieval-looking which, when we came to it, made the brash new Urfalee church of St George look more surprising still. It stood out like an office block in a Georgian crescent, all pre-stressed concrete and gleaming modernity, as different from the austere classical chapels of the Tur Abdin as could be imagined. Inside it was worse still: jarring Technicolor icons hung from the brightly-lit walls; at the back of the altar, behind the priest, a barrage of fairy lights winked like a neon advertisement in Piccadilly Circus.

  But for all the flash modernity of the setting, the singing was still astounding. A cortege of elderly priests conducted the service, accompanied by a string of echoing laments of almost unearthly beauty, sinuous alleluias which floated with the gentle indecision of falling feathers down arpeggios of dying cadences before losing themselves in a soft black hole of basso profundo. At the elevation, the altar boys rattled flabellae, ecclesiastical fans which are often depicted on Pictish and Irish cross-slabs, but which died out in the West before the Norman Conquest, and have survived in use only in the Eastern Churches.