From The Holy Mountain

by William Dalrymple

  'St Sabas spent the night giving thanks to the Lord. The following morning he climbed down the cliff. At the bottom, just as he expected, he found that the ass had revealed a spring of living water. It was a constant supply that never ever fails. Even today. And incidentally it tastes very good in ouzo. This is one of the compensations that St Sabas gives us for our sufferings.'

  'What are the others?' I asked.

  'There are many,' he said. 'But the most remarkable is this: after we leave our mortal frame, our bodies never grow stiff.' 'I'm sorry?'

  'After we are dead we never get stiff. We never suffer from ... how do you say... ?'

  'Corruption? Decomposition?'

  'That's right: decomposition.' Fr. Theophanes rolled the word around his mouth as if savouring the notion of mortal decay. 'But the monks of this monastery, instead of giving off a foul stench of decay, emit a sweet fragrance. Like the scent of precious myrrh.'

  I must have looked sceptical, for Theophanes added: 'It is true. Many scientists have visited the monastery and declared themselves baffled. Anyway,' he said, changing the subject, 'what were you doing in the valley this morning?'

  I told him, and remarked on the number of cells which appeared to have been desecrated by treasure hunters.

  'It is the Bedouin,' replied Theophanes. 'They are always looking for buried gold. Sometimes they ring the bell of the monastery and ask for incense from the cave of St Sabas to help them find their gold.'

  'How does that help?'

  'Sometimes they find gold in caves or old ruins, but they dare not take it in case it is guarded by a djinn. They go to their sheikhs, but they can do nothing, so the sheikhs tell them to come here. The Muslims believe that if they get incense from here they can burn it and the holy fumes will scare away the djinn.'

  'Do you give them incense?' I asked.

  'No. It would be blasphemous to use a holy substance for such a purpose. But sometimes I wonder . . .' 'What do you mean?'

  'Well ... Once a man from Bethlehem came here. He was a taxi driver, named Mohammed. I knew him a little because he sometimes brought monks or pilgrims to us. Anyway, one day he rang the bell and asked for incense, saying that he had found some gold in a pot: it had been turned up by a plough on the land belonging to his family. He said his family were worried in case it was guarded by an evil djinn. I said no, he could not have it. Now he is dead. Sometimes I wonder whether I should have said yes.'

  'What do you mean, "Now he is dead"?'

  'He left here, went home and broke open the pot. Straight away he went crazy. He got iller and iller, skinnier and skinnier. Before, he was a strong man. But slowly he became like a skeleton. Bones, a little skin, nothing more. Finally, three months ago, he died.' Theophanes shook his head. 'The Muslims think the djinns are different from demons, but this is just a trick of the Devil. There is no such thing as djinns: just devils in disguise. Now this man's soul will go to Hell.'

  Theophanes crossed himself, from right to left in the Orthodox manner: 'He lost the gold and he lost his soul. Now he will burn like a Freemason.'

  'Fr. Theophanes,' I asked, my curiosity finally getting the better of me, 'I don't understand why you are so worried by the Freemasons.'

  'Because they are the legions of the Anti-Christ. The storm-troopers of the Whore of Babylon.'

  'I always thought Freemasons just held coffee mornings and whist drives and that sort of thing.'

  'Wheest drives?' said Theophanes, pronouncing the word as if it were some sort of Satanic ritual. 'Probably this wheest drive also. But their main activity is to worship the Devil. There are many steps,' he said, nodding knowingly. 'But the last, the final step, is to meet with the Devil and have homosexual relations with him. After this he makes you Pope or sometimes President of the United States.'

  'President of the United States ... ?'

  'Certainly. This has been proved. All the Presidents of the United States have been Freemasons. Except Kennedy. And you know what happened to him

  Theophanes was still raving about the Freemasons, and the way they had masterminded the Ecumenical movement and invented the supermarket barcode, when a young novice knocked on the door to tell us that the Patriarchate van was ready to take me to Jerusalem. Theophanes helped carry my luggage to the gate.

  'Be careful,' he said, as we stood by the great blue door. 'These are the Last Days. They are near their goal. They are everywhere now. Always be on your guard.'

  'Goodbye, Fr. Theophanes,' I said. 'Thank you for everything.'

  'They say this may be the last Pope.'

  'Yes?'

  'Some Holy Fathers have said this. Then the Arabs will be in Rome and the Whore of Babylon will be in the Vatican.' And the Freemasons?'

  'These people. Who knows what they will do . . .' Theophanes frowned. 'Anyway,' he said, 'you must visit us again.' 'Thank you.'

  'Maybe you will have converted to Orthodoxy by then?' I smiled.

  'I will pray for you. While there is still time. Maybe you can be saved.'

  Taking a huge key from a gaoler's ring, the monk undid the bolts of the low gate in the monastery wall. 'Think about it seriously,' he said as he let me out. 'Remember, you will be among the damned if you don't.'

  The heavy metal door swung closed behind me. Outside, a dust storm was just beginning.

  Ararat Street, the Armenian Quarter, Old City of Jerusalem, 4 November

  The Armenian Quarter is the most secretive of the divisions of the Old City of Jerusalem. The Muslim, Christian and Jewish Quarters all look outwards; wandering down their cobbles it is impossible not to get sucked into their flea-markets and junk shops, cafes and restaurants. The Armenian Quarter is very different. It is easy to pass it by without realising its existence. It is a city within a city, entered through its own gate and bounded by its own high, butter-coloured wall.

  The gatehouse gives onto a warren of tunnels and passageways. Off one of these I have been given an old groin-vaulted room smelling of dust and old age, with a faint whiff of medieval church. In the streets around my room, hidden behind anxiously twitching lace curtains, lives a displaced population, distinct from their neighbours in language, religion, history and culture.

  At the time of John Moschos, Jerusalem contained many such communities: large groups of Georgians and Armenians, Syrians and Galatians, Italians and even some Franks, most of whom had initially come to Jerusalem on pilgrimage and stayed on. Although the city is still full of small church missions, usually staffed by clerics on temporary postings, the Armenian Quarter is the last substantial community of permanent Christian exiles resident in Jerusalem.

  The surprise isn't that the others have disappeared. It is that the Armenians have managed to remain. For despite the reference in the psalms to 'the peace of Jerusalem', the Holy City has probably seen more rapine and pillage, more regularly, than any comparable patch of ground on the planet. Here the Israelites battled with the Jebusites, Canaanites, Philistines, Assyrians, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks and Romans; here the Arabs eventually succeeded them only to lose control successively to the Crusaders, the Turks, the British and the Israelis. In Jerusalem every street corner has its own martyr or monument, saint or shrine. Its soil is drenched in blood spilt in the name of religion; its mental hospitals are full of whole hagiarchies of lunatics claiming to be David, Isaiah, Jesus, St Paul or Mohammed.

  Yet amid this conflict between competing truths and rival certainties, the Armenian quarter is a startling example of peaceful continuity. In the third century a.d., the Armenians were the first nation to convert to Christianity, and they quickly became enthusiastic pilgrims to the Holy Places. Palestine may have been a dangerous spot to visit, but it was usually paradise compared to the Armenians' anarchic homeland. By the time of John Moschos there were over seventy Armenian churches in the city.

  The Jerusalem Armenians became adept at living under foreign rule. In the eighth century, when Jerusalem was ruled by the Arab Abbasid dynasty, the Armenians manag
ed to arrange it so that two of the Caliphs had Armenian mothers; in 1099, when the Crusaders captured the town, the first two queens of Jerusalem were also Armenian. Later, when Saladin reconquered the city for Islam, the Armenians played their cards with such skill that they were the only Christians who avoided being expelled or carried off into slavery.

  After 1915, following the genocide of perhaps a million and a half Armenians at the hands of the Young Turks, the Jerusalem Armenian Quarter became a place of refuge for many of the ragged survivors. Within a couple of years the number of inhabitants in the quarter doubled, and the descendants of these people still make up about half the population of the quarter today.

  Having lived through the rule of tyrants such as the hideous Mameluke Sultan, Baybars of Egypt (an ex-slave so ugly that he was once returned to the market by a horrified buyer), it might be expected that the Jerusalem Armenians might consider the current Israeli dominion over the Old City as a relatively benign period in their history; after all, the Jews and Armenians have much in common, sharing a history of wandering, trade, persecution and suffering. But it is not quite as simple as that.

  A short distance from my room, in a cloister overhung with pot plants, vines and flowering shrubs, I found the rooms of Bishop Hagop Sarkissian, a friend from previous visits. Bishop Hagop is a gentle amateur antiquary who has renovated many of the medieval chapels in the quarter. His enthusiasm for Armenian architecture has overflowed into his rooms, which are now cluttered with small wooden models of Armenian churches, painstakingly reconstructed from old prints and daguerreotypes.

  Bishop Hagop is a small, quiet figure with a lavender-blue cassock and a grey goatee beard. He is generally a gossipy, high-spirited man, but he has a penchant - understandably common among Armenians - for telling depressing stories about the genocide. Hagop's mother was the only one of fifty family members to survive the 1915 massacre of her people; his father, a renowned botanist and ethnographer, was one of the few Armenian intellectuals to escape the Young Turks' purges, and only did so by walking five hundred miles through Anatolia and the Levant disguised as a Turkish woman in full chador. Before he died in Jerusalem from the shock of the experience, he managed to finish writing what is arguably the best eyewitness account of the whole Armenian genocide.

  As we sat in his rooms sipping fiery Armenian cognac, the Bishop talked angrily about a decision taken by Israeli television some time previously. A documentary film on the Armenian genocide scheduled for prime-time viewing had been mysteriously cancelled at the last minute. There had been a furious response not only from the Armenians but from many Israeli liberals, yet the television executives refused to alter their position.

  'The Israelis are always insisting on the uniqueness of their Holocaust,' said Hagop. 'Now it seems they want our genocide to be forgotten. It is as if they want a monopoly on suffering.' The old man shook his head: 'In a million little ways, the Israelis make life difficult for us. Many of my people believe they want to squeeze us out'

  'That is a pretty strong accusation,' I said. On my previous visits the Bishop seemed far too absorbed in the Armenian past to worry much about contemporary politics. So I was surprised when, after downing another glass of cognac, he began to pour out his worries about the future.

  'Many right-wing Israelis now say that Jerusalem should belong to the Jews only,' he said, lifting his glass to his lips again. 'These people say that Jerusalem is their eternal capital, and that we are trespassing in their city.'

  The Armenians, he said, had been shaken a couple of years earlier when fundamentalist Jewish settlers of the Ateret Cohanim (Garland of the Temple Priests) had used a succession of Panamanian cover-companies to sub-let and take over the St John's Hospice near the Holy Sepulchre in the very heart of the Christian Quarter. The Armenians were more shaken still when it emerged that the settlers had been given $2 million of government funds to effect their purchase.

  Under an Israeli Supreme Court ruling, non-Jews are excluded from the Jewish Quarter, and all Arabs resident there in 1967 were evicted from it. At the same time, on 10 June 1967, the entire Maghariba (Moors') district was demolished to create a plaza around the Wailing Wall. The area dated back to the fourteenth century, and included a mosque and shrine of Sheikh A'id; but despite their antiquity the 135 buildings in the district were bulldozed and the 650 Palestinians who lived there were expelled from their homes. Yet while all the two thousand Jews who had lost property there in 1948 had their land restored, none of the thirty thousand Palestinians evicted from the Christian suburbs of West Jerusalem in 1948 were allowed to return to their old homes, nor was any reverse law promulgated to prevent Jews from settling in the Christian, Armenian and Muslim Quarters of the Old City; indeed, funds from the Israeli Housing Ministry are available to finance such colonisation, on the grounds that Jews have a right to settle anywhere in their Holy City.

  By Easter 1990, when the St John's Hospice was seized, more than forty properties in the Muslim Quarter had already been acquired by the Ateret Cohanim and other radical settler groups, but the takeover of the hospice was the first attempt by settlers to move into the Christian Quarter. The move quickly snowballed into a major international controversy.

  According to a report in the London Sunday Telegraph, a Greek priest who had forced his way inside the hospice to try to stop the looting of the property asked a settler to hand him a picture of the Last Supper. The Israeli broke the frame over his knee and trampled the canvas into the floor.

  Following this incident, the octogenarian Orthodox Patriarch, the owner of the hospice, led a Maundy Thursday protest march to the property. During the demonstration one of the Greek monks attempted to remove a Star of David which the settlers had just erected over a cross carved above the hospice doorway. As he reached for the star, the Israeli policemen assigned to guard the settlers pushed the elderly Patriarch onto the ground, hit him, then pepper-gassed both him and his monastic entourage. Television cameras recorded the entire incident, setting off a further chain of international protests.

  According to Hagop, the settlers were now stepping up their efforts to buy Armenian land in the Old City. Every month, he said, the Armenian Patriarchate received dozens of enquiries from middlemen acting for settlers willing to pay very high prices for a toehold in the Armenian Quarter. Others applied directly. Ariel Sharon, architect of Israel's invasion of Lebanon, had allegedly offered nearly $3.5 million for an empty parking lot and some houses backing onto it.

  'We refused, of course,' said Hagop. 'But these people are fanatics. They will never give up.' The Bishop frowned. 'I am seriously worried for our future. We have been here for 1,600 years, yet we cannot be sure what will happen tomorrow. The Israelis claim that they are champions of religious freedom, but behind that smokescreen they make it impossible for our community to flourish. They have not granted one building permit to us since 1967, and they destroy any building we construct illegally. It took four years for us to get a telephone for our infirmary, while a Shin Bet [Israeli Secret Police] informer I know got one within a week. They neglect our streets. The Jewish Quarter is properly maintained, but the streets in the other quarters are subsiding because the old Ottoman-period drainage system is collapsing. It's worst of all in the Muslim Quarter. The people there believe the Israelis want to make their houses uninhabitable so that they have to leave; then the buildings can be acquired by settlers.'

  The Bishop snorted: 'They even use their tax system to put our shopkeepers out of business, charging them totally arbitrary tax demands. In 1967 we had eighty or ninety shops in the Old City, now - what? - maybe ten are left, possibly less. All the rest have been bankrupted by tax officials who refuse to believe their accounts. In several cases shopkeepers got demands for more than the entire value of their businesses.'

  I suggested to the Bishop that maybe he was getting just a little paranoid. The old man shook his head. 'In the course of the furore over the St John's Hospice it emerged that the Israeli government
had allocated 7.5 million shekels [£2.5 million] to buy more Christian and Muslim buildings in the Old City. That figure is not disputed. It is not my imagination. There is a concerted government policy to Judaise the Old City. We are an obstacle to that policy. Sooner or later they will find a way of getting around the obstacle we represent.'

  The Bishop poured another glass of cognac for me. 'In my lifetime I have seen my community wither like a diseased tree. The Armenian community used to contain millionaires. Now the young Armenians in my choir look up to their contemporaries who manage to get jobs as waiters in Israeli restaurants. The most ambitious and talented young people are emigrating, to America mainly. They know there is no future for them here. But it's not just the young. Whole families are going.'

  When Bishop Hagop had been a young man, he said, there were over ten thousand Armenians in Palestine. Now fewer than two thousand were left. The whole community structure had shrunk. In the old days there had been five Armenian clubs and a theatre group; there had been plays, concerts, gatherings, dances. Now the quarter was a quiet place; those with energy and ability had left and made new lives for themselves in Boston and New York. A shadow had fallen over the Armenian Quarter; the place seemed to be shrinking in on itself.

  On my way back to my rooms later that evening I fell into conversation with some Armenian teenagers. To my surprise they echoed the Bishop's despair.

  'There is nothing for us here,' said one girl. 'Nothing. If Armenian boys are lucky they will end up washing dishes, or working on a construction site. For us there is even less choice. No non-Jew can get a decent job.'