From The Holy Mountain

by William Dalrymple

  Indeed the monks themselves could be pretty unruly. They had to be permanently banned from Gaza when they insisted on disrupting night spectacles at the theatre and various festivals they considered 'pagan'. In Chalcedon, on the Asian shore of the Bosphorus opposite Byzantium, when the monks protested about the staging of Olympic Games, the local bishop reminded the leader of the protesters that he was a monk and should therefore 'go and sit in a cell and keep quiet'; but in Palestine the monks were much more numerous and were clearly made of sterner stuff. On one occasion troops had to be used to restore order after the Palestinian monks rose in revolt against a Bishop of Jerusalem they considered heretical. Things got even more out of control during the reign of the heretical Emperor Valens: when the monks demonstrated violently against a bishop he had installed, the Emperor deported large numbers of them, condemning them to the Imperial mines and quarries in the deserts of Upper Egypt.

  Sometimes the monks did get away with it, however. Under an oppressive and bigoted late Roman law, the Jews were forbidden to enter Jerusalem except once a year on the Jewish festival of Sukkoth, when they were permitted to come and weep over the ruins of their Temple. In 438 a.d. these regulations were relaxed by the Empress Eudoxia, an act which electrified the Jewish diaspora but outraged the more fundamentalist monks. As the Jews gathered in unprecedented numbers on Temple Mount, the Syrian monk Barsauma led one of the most horrific anti-Semitic pogroms of the period, attacking and killing many of the Jewish pilgrims. Barsauma protested that he and his followers had not been directly involved and that the Jews had been killed by 'missiles coming, as it were, from Heaven'. But the surviving Jews had evidence that this was not true, for they had managed to seize eighteen of Barsauma's followers, and brought them to the Empress for trial. But even the Empress could do nothing in the face of the monastic mob Barsauma was able to muster: cheerleaders in the crowd threatened to burn her, and set up a chant of 'The Cross has conquered'; 'the voice of the people spread and swelled for a long time, like the roar of a wave of the sea, so that the inhabitants of the city trembled because of the noise of the shouting.' Barsauma was never brought to justice, and indeed was later canonised by the Syrian Orthodox Church.

  Yet despite such pogroms, rebellions, and internal turbulence, Palestine underwent a massive increase in population during the Byzantine period. Archaeological surveys of pottery picked up in the fields of Israel and the West Bank have found around four times the density of Byzantine pottery as that of the Israelite period, implying that the population during Byzantine rule must have been quite significantly higher than during the centuries preceding it. Whole areas of the region never settled before (or since) were cultivated in this period: in the depths of the Negev desert, for example, six Byzantine towns have been excavated standing in what was then cultivated land. It is probably only in the twentieth century that the population of the region began to equal or surpass the exceptional high point reached during the sixth century.

  The seeds of the destruction of Byzantine Palestine may well have lain in the scale of this sudden expansion. Excavations at Scythopolis (modern Beit Shean) have shown that while the town's brothels were flourishing, bathing was falling out of fashion: the town's five bath houses, all flourishing during the Roman period, fell into disuse under the Byzantines. This may have been partly due to the influence of the monks, who regarded the baths with horror and heaped praise on those who refrained from washing for the longest possible period: one story of the desert fathers admiringly tells how a wandering monk chanced upon a saintly hermit in a cave in the furthest reaches of the desert, 'and believe me, my brothers, I, Pambo, this least one, smelt the good odour of that brother from a mile away'. Basic norms of hygiene were not just ignored by the monks and their admirers: they were deliberately, piously flouted.

  But it was not just a question of fashion; there were structural problems too. The old Roman aqueducts were clogging up, while in Scythopolis the neatly paved drains built during the pagan Empire fell into disrepair and were replaced by open sewers. In all the Byzantine sites excavated in Palestine and Jordan only two lavatories have ever been discovered, and one of those was located directly over a monastic kitchen.

  The result of all this was a wave of epidemics throughout the sixth century. The pages of John Moschos contain many references to outbreaks of plague, and the evidence of modern archaeologists has shown that leprosy, smallpox and tuberculosis were rife, while lice proliferated to an extent unknown in almost any other period of Middle Eastern history.

  Many historians now believe that it is in the devastating infections and plagues of the late sixth century that the root cause of the rapid collapse of the Byzantine Levant should be sought.

  Every morning during my stay in Jerusalem I toured the lanes and alleys of the Old City, searching out fragments of the Byzantine period, often in the company of Bishop Hagop. The Bishop had cheered up somewhat since our first meeting, and was always at his liveliest in the ancient vaulted passageways of the different quarters, pointing out both the architectural remains littered around us and some of the Old City's more unusual modern inhabitants.

  'See that blind beggar? Yes, the man in the wheelchair in front of that Crusader arch. He's only blind from nine until twelve. Then he takes off his dark glasses and has another job, as a waiter in a kebab restaurant in the Muslim Quarter. Very good kebabs, too. Over there, that's the Church of St John the Baptist. It's got some lovely Byzantine stonework but the Greeks have gone and put horrible new frescoes in the apse: bright yellows and blues.'

  The Bishop shuddered. 'The taste of some of these modern Greeks ... Have you seen the mosaic they've put up in the Holy Sepulchre? It looks like something out of Walt Disney. Now, look down here. See the tall man selling olive-wood figurines? He's called Isa. For years he used to be a cook. Specialised in making sandwiches: nice dainty ones for wedding parties. He was famous for his special liver sandwiches and soon became the most popular caterer in the Old City. Then someone noticed that the cat population near his house kept declining every time there was a wedding: eight to ten cats went missing whenever a reception was held. News spread about this, but people kept begging him for sandwiches. In the end he couldn't satisfy demand: the cat population ran too low and he couldn't produce the goods. So he got into olive wood instead. But at least he was quite humane with the cats. There's a Cypriot monk who makes his unfortunate cats fast in Lent. He locks them up and you can hear them yowling into the night. And it's not just Lent. About once every year he has dreams in which he thinks he is given an exclusive premonition of the coming of the Messiah. So for a fortnight afterwards he makes these poor cats scream all night in expectation of the Second Coming. Terrible noise. Now, see that pillar ...'

  Perhaps the biggest surprise of our walks was discovering quite how little of Byzantine Jerusalem has survived. While in northern Syria hundreds of unnamed and unknown late antique towns and villages still exist virtually intact, in Jerusalem, once probably the most magnificent provincial town in the entire Christian Empire, only desultory fragments of floor mosaic and piles of collapsed pillars remain to hint at what has been lost. Following the trail of John Moschos's writings around the city takes one to a variety of dank cellars and obscure crypts, but even here there is little surviving that is of more than antiquarian interest. Ironically, the only great Byzantine building left in the city is a mosque - the Dome of the Rock - decorated by Byzantine craftsmen for the new

  Muslim conquerors in the late seventh century, shortly after the fall of the eastern half of the Empire. Runciman has called the Dome 'the supreme example of the rotunda-style of building in Byzantine architecture'.

  Of Constantine's original Holy Sepulchre very little survives. Fragments of its walls are visible through a dark hole in the side of the Syriac chapel, but most of the existing structure is Crusader, with a few later additions from the Ottoman period. The Nea, Justinian's magnificent New Church of Mary, Mother of God, where one of Moschos's frie
nds, Abba Leontios the Cilician, worked for forty years, has also effectively vanished. Fragments of it - mere lumps of wall, along with some strange vaulted substructures - lie scattered around various undercrofts in the Jewish Quarter. Archaeologists have excavated what remains, and seem excited by their discoveries, but it is almost impossible for the layman to imagine that these sad piles of brick and stone once surpassed many of Justinian's surviving churches - Haghia Eirene in Istanbul or San Vitale in Ravenna - still less that the Nea could be mentioned in the same breath as Haghia Sophia, the greatest of all Byzantine buildings.

  The Cardo - the great central bazaar of Byzantine Jerusalem -is a similar story. It dominates the portrait of the city on the sixth-century mosaic map discovered at Madaba in Transjordan in 1884, and fragments of it have been discovered all over Jerusalem. Near the Holy Sepulchre, deep within the bowels of an echoing Russian Orthodox complex known as the Alexander Hospice, one can see a hundred yards of its arcades and paving, as well as a modest Byzantine stab at a classical Triumphal Arch. The Cardo resurfaces again for two hundred yards in a hole in the ground in the Jewish Quarter, beside a line of new boutiques selling bronze menorah, Israeli flags and Hebrew T-shirts for the American tourists. It then disappears into the side of a restaurant, never to be seen again.

  One place where you cannot see the slightest hint of Byzantine work is at a busy road interchange just outside the Damascus Gate. I went there with Bishop Hagop one damp winter's afternoon, after lunching at an Armenian restaurant near the Austrian

  Hospice. The Bishop stood on the pavement beside a new plastic bus shelter and asked me what I could see.

  'Well...' I ventured. 'A bus shelter?'

  'Anything else?'

  'A couple of manholes?'

  'Exactly. A bus shelter and a set of manholes. But nothing else.' 'No,' I agreed. 'So what?'

  'This manhole is all that marks the site of one of the greatest Armenian monasteries of the Byzantine period. To the north-east, over by that filling station, were the monastic buildings of St Stephen's, the largest Greek monastery in Jerusalem. The foundations of its abbey church still survive under the chapel of the French Ecole Biblique. But its monastic buildings were considered long lost'

  I mentioned how Sophronius had said the last mass before the fall of Jerusalem in St Stephen's, and asked when the monastery had been discovered.

  'Both monasteries - the Greek and Armenian complexes - were discovered when the Israelis were building a dual carriageway to link some of the new West Bank settlements to the Old City: the settlers said they needed a new road which did not pass through Arab neighbourhoods because of intifada stone-throwing. The Israeli archaeologists excavated the ruins, took our mosaic to West Jerusalem, then backfilled both sites.'

  'Didn't you protest?'

  'Protest? We begged them to preserve it. But they would not listen. They said their road was more important. All they preserved was one of our burial chambers. It's under this manhole here. Originally they promised access for pilgrims, and lighting as well, but it never materialised. In Jerusalem we Christians are now too small a community to have any influence. We don't have a lobby. We don't even have a vote. As a result, in the space of a few months, two of the biggest monasteries ever discovered in the Middle East have been erased from the face of the earth. A visitor passing this spot today would never know any Christian building

  - let alone a pair of the most important monasteries in Palestine

  - had ever been here.'

  'They probably didn't have the funds to preserve them,' I said. 'Ruins get bulldozed all over the world.'

  'At exactly the same time as the two monasteries were discovered,' answered Hagop, 'builders located the tomb of a fifteenth-century rabbi in the Palestinian village of Silwan, a mile from here. Archaeologically, the site is of no great importance, but tourists are now taken around the tomb, and the impression is given that Jerusalem has always been a Jewish-dominated city. The truth is quite different: for eighteen hundred years the Jerusalem Jewish community was a small minority here. But with the ultimate political status of the town still undecided, it is vital for the Israelis that that truth is suppressed, or at least disguised. Jerusalem is meant to be their eternal capital. These monasteries are evidence of a Christian-dominated Jerusalem. So they were hidden.'

  'I'm sure there must have been a good reason for their being bulldozed,' I said. 'I don't believe in conspiracy theories.'

  'They promised us a plaque, some sort of memorial,' replied Hagop, scowling. 'Two years later, can you see anything except this manhole? They've still got our mosaic and the bones from the Armenian burial chamber. They're in the storerooms at the back of the Israel Museum. If we don't shout too loud, and behave ourselves, we might get them back. Otherwise we can probably forget it. As for the monastery, we will probably have to wait another century until this road is taken out of commission and we get the site of our shrine back.'

  We wandered over the site of the two vanished monasteries, Hagop pointing out the approximate places where various features had stood: a mosaic here, a hospice there, the abbey church here, monastic buildings over there.

  'It was a huge complex,' said Hagop. 'From here right over to where that filling station has been built. It was our first Armenian Quarter, another reminder of the continuous Christian presence in this city.'

  We headed towards the garage. A little way beyond it stood the Ecole Biblique, where Hagop had promised to help get me a reader's ticket for the library. As we passed the pumps, Hagop suddenly pointed to a sign in the newly planted garden beside the filling station.

  'Look!' he said. 'This is new. It must have just gone up.' We walked closer and read the notice, which was written in Hebrew and English, but not Arabic:

  jerusalem municipality ministry of transport road number one archaeological garden: fragments of the third wall.

  'I don't believe it,' said Bishop Hagop. 'What's the Third Wall?' I asked.

  'It is the wall built by Herod Agrippa before the Jewish Revolt of 66 a . d . It's an important discovery. Scholars have been arguing for years about where this wall ran, so it's quite legitimate to preserve it. But to keep this when a whole monastic complex has been obliterated before our eyes, right next door to it - that's just nationalistic bigotry. Nothing is erected to commemorate our ruins. There's no mention of them. Nothing. They might as well never have existed. Then they find ten feet of walling from the period of their King Herod and they build a special archaeological garden to preserve it. Do you still call me paranoid?'

  Later, in the cuttings library of the Jerusalem Post and the archaeological section of the Ecole Biblique, I checked what Bishop Hagop had said.

  Like so many apparently trivial disputes in Jerusalem, it turned out that the question of the monastic complex had mushroomed into something of an international scandal. The Christian Churches in the city had been deeply incensed by the authorities' decision to bury a pair of major Christian shrines. They had also been furious at the lack of protection afforded to the ruins, which allowed vandals - allegedly ultra-Orthodox Jewish haredim from nearby Mea She'arim, according to the Jerusalem Post - to pour tar over a beautiful sixth-century Byzantine mosaic and pile rocks on top of a Christian funerary crypt. Church leaders had given interviews to the international press making clear their view that while finds of importance to Judaism were treated with care and respect, Christian antiquities were being disregarded as part of Israel's campaign to assert its rights to the city. When these interviews had no effect, the heads of all the leading Christian Churches in the Holy Land issued a formal joint statement of complaint about Israeli cultural policies, singling out what they described as Israel's 'depredation' of the Christian archaeological heritage, and threatening to appeal for international protection for their ruins unless 'appropriate and satisfactory measures are taken to preserve our universal Christian heritage'.

  According to the official Israeli archaeological report (entitled, significant
ly enough, Excavations at the Third Wall), there were in fact not two but four separate monasteries discovered in the excavations north of the Damascus Gate, as well as two hostelries for pilgrims and a large Christian cemetery. Moreover, shortly afterwards, a fifth Byzantine shrine - a small burial chapel decorated with mosaics and rare frescoes - was discovered near the Jaffa Gate during building for the Mamilla Project, a politically motivated scheme intended to 'integrate' the Old City with the new and make it impossible for the two ever again to be divided as they had been from 1948 to 1967, with the Old City going to the Arabs and the New City to the Israelis - a division the Palestinians wish to reinstate. But despite the unprecedented Christian protests, not one of these sites was preserved for posterity. All were reburied, with the exception of the frescoed chapel outside Jaffa Gate, which was bulldozed to make way for nothing more important than an underground parking lot. 'The whole Mamilla Project depends on it [the carpark],' Gideon Avni of the Israel Antiquities Authority told the Jerusalem Post by way of explanation.

  There is probably nowhere else on earth where the far distant past is so politicised as in the Holy Land. In its 1948 Proclamation of Independence, Israel referred to 'the re-establishment of the Jewish State', thus firmly basing its historic right to exist on the Biblical precedent of the Israelite Kingdom that had thrived in the same area. Since 1967 the same justification has been advanced for the Israeli colonisation of the West Bank and Golan: many of the new Jewish settlements that were set up, such as Shilo, Givon and Katzrin, were deliberately built on sites identified as having originally been colonised by the ancient Israelites three thousand years earlier.

  In a situation like this, where contemporary political claims are based on rival interpretations of ancient history, it is almost impossible for archaeologists to remain neutral or objective. There have long been accusations that Israeli archaeologists have a tendency to excavate not so much to illuminate the general history of the region as to uncover their own history, in some cases allegedly digging through and discarding as irrelevant the intervening Turkish, Arab and Byzantine layers. Indeed, to Israel's great credit, many of the fiercest criticisms of this political bias have come from Israeli liberals incensed at what they regarded as the right-wing nationalistic bias of the country's archaeological establishment. In 1992 the Jerusalem-based archaeologist Shulamit Giva accused Israeli Biblical archaeology of being 'a tool in the hands of the Zionist movement [attempting] to find a connection between the ancient history of the Land of Israel and the historic occurrence of the [modern] State of Israel'. Israeli archaeology, she continued, had 'lost its independence as a scientific discipline and become an executive arm of an ideological movement, a nationalist and political instrument which provided "roots" for the new state'.