From The Holy Mountain

by William Dalrymple

  But these stories are exceptions. Far more common are tales set against a background of small villages or remote estates, or else in the distant wilderness where hermits can live alone for years undisturbed by anyone - so much so that their deaths can go unremarked for decades. In one particularly macabre tale, a community of monks see mysterious lights at night at the top of the mountain high above their monastery. When daybreak comes they send up a party to investigate, who find that the source of the strange celestial aura is a small cave. Inside they discover an anchorite in a hair shirt. One of the monks embraces the ascetic, only to realise that he is dead. Although his body is miraculously well preserved, a note written by the dying monk indicates that he had 'departed this life' more than seventeen years previously.

  The degree to which monasteries, with their mystical and otherworldly outlook, came to dominate the culture of the region is demonstrated by a set of gospels illuminated in the sixth century at the lost monastery of Beth Zagba, believed by Byzantinists to lie somewhere in the hills around Serjilla. In the illustrations of the Rabula Gospels, the angels are as real as the saints, who in turn are drawn to look like local monks: gaunt rustics caught in mid-argument, hands wildly gesticulating, their expression masked beneath thick growths of beard. In the most famous picture, of the Ascension, Christ hovers in his fiery chariot only just out of reach of the apostles. No dramatic gulf separates his divine world from that of his followers; he is the same size as them, has similar features and wears similar clothes. No barrier separates the natural from the supernatural.

  Another illustration, that of Christ Enthroned, takes this immediacy even further. Christ is shown in majesty, on a golden throne studded with huge cabochon jewels. But around him, flanking him on either side, are not the expected crowd of seraphim and cherubim but a crowd of rough-robed Syrian monks. They are hooded and cowled in their sober brown sackcloth, hair grey, eyes staring, gospel books clutched to their chests as if they were clustered around the abbot in the chapter house or refectory. There is none of the chill remoteness of much late Byzantine art; here the superhuman is considered tangible and everyday, the divine imminent and directly accessible.

  This sort of mystical abstraction is a world away from the practical late Roman farmers of Serjilla or the pyramid-dynasty of al-Barra. And yet if recent scholarship is correct, it seems increasingly likely that the two worlds - those of the gentrified landed estates and the isolated wild-eyed illuminator monks -coexisted side by side in these hills, and that the transition both from the pagan-classical to the Byzantine-Christian, and then, three centuries later, from the Byzantine-Christian to the medieval-Islamic, was a far more gradual process than the traditional accounts of violent change and invasion would allow.

  In the Middle East, the reality of continuity has always been masked by a surface impression of cataclysm.

  Returning in the dusk to Serjilla, I narrowly avoided being torn limb from limb by a pack of enormous sheepdogs. I had just rescued my pack from its sarcophagus and was returning up the hill when the beasts came howling out of the shadows, closing in on me with great leaps and bounds. With only seconds to spare, I managed to scramble up the fallen wall of a tumbledown Byzantine farmhouse, and stood there perched on a projecting gable like a stylite on his pillar. Pulling my rucksack up after me, I looked down to see three wolf-dogs growling below me, mouths open, each exhibiting a truly Baskervillian set of fangs. It was little comfort to think that sheepdogs also seem to have been a hazard of the region in Byzantine times: the unattractive anti-Semitic monastic rabble-rouser Barsauma survived an attack by dogs during his youth, which according to his biographer was understood to presage his future sainthood.

  Eventually, just when I was beginning to think that I was going to have to spend the night up on my perch, the shepherd - a small fifteen-year-old boy - came up. He scattered the three dogs as easily as if they were poodles with a torrent of abuse and a hail of small pebbles. At my request he escorted me out of the ruins and onto the track before returning to his flock and the night-shelter of the old Serjilla bath house.

  Quickening my pace, and mouthing prayers that I would not pass any more shepherds or their dogs, I headed back to the main road, and just managed to catch the last bus of the day before darkness fell. It was heading south.

  A two-hour drive brought me to Horns. At the time of John Moschos, Horns was known as Emesa, and was home to figures as diverse as, on the one hand, Romanos the Melodist, and on the other, St Symeon the Fool, who used to defecate in the centre of the marketplace and complained that the girls of Emesa were 'as licentious as any in Syria'. Horns was famous for its taverns, jugglers, mimers, prostitutes, dancing girls and beggars, as well as for the overheated libido of its clergy: Deacon John of Emesa, the Casanova of the Byzantine Church, was notorious for his habit of making love to all the most beautiful married women in his congregation. Horns was also the place where the early Anglo-Saxon pilgrim St Willibald was imprisoned for several months on his way to Jerusalem. It is still one of the principal Christian towns in Syria, but today is famous only for the stupidity of its inhabitants: contemporary Homsis play the same role in Syrian jokes as the Polish do in those of America, the Irish in Britain, and Kerrymen in Ireland. I decided against staying the night in the city and headed on instead to the convent of Seidnaya, the most important of the three Byzantine monasteries still functioning in Syria.

  On the rattling country bus I sat beside an old Arab farmer. Discovering where I was going, he regaled me with stories of the exploits of a figure he called Malik Jylan of Rum. It was only later, when I read about the myth of the monastery's foundation by the Emperor Justinian, that I realised that my companion had been telling me a version of the same story: of how the Emperor - Malik Jylan in Arabic - out on a hunting expedition, had chased a stag up a rocky eminence. Just as he was about to draw his bow, the stag changed into the Virgin Mary. The Virgin commanded him to build a convent on the site, which, she said, had previously been hallowed by Noah himself, who planted a vine there soon after the Flood. According to my friend on the bus, if I understood him correctly, the Emperor then installed his own sister as the first abbess. The origin of the legend would appear to be etymological: in Aramaic Seidnaya means both 'our lady' and 'a hunting place'.

  The road wound steeply up into the hills, and the bus stopped in village after village. By the time it dropped me off in the dark at the bottom of the hill leading up to the monastery it was after nine o'clock, and I was worried that the abbey gates would have closed for the night. Exhausted, I trudged uphill towards the lights of the convent, which sat, more like a crusader castle than a shrine, on a spur of rock at the very top of the village. In the cold and the darkness I was anxiously aware that the last bus had just departed and that the small village around the foot of the rock contained no hotel or lodging house.

  The gateway of the convent was reached up a steep flight of stairs; and at the top, to my relief, I found that the door was open. Walking into an empty courtyard, my feet echoing on the flagstones, I wondered where the nuns had gone. Then I heard the distant sound of Orthodox chant drifting from the church and headed towards it.

  Two nuns in black veils were chanting at a lectern, while a priest, hidden behind the iconostasis, echoed their chants in a deep reverberating bass. The church was no older than the early nineteenth century, despite some medieval masonry low down in the walls of the nave. But its atmosphere was as authentically Byzantine as any I had seen on Athos. The only light came from a few flickering lamps attached to steel chandeliers suspended from the ceiling on gold chains. As the candle-light waxed and waned with the draught, the frescoes in the domes and semi-domes flashed momentarily into view then disappeared again into the shadows.

  When the travel writer Colin Thubron visited the convent in 1966, he claimed to have witnessed a miracle: to have seen the face of the icon of Notre Dame de Seidnaya stream with tears. In the same church I too witnessed a miracle, or something that t
oday would certainly be regarded as a miracle in almost any other country in the Middle East. For the congregation seemed to consist not of Christians but almost entirely of heavily bearded Muslim men. As the priest circled the altar with his thurible, filling the sanctuary with great clouds of incense, the men bobbed up and down on their prayer mats as if in the middle of Friday prayers in a great mosque. Their women, some dressed in full black chador, mouthed prayers from the shadows of the exo-narthex. A few, closely watching the Christian women, went up to the icons hanging from the pillars of the church, kissed them, then lit candles and placed them in the candelabra in front of the images. As I watched from the rear of the church I could see the faces of the women reflected in the illuminated gilt of the icons.

  Towards the end of the service, the priest reappeared with a golden stole over his cassock and circled the length of the church with his thurible, gently and almost apologetically stepping over the prostrate Muslims blocking his way, treading as carefully as if they were precious Iznik vases. While I had seen Muslims and Christians praying together on the island of Buyuk Ada, off Istanbul, this was something quite different: a degree of tolerance - in both congregations - unimaginable today almost anywhere else in the Near East. Yet it was, of course, the old way: the Eastern Christians and the Muslims have lived side by side for nearly one and a half millennia, and have only been able to do so due to a degree of mutual tolerance and shared customs unimaginable in the solidly Christian West.

  How easy it is today to think of the West as the home of freedom of thought and liberty of worship, and to forget how, as recently as the seventeenth century, Huguenot exiles escaping religious persecution in Europe would write admiringly of the policy of religious tolerance practised across the Ottoman Empire. The same broad tolerance that had given homes to hundreds of thousands of penniless Jews, expelled by bigoted Catholic kings from Spain and Portugal, protected the Eastern Christians in their ancient homelands, despite the Crusades and the continual hostility of the Christian West. Only in the twentieth century has that traditional tolerance been replaced by a new hardening in Islamic attitudes; and only recently has the syncretism of Cyrrhus and Seidnaya become a precious rarity.

  As vespers drew to a close the pilgrims began to file quietly out, and I was left alone at the back of the church with my rucksack. As I was standing there I was approached by a young nun in a knitted black balaclava; it was shaped a little like the Sutton Hoo helmet, with a long tailpiece which trailed down the back of her neck. Sister Tecla had intelligent black eyes and a bold, confident gaze; she spoke fluent English with a slight French accent. She asked me where I was from, and after I had told her I remarked on the number of Muslims in the congregation. Was it at all unusual, I asked.

  'The Muslims come here because they want babies,' said the nun simply. 'Our Lady has shown her power and healed many of the Muslims. Those people started to talk about her and now more Muslims come here than Christians. If they ask for her she will be there.'

  As we were speaking, we were approached by a Muslim couple. The woman was veiled - only her mouth was visible through the black wraps; her husband, a burly man who wore his beard without a moustache, looked remarkably like the wilder sort of Hezbollah commander featured in news bulletins from southern Lebanon. But whatever his politics, he carried in one hand a heavy tin of olive oil and in the other a large plastic basin full of fresh loaves, and he gave both to the nun, bowing his head as shyly as a schoolboy and retreating backwards in obvious embarrassment.

  'They come in the evening,' continued the nun. 'They make vows and then the women spend the night. They sleep on a blanket in front of the holy icon of Our Lady painted by St Luke. Sometimes the women eat the wick of a lamp that has burned in front of the image, or maybe drink the holy oil. Then in the morning they drink from the spring in the courtyard. Nine months later they have babies.'

  'And it works?'

  'I have seen it with my own eyes,' said Sister Tecla. 'One Muslim woman from Jordan had been waiting for a baby for twenty-five years. She was beyond the normal age of childbearing, but someone told her about the Virgin of Seidnaya. She came here and spent two nights in front of the icon. She was so desperate she ate the wicks of nearly twenty lamps.'

  'What happened?'

  'She came back the following year,' said Sister Tecla, 'with triplets.'

  The nun led me up the south aisle of the church, and down a corridor into the chapel which sheltered the icons. At the doorway she removed her shoes and indicated that I should do likewise. I placed them with my rucksack, beside the great mountain of footwear already deposited in the antechamber and Sister Tecla led me into the muffled sanctuary. It was darker even than the church, with no windows to admit the faint light of the moon and stars which had cast a silvery light over the high altar during vespers. Here only the twinkling of a hundred lamps lit the interior, allowing us to avoid tripping over a pair of Muslims prostrated on their prayer carpets near the entrance.

  'And you have no objection to so many Muslims coming here and praying in your church?' I whispered.

  'We are all children of God,' said Sister Tecla. 'The All Holy One brings us all together.'

  She kissed an icon of the warrior saints Sergius and Bacchus, then turned back to face me. 'Sometimes the Muslims promise to christen a child born through the Mother of God's intervention. This happens less frequently than it used to, but of course we like it when it does. Others make their children Muslims, but when they are old enough they bring them here to help us in some way, perhaps with cleaning the church or in the kitchens.'

  The shrine of the icon was thick with the low murmur of prayer and chanting; those pilgrims who were talking to each other did so in hushed voices. Behind me a Syrian paratrooper in full khaki fatigues entered the shrine, having first deposited his heavy boots by the entrance. He advanced towards the icons on his knees, crossing himself all the while and murmuring prayers to the Virgin. Here, you felt instinctively, rather than in the church, was the centre of the convent's devotion.

  In the lamplight, smoke-blackened icons were everywhere, some of them very fine. There was a Beheading of John the Baptist, from which pious pilgrims had scratched out the face of the executioner; there were several of the Panaghia, including one in which the Madonna was shown with thin, almond-shaped eyes as if she was a Persian princess; there was a fine image of the Dormition, the composition of which, intriguingly enough, seemed to be derived from the Ascension in the Rabula Gospels. But the most famous of the images of Our Lady of Seidnaya, the sacred icon supposed to have been painted by St Luke, was invisible, so cluttered was it with knotted silk ribbons, scribbled petitions and silver plaques representing the parts of the bodies of the pilgrims which had been healed through the Virgin's prayers.

  As Sister Tecla led the way from the shrine she said, 'Come: I will take you to the guest rooms. You must eat before you go to bed.' Up to that point neither of us had broached the subject of where I was to spend the night.

  In the guest rooms I was shown to a divan, while a servant took my rucksack to my cell. Sister Tecla poured me a small cup of bitter Arab coffee from a thermos flask, then sent the servant to the kitchens for some food. It arrived a few minutes later, brought by a young novice: a plate of thin soup and some feta cheese accompanied by flat pitta bread. Sister Tecla sat opposite me as I ate, and I asked her about an unexpected photograph which was framed on the wall beside my table.

  'These are our Syrian cosmonauts,' she said, pointing to a picture of three men in space suits clutching their helmets under their arms rather as stage ghosts hold their heads. 'They spent a month together on the Soviet space station Mir.'

  'But why is the picture here?' I asked.

  'It was given to us by the cosmonauts after they returned to Syria.'

  'They came here?'

  'Of course. All three are Muslims, but they visited Seidnaya before they went, to pray for good luck. As soon as they had returned safely they came here agai
n.'

  'To tell the nuns about their adventures?'

  'No, no,' said Sister Tecla, looking at me as one might at a rather dim ten-year-old. 'They came to thank the Virgin and give us presents: this picture and a sheep.'

  'A sheep?'

  'A sheep.'

  'As ... as a pet?'

  'No, no,' said Sister Tecla, frowning again. 'The cosmonauts came here to cut the sheep's throat, of course.' She gave me another withering look. 'It was a sacrifice to the Virgin,' she said, 'to thank her for their safe return from outer space.'

  IV

  Hotel Cavalier, Beirut, Lebanon, 23 September 1994

  After a fortnight of glorious indolence staying with friends in a diplomatic suburb of Damascus, I was woken this morning by the sound of Bing, their Filipino manservant, blow-drying my now spotlessly clean rucksack.

  Slowly the daunting prospect of the day ahead began to take shape: leaving the soft beds, the cool blue swimming pool and my hospitable hosts - all for the uncertainties of the Lebanon, a country which for the last two decades has been virtually a synonym for anarchy.

  To an earlier generation, Lebanon brought to mind images of skiing amid the cedars and sunbathing on the lido at Byblos, followed by flighty evenings in the casinos of Jounieh. But for those of us who grew up during the eighties, Beirut is of course associated with a rather different set of images: grainy front-page pictures of the massed Palestinian corpses at Sabra and Chatila; Don McCullin's photographs of the fire-blackened ruins of the lunatic asylum the Israelis bombarded with phosphorus; television pictures of the hostages; the impacting shells of the bloody militia wars - the PLO versus the Phalange, the Phalange versus Amal, Amal versus Hezbollah, Hezbollah versus the PLO. None of these made one in a particular hurry to rush to see the country for oneself.