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The Byzantines used Prinkipo as a prison, and exiled a succession of crooked chancellors and plotting princes to its monasteries. The Ottomans turned it into a summer resort, and so it remains: a thin line of lovely slatted wooden houses, with carved balustrades and lattices, prettily painted in cream and light blue. But the site of one of the old monasteries is still an active shrine, and it was there that I was heading. Fr. Dimitrios had told me about it. The Shrine of St George was an example, he said, of something which was once common, but is now rare: a holy place sacred to both faiths, where Greeks and Turks still pray side by side.
Because of a local by-law cars are banned from the island, so at the jetty I hailed an old horse-drawn phaeton. We trotted along the cobbles, up the hill, with gardens and orchards on either side. Apples and apricots hung heavily on the trees; bougainvillaea and jasmine blossomed over orchard walls.
A century ago Prinkipo was exclusively Greek, and today one or two old Hellenes still cling on to their houses: large, ostentatious wooden buildings with pediments and pillars. Occasionally, as we passed the manicured lawns, we caught glimpses of old Greek women sitting in the shade of magnolia trees with shiny green leaves and thick creamy flowers; some were sewing, others sipping glasses of sherbet.
We drove out of the town and up the mountain; pine forests replaced orchards and thick carpets of pine needles rotted in the wheel-ruts. Other than the clip-clop of the horse and the rattle of other phaetons taking farmers and pilgrims back into town, it was completely silent.
After twenty minutes, the driver dropped me beside a graveyard at the bottom of the dusty path leading up to the shrine. Before climbing the hill, I looked inside. It was the last Greek graveyard in Turkey still in use. I wandered through the unkempt memorials, overgrown and unswept, carpeted now, like the road outside, by a thick muffling of pine needles. Many of the headstones were decorated with photographs. Paradoxically, I found that it was these photographs of dead people from a deserted graveyard which, more than anything else, brought to life the world of the Greek Istanbul which had been ended by the 1955 riots.
Fr. Dimitrios had described those who had left – the Greeks who formed such an influential minority in the Istanbul of the nineteenth century – as cosmopolitan, artistic and well educated; but the photographs, less nostalgic, revealed a prosperous petit-bourgeois society of shopkeepers and spinsters: moustaches and double chins, waistcoats and fob watches, bald spots and pincesnez; line upon line of plump, suspicious men, grown prematurely old in their confectionery shops, moustaches bristling in late Ottoman indignation; pairs of old ladies shrouded in funereal black, plain and bitter, all widows’ weeds and pious scowls.
Walking up the hill, among the ebb and flow of pilgrims, I marvelled at what I took to be thick white hibiscus blossom on the bushes near the summit. Only when I reached the top did I see what it really was: on every bush the pilgrims had tied strips of cloth, primitive fertility charms, to the branches. Some were quite elaborate: small cloth hammocks supporting stones or pebbles or small pinches of pine needles. Others were tangled cat’s-cradles of threads wrapped right around the bushes, as if packaged for the post.
Inside the shrine it was just as bizarre. At some stage a fire had half-gutted the building, leaving charred rafters and singed window frames standing in the open air. But the rooms, though half exposed and quite unrestored, were filled by a continuous trickle of supplicants. The two nationalities were praying side by side; but they were not praying together. The Greeks stood in front of the icon of the mounted saint, hands cupped in prayer. The Turks put prayer carpets on the floor and bent forward in the direction of Mecca. One veiled Muslim lady scraped with long nails at a tattered nineteenth-century fresco of the saint, then with her fingertip touched a fragment of the paintwork to her tongue.
‘The Muslims also believe in St George,’ explained a young Greek student I met waiting by the jetty half an hour later. ‘They hear St George is working miracles so they come here and ask him for babies. Maybe they don’t know he is Greek.’
‘They probably think he is Turkish,’ said her friend.
‘Probably,’ said the first girl. ‘They think everything is Turkish. I’ve heard boys say Haghia Sophia and the Hippodrome were built by the Seljuk Turks.’
‘They don’t know history,’ agreed the second girl. ‘One day some boy asked my sister, “Why did you Greeks come here? All you do is make trouble.” She said, “We didn’t come: you did.’“
‘They even think Homer was one of them,’ sighed the first girl. ‘They say he was a Turk and that his real name was Omar.’
ISTANBUL, 1 AUGUST
11 p.m.: I have just returned from supper with Hugh Pope, Turkey correspondent of the Independent. We ate in a fish restaurant at Bebek, five miles up the Bosphorus, overlooking Asia. Talk soon turned to the Kurdish war currently raging in the southeast.
‘At least fifty people are being killed every day,’ he said. ‘Unless at least two hundred are gunned down, I don’t even bother calling the Foreign Desk.’
Hugh told me that the previous December, when the Independent sent him to Diyarbakir, he managed to get through to the largest of the surviving Syrian Orthodox monasteries in the southeast, Mar Gabriel. The day before he arrived, a lorry had hit an anti-tank mine two hundred metres from the monastery’s front gate. As he drove up, the charred corpse of the driver was still sitting in the burned-out skeleton of the truck, hands welded to the wheel. The mine had apparently been placed by the PKK, the Revolutionary Kurdistan Workers’ Party, and was thought to have been aimed at village guards – in the eyes of the PKK, collaborators with the Turkish government – passing on their way to the neighbouring village of Güngören. Although the mine’s target did not seem to have been the monastery, it dramatically brought home to the monks how vulnerable they were to being caught in the crossfire between the PKK and the government.
According to Hugh, the Kurdish guerrillas dislike the Suriani Christians as much as the local government does, accusing them of being informers, just as the authorities accuse them of being PKK sympathisers. Moreover, the Kurds have much to gain by driving the Suriani out: they can then occupy their land and farm it themselves.
Yet the problems faced by the Christians and the Kurds have similar roots. The Ottoman Empire was administered by a system which allowed, and indeed thrived on, diversity. Each millet or religious community was internally self-governing, with its own laws and courts. The new Turkey of Ataturk went to the opposite extreme: uniformity was all. The vast majority of Greeks were expelled, and those who remained had to become Turks, at least in name. The same went for the Kurds. Officially they do not exist. Their language and their songs were banned until very recently; in official documents and news broadcasts they are still described as ‘Mountain Turks’.
It is this ludicrous – and deeply repressive – fiction that has led to the current guerrilla war. Because of it the rebels of the PKK are now involved in a hopeless struggle to try and gain autonomy for the Turkish Kurds, something Ankara will never allow. More than ten thousand people have been killed in the south-east of Turkey in the last five years, and great tracts of land and around eight hundred villages have been laid waste in an effort to isolate and starve out the guerrillas. At least 150,000 Turkish troops are tied down in the mountains of the south-east, fighting perhaps ten thousand PKK guerrillas. At the moment the government seems to have the upper hand, and it is said the average life expectancy of a guerrilla is now less than six months. Hugh says that the fighting, though currently intermittent, is expected to reach a new climax in the coming weeks: summer is the fighting season.
I plan to set off to the south-east next week. Antioch – modern Antakya – is on the edge of the trouble. Once there it should be easier to judge how bad things really are: it is virtually impossible to gauge the difficulty of getting to the Syrian Orthodox monasteries from here, and the situation changes from day to day. Inshallah it should be possible to get through without taking any unreasonable risks. Hugh has given me the name of a driver in Diyarbakir who last year was willing – for a price – to drive him into the war zone.
He also raised the question of whether I should get a press card. On the one hand, he says, the authorities in the south-east hate all journalists: last year his wife was beaten up by the police in Nusaybin when she produced her card. On the other hand, he says that no one will believe me if I say I’m a tourist – no tourist has gone anywhere near the south-east for three or four years now – and if I have no Turkish ID he tells me that there is a real possibility that I could get arrested for spying.
On my return from supper I asked the advice of Metin, the hotel receptionist, whose home is in the south-east. He seems to think my plans are hysterically funny. ‘Don’t worry, you’ll only get shot if you run into a PKK roadblock, and only get blown up if you drive over a landmine. Otherwise the south-east is fine. Completely safe. In fact highly recommended.’
Becoming serious, Metin said that if the police did not arrest me, and if I did not drive over any landmines, there was always the delightful possibility of being kidnapped by the PKK. This happened last year to three British round-the-world cyclists. They were not in the least harmed, but as the guerrillas cannot light fires – that would reveal their whereabouts to the army – the hostages were forced to live for three months on snake tartare and raw hedgehog.
‘The tourists should consider themselves lucky,’ said Metin. ‘If it had been Turkish soldiers that had fallen into the PKK’s hands, they would have had their dicks cut off. Then the PKK would kill them. Roasted them over a fire or something. Very slowly. Chargrilled them.’
‘And this sort of thing still goes on?’
‘These guys are committing mass murder right now,’ answered Metin.
‘But they only do that to Turkish soldiers, right?’
‘You can’t be too careful in the east,’ said Metin, twirling his moustache. ‘As they say in Ankara: Kurdistan is like a cucumber. Today in your hand; tomorrow up your arse.’
ISTANBUL, 3 AUGUST
My last day in Istanbul; tonight the train.
This morning I went to the Phanar to say goodbye to Fr. Dimitrios, and to collect the letters of introduction he has written to the hegumenoi (abbots) of the Greek monasteries in the Holy Land and Sinai.
Running down the stairs from Fr. Dimitrios’s office, I knocked into a visiting Greek monk who was crouching in the doorway leading into the courtyard, feeding the sparrows. I apologised and we fell into conversation. He said he had been to England once but did not like it much. ‘It was so sad,’ he remarked. ‘All the churches were closed. In Ipswich I went. Not one church was open. Not one!’ He added darkly: ‘I read in a magazine that the head of the Satan Cult lives in England.’
He disliked London and was unimpressed by Buckingham Palace. In fact only two places really appealed to him. One was Kew: ‘Your Kew Gardens! So beautiful! So lovely! I would feed the squirrels and bring them nuts.’ The other was a shop in Lambeth which sold religious trinkets. From his suitcase the monk produced a small plastic hologram of Christ. ‘It is so beautiful, no? It is by a Swiss artist and is based on the exact likeness of Jesus. Some of the other monks think it is not pleasing to look at, but I do not understand why. Walk around: look! Now our Lord is smiling! Now he is showing his sobriety! Now he is dead. Now he is risen! Alleluia! It is so beautiful, no? I carry it with me always.’
A night ferry across the black Bosphorus to Haydarpasha, the Anatolian railhead of the old Berlin to Baghdad railway that T. E. Lawrence spent so long trying to blow up. Tomorrow to Ankara to pick up my press card.
On the train the conductor had no record of my reservation. But he asked me my nationality, and when I told him, I thought I saw a brief flicker of terror cross his face; certainly, I was immediately upgraded to first class. Only when I sat eating supper in the station restaurant did I discover the reason for this uncharacteristically flexible behaviour: there was a European Cup soccer match that evening between Manchester United and Galatasaray, and the television news was full of the English visitors’ traditional pre-match activities: trashing restaurants, picking fights, beating up innocent Turks and so on. For the first time I felt grateful for English football’s international reputation for hooliganism: it seemed that my compatriots from Manchester had unknowingly guaranteed me a first-class berth for the night.
NIGHT BUS BETWEEN ANKARA AND ANTIOCH, 6/7 AUGUST
4.15 a.m.: This is a horrible way to travel. It is nearly dawn, and the first glimmer of light has illuminated an expanse of flat plains covered by a wraith of thin mist. The rutted roads, the bracing crash of the long-defunct suspension, the snoring Anatolian peasants: these one expects and can bear. What is intolerable is the deliberate regime of sleep deprivation imposed on all passengers by this driver and his henchman, the moustachioed Neanderthal of a conductor.
Every other hour we pull in to some seedy kebab restaurant. The lights are put on, we are shaken awake and a Turkish chanteuse is put on the Tannoy so loud that we have no option but to vacate the bus. The driver and his friend disappear behind the scenes to pick up their commission from the restaurant owner, while we are all expected to make merry with plateloads of malignant kebabs or, even more horrible in the middle of the night, bags full of sickly-sweet Turkish delight.
Worse is to follow. On returning to our seats, the Neanderthal marches down the aisles, gaily shaking eau de cologne over the outstretched hands of the passengers. This can be quite refreshing at three o’clock on a hot afternoon; but it is irritating beyond belief at three o’clock in the dull chill of the early morning. And so on we trundle, rattling and shaking like a spin dryer, smelling like a tart’s boudoir, tempers rising steadily with each stop.
6 a.m.: We pull in to a particularly run-down kebabji which, with horrible inevitability, has suddenly materialised from nowhere amid the grey wastes of Anatolia. We stumble out of the bus and obediently line up for our breakfast, smelling like a collection of extras from some spectacular epic of an after-shave advertisement. Too weak to argue, too tired to care, I join the queue and load my plate with some slurry that must once have been an aubergine.
8 a.m.: Issus, site of Alexander’s great victory over the Persians. It may be one of the turning points in world history, but it’s a miserable-looking place now: a scrappy village with a petrol pump, a derelict electricity station and the statutory seedy restaurant over which hangs a terrible smell of grease and dead animal.
My neighbour in the bus, a garrulous traffic policeman from Istanbul, made the mistake of eating a kebab at the last stop and is now being noisily ill in the street; he has attracted a small circle of onlookers who appear to take the view that this is the most interesting thing to have happened in Issus for several months. Despite the early hour, it is already hot and muggy. We’re through the Cilician Gates and heading into the plains. On the far side of the road parties of bedraggled peasants are standing in lines, hoeing the dead ground beside the cotton and tobacco fields – or at least some are: most have put down their implements to watch my friend’s streetside evacuations.
The men here are a rough-looking bunch, scowling, ill-kempt and unshaven. But – looking around the motley crew filling the tables around me, and glimpsing my own reflection in the mirror – who are we to talk?
9 a.m.: Antioch: a gridiron of dirty alleyways surrounded on three sides by the crescent cliffs of Mount Silpius. As we leave the bus for the last time and stumble into the glare of the bus station the smirking Neanderthal offers us a last splash of eau de cologne. I shake my head, but get the horrible stuff poured all over me anyhow.
BUYUK ANTAKYA OTELI, ANTIOCH, 11 AUGUST
Cleansed, vowing never again to go on a night bus, nor ever again to touch eau de cologne, I went to bed for the rest of the morning, lulled to sleep by some of John Moschos’s more soporific miracle stories: tales of doughty Byzantine hermits fending off the advances of demonic temptresses and saucy ‘Ethiopic boys’.
With the exception of the mosaics in the museum and a few fragments of the much-rebuilt town walls, it seems that barely one stone remains from what was once the third greatest metropolis in the Byzantine Empire and briefly, under Julian the Apostate, its capital. Of the city’s famous buildings – Constantine’s Golden Octagon, the Council Chamber where Libanius declaimed, the great hippodrome that could seat eighty thousand people – nothing now remains. Like Alexandria, its traditional rival, Byzantine Antioch is now just a city of memory, forgotten but for the conjectures of scholars.
There is a reason for this. The city is built in the centre of an earthquake zone and has been levelled again and again, at least once every two hundred years. Today it is a sleepy, provincial place, architecturally undistinguished but for a few fine late-Ottoman villas decorated with carved wooden balustrades and with vines tumbling over the shuttered windows. Other than the occasional archaeologist, no one really bothers to come to Antioch any more: not the Turkish politicians, not the journalists, not the tourists, not even the PKK.
It is odd to think that all Europe, much of the Middle East and the entire length of the North African coast was once ruled from this little market town, today a forgotten backwater even by Turkish standards. Perhaps one day Los Angeles or San Francisco will be like this.
When John Moschos visited Antioch in the 590s, there were already many signs that the city was in serious decline. The School of Antioch, once one of the most sophisticated of all theological schools, was no longer in its prime. The days of John Chrysostom and Theodore of Mopsuestia were long past, even though it was probably at this time that Theodore of Tarsus came to the city to receive his training in the Antioch tradition of Biblical exegesis, a training he later brought with him to Anglo-Saxon England when he was appointed the seventh Archbishop of Canterbury. Antioch’s port, Seleucia ad Pieria, was beginning to silt up, and the great trade of the Mediterranean had begun passing the city by. The bazaars were empty but for local agricultural produce, and refugees were setting up shacks where once great caravans of merchants traded in silks and spices from Persia, India and the East.
Moreover, corruption had set in, and the city had the most dubious reputation. When the Emperor framed a troublesome Bishop of Antioch for consorting with a prostitute, no one for a minute doubted the bishop’s guilt. The Antioch theatre was famed for its great aquatic spectacles featuring (as one source puts it) ‘large numbers of naked girls from the lower classes’, and the city’s eighteen public baths were as disreputable as any in the Empire. St John Chrysostom, later the scourge of Constantinople, began his career as moral watchdog in Antioch, where he attacked the institution of ‘spiritual partnerships’ between monks and nuns and for good measure went on to accuse the city’s upper-class women of habitually exposing themselves before the eyes of their servants, ‘their softly nurtured flesh draped only in heavy jewellery’.
But it was sorcery that was the declining city’s greatest vice. In an age when demons were considered to fill the air as thickly as flies in a Turkish market (Gregory the Great always used to recommend making the sign of the cross over a lettuce in case you swallowed a demon that happened to be perched on its leaves), in Antioch things had come to such a pass that demonic activities were rife even among the clergy – or so it was whispered. The Antioch hippodrome was a famous centre of such witchery: not only were all kinds of magic practised there against horses and charioteers, but the galleries were packed with nude classical statues believed to be the haunt of those demons who specialised in exciting the carnal passions. Indeed the Byzantine version of the Faust tale involved a Jewish necromancer leading a presbyter to the hippodrome in the middle of the night. The presbyter has been sacked from his position as oikonomos (treasurer) by the new bishop. The necromancer succeeds in conjuring up Satan himself, who promises to help the presbyter regain his former position if he first agrees to become the Servant of Darkness, and kisses his cloven foot in submission. The presbyter does as he is bidden, and sells his soul to the Devil.
Surrounded by similar stories, the worried Antiochians looked for guidance not to their clergy, nor to the Byzantine governor or the magister militum. Instead they turned to St Symeon Stylites the Younger, a renowned hermit who had set up his pillar a few miles outside the city. From there he issued a series of dreadful threats and warnings to the faithful, calling on them to repent and mend their ways.
His powers were remarkable. According to his anonymous hagiographer the dust from his clothes was more powerful than roasted crocodile, camel dung or Bithynian cheese mixed with wax – apparently the usual contents of a Byzantine doctor’s medicine chest. This dust could cure constipation, cast leprosy on an unbeliever, bring a donkey back to life and restore sour wine to sweetness. It was clearly a particularly handy thing to have on board ship in the event of a storm. A certain Dorotheus, a cleric at Symeon’s monastery, sailed during the forbidden period of the year in the midst of winter, trusting to the protection of his stylite master. Far out to sea, however, the vessel ran into a tremendous storm which lashed it with waves so high they rolled over the deck. The Captain was in despair, but Dorotheus took some dust which had been blessed by St Symeon and sprinkled the ship with it; ‘a sweet fragrance filled the air, the churning sea was pacified, a fair wind filled the sails and safely brought the ship to its destination.’
Symeon was clearly not a man to be trifled with. An Antiochian brickmaker who privately voiced his view that Symeon’s miracles might not be the work of God but instead of the Devil found that his hand promptly turned putrid, and ‘it was only after he shed many tears of repentance that he was forgiven and restored to health’. Symeon could have an equally dramatic effect on other parts of the body. Moschos tells a story of a renegade monk who gave up the habit, left his monastery in Egypt and settled in Antioch. One day, on his way back to town from a trip to the coast, the ex-monk decided to visit Symeon’s pillar. He had no sooner entered the enclosure than the stylite pointed him out amid the crowd of assembled pilgrims: ‘Bring the shears!’ cried Symeon, miraculously divining his visitor’s monastic past. ‘Tonsure that man!’
Packing him off back to his Egyptian monastery, Symeon promised the man a sign that he had been granted divine forgiveness. It duly arrived: one Sunday, back in his cloister, when the monk was celebrating the Eucharist ‘one of his eyes suddenly came out’. This, oddly enough, was considered a good thing, at least by Symeon’s more ardent admirers. ‘By this sign,’ comments a breathless Moschos, ‘the brethren knew that God had forgiven him his sin, just as the righteous Symeon had foretold.’
After lunch, refreshed, I set about trying to find a driver willing to take me to what remains of the stylite’s pillar on the Wonderful Mountain, a few miles south of modern Antakya.
In the main bazaar – a vaulted Ottoman street that still follows the line of the old Byzantine corso – I met a pious and thickly bearded driver named Ismail. He owned an ancient and much repainted Dodge truck, currently coloured lemon-yellow. We haggled for long enough for both of us to feel we were being swindled, and after Ismail had attended midday prayers we drove off in the truck, jolting out of Antioch, heading due south.
Olives were everywhere: long regimented lines of trees forming neat chequerboard patterns against the ash-coloured soil of the hills. But for the occasional minaret poking up beyond the groves and the groups of baggy-trousered peasants loading firewood onto carts, it could have been Umbria. In the valley to our left shepherds and their barking dogs were leading herds of long-eared goats and sheep, bells tinkling, through the mulberries and aloes. Within a few minutes the perfect pyramid of Mons Mirabilis rose up through the morning haze.
Bouncing off the main road onto a track, we climbed a dry wadi in a cloud of dust. We passed an old couple with mattocks in their hands, hoeing a barren terrace. The track continued to spiral steeply upwards; slowly a great vista opened up around us. Ahead lay the distant metallic glint of the Mediterranean; to the south, Mount Cassius and the olive groves of Syria; to the north, the hot, flat, plains of Cilicia. Immediately below us, through the heat haze, we could see the meandering course of the sluggish Orontes, and on either side lines of dark green cypresses.
When John Moschos came here, all the peaks within view were crowned by stylites, and competition between them was rife: if one was struck by lightning – something that clearly happened with a fair degree of frequency – the electrocuted hermit’s rivals would take this as a definitive sign of divine displeasure, probably indicating that the dead stylite was a secret heretic. Judging by what Moschos has to say in The Spiritual Meadow, visiting these pillar saints was a popular afternoon’s outing for the pious ladies of Antioch’s more fashionable suburbs. The most chic stylite of all was undoubtedly Symeon, whose pillar lay a convenient palanquin’s ride from the waterfalls of Daphne, the resort where Antony took Cleopatra for their honeymoon.
Today it seems that no one comes to Symeon’s shrine. There are only a handful of Christians left in Antioch, and they have better things to worry about than the ruins of a forgotten hermit. The broken pillar is surrounded now by the ruins of the churches, monasteries, pilgrims’ hostels and oratories that sprang up around it, a crumbling panorama of collapsed walls and fallen vaults. The only intruders are shepherds looking for somewhere to shelter their flocks during storms. Even the dirt track no longer reaches the pillar. I left Ismail bobbing up and down on his prayer carpet at the end of the path, and climbed up to the summit on my own.
Rising to the crest of a hogsback ridge, I could see above me the lines of honey-coloured masonry that marked the exterior wall of the stylite’s complex. But it was only as I got much nearer to the ruin that I began to take in the true scale and splendour of the building: high on that empty hilltop with the wind howling over the summit lay a vast cathedral, constructed with great skill out of prisms of finely dressed stone. It was built with deliberate extravagance and ostentation: the basket capitals of solid Proconessian marble were lace-like and deeply cut; the pilasters and architraves were sculpted with an imperial extravagance. It was strange: a ragged, illiterate hermit being fawned over by the rich and highly educated Greco-Roman aristocracy; yet odder still was the idea of a hermit famed for his ascetic simplicity punishing himself in the finest setting money could buy. It was like holding a hunger strike in the Ritz.
I clambered into the basilica over a pile of fallen pillars and upended capitals; as I did so a thin black snake slithered from a marble impost, through a patch of poppies, down into the unseen dark of an underground cistern. I sat down where it had been lying, and opened up The Spiritual Meadow to read Moschos’s description of the teeming crowds that once thronged the site to look at Symeon, to hear his pronouncements and, possibly, even to be healed. Once the road between Antioch and the coast was jammed solid with devotees and pilgrims coming from all over the Mediterranean world. Now it was just the snake and me.
The complex was based on that of the original St Symeon Stylites, St Symeon Stylites the Elder, who first ascended his pillar near Aleppo a century earlier in an effort to escape the press of pilgrims around him. His pillar was originally just a refuge from the faithful; only by accident did it become a method of voluntary self-punishment and a symbol in itself. The building around the original St Symeon’s pillar was erected by the Emperor after the stylite died, so that his pillar became a relic and the church which enclosed it a huge reliquary. But here on Mons Mirabilis there was a crucial difference: the church was built around a living saint. In one of the most unlikely manifestations of Christian piety ever witnessed, it was a living man – a layman, not even a priest – who was the principal object of reverence in the church.
The stump of the pillar rises still from a plinth in the middle of an octagon, around which are stacked tiers of stone benches. In a normal Byzantine episcopal church such stone benches, reserved for the senior clergy of the church and called the synthronon, would be placed around the apse and would look onto the altar. But in this church conventional worship was relegated to the flanking side chapels; here the main nave looked not towards the altar (and thus to God) but towards the saint himself. The stylite had become like the Christian version of the Delphic oracle: raised up on his pillar at the top of the highest mountain, a literal expression of his closeness to the heavens, he spoke what all assumed to be the words of God. The Byzantines were constantly haunted by the spectre of heresy, but no one in Antioch ever seems to have suggested that in behaving in this way the stylites or their followers were doing anything in the least bit uncanonical. Even when the Egyptian monks tried to excommunicate Symeon, the rest of the Byzantine Church assumed – perhaps not inaccurately – that they were just motivated by jealousy: after all, the stylites had rather stolen the desert fathers’ thunder.
The sun was lowering in the sky, sinking towards the Mediterranean. In the distance, to the east, lightning played on the horizon. But even though it would soon be dark I lingered in the ruins, pacing through the complex in the dusk and wondering at the oddness of the world John Moschos inhabited: sophisticated enough to build this astonishing classical basilica, yet innocent enough to believe that these strange, ragged men shrieking from their pillars were able to pull aside the heavy curtain of the flesh and gaze directly on God. Standing on their pillars, they were believed to be bright beacons of transcendence, visible from afar; indeed in some cases we hear of disciples claiming to be unable to bear the effulgence of the holy man’s face, so bright had it become with the uncreated light of the divine.
The Byzantines looked on these stylites as intermediaries, go-betweens who could transmit their deepest fears and aspirations to the distant court of Heaven, ordinary men from ordinary backgrounds who had, by dint of their heroic asceticism, gained the ear of Christ. For this reason Byzantine holy men and stylites became the focus for the most profound yearnings of half of Christendom. They were men who were thought to have crossed the boundary of reality and gained direct access to the divine. It is easy to dismiss the eccentricities of Byzantine hermits as little more than bizarre circus acts, but to do so is to miss the point that man’s deepest hopes and convictions are often quite inexplicable in narrow terms of logic or reason. At the base of a stylite’s pillar one is confronted with the awkward truth that what has most moved past generations can today sometimes be only tentatively glimpsed with the eye of faith, while remaining quite inexplicable and absurd when seen under the harsh distorting microscope of sceptical Western rationality.
Back in Antioch, the incipient storm had not yet broken and a stuffy afternoon had turned into a heavy and swelteringly hot night. In the backstreets, many families had settled themselves outside, laying straw mats and old kilims out on the pavements. Grandmothers sat on stools at the back, knitting; women in head-scarves brought out steaming pilaffs to their cross-legged husbands. The richer families sat in a semi-circle in front of televisions, often placed on the bonnet of a conveniently parked car. The noise of televised gunshots and the murmur of Turkish soap operas mingled with the whirr of cicadas.
I got Ismail to drop me off, and wandered in the dark through the narrow streets, under the projecting wooden balconies of the old houses and the vine trellising of the bazaars. Down alleys, through arched doorways, you could catch glimpses of the hidden life of the courtyard houses: brief impressions of bent old ladies flitting from kitchen to zenana; old men in flat caps gossiping under palms, sticks in their hands.
After nearly an hour I found a café with a marble Ottoman fountain, and there I washed off the dust of the afternoon and settled down to drink a glass of raki. From inside came the acrid smell of Turkish tobacco and the sharp clack of backgammon. Gnarled old men with moustachless Islamic beards pushed barrows of figs and pomegranates along the cobbles. Flights of dark-skinned teenagers kicked balls amid the uncollected rubbish of unlit alleyways; smaller children pulled toys made of old crates, with wheels cannibalised from long-rusted prams or bikes. Through the dark, from another part of town, came the thump of drums from an unseen circumcision ceremony.
Later, walking back to the hotel, I took a wrong turning and stumbled by accident across the Greek Orthodox church. It was a substantial eighteenth-century building, Italianate and flat-fronted, with a small belfry facing onto the courtyard. The whole complex lay hidden by a discreetly narrow arch, and was guarded by an old Turk in a pair of baggy shalwar trousers.
The priest was away in Istanbul, but from the doorkeeper I learned that the Christian community now numbered only two hundred families. In his lifetime, he said, as many as fifteen thousand Christians had left the town for new lives in Syria, Brazil, Germany and Australia. As with the Istanbul Greeks, it was just the poor and the old who were left. If I wanted to know more, he suggested, I should try to find the Italian Catholic priest who had recently come to live in the town; he didn’t know the address, but had heard it was somewhere nearby in the old Jewish quarter.
It was not difficult to find him. Everyone seemed to know about the Italian. Fr. Domenico turned out to be a missionary friar from Modena. He was a tall, thin man with a lined, ascetic face and a distant, rather disconcerting gaze. He lived on his own and was finishing his supper when I interrupted him.
He had been in Turkey for twenty-five years, he said, and now thought of it as home, although each year he still crossed the Mediterranean to spend a fortnight with his elderly parents.
Like the gatekeeper at the Orthodox church, Fr. Domenico was gloomy about the future of Christianity in the city. ‘Antioch was one of the first centres of the Early Church,’ he said. ‘St Peter and Paul both preached here. According to the Acts of the Apostles it was in Antioch that the disciples were first called Christian. But now there are barely two hundred Christian families left.’
‘What will happen to them?’ I asked.
‘They are better off than the Greeks in Istanbul,’ said Fr. Domenico. ‘They are too few to be a threat. The Turks do not mistreat them. But the community will die out. The young are still emigrating, mainly to Brazil. Christians may have been here since the time of the Apostles, but I doubt whether there will be any here at all in twenty years’ time.’
I asked what the Antioch imams thought of his activities in their town.
‘When I first arrived they came to see me and asked, “What do you believe in?” So I showed them some books in Turkish. One was a hymn book which contained the words “Jesus Son of God”. They were scandalised, and half of them left then and there muttering about blasphemy. But two or three imams stayed on for tea and we discussed theology. They accused me of using the wrong gospels and said that only the Gospel of Barnabas was true.’
‘The Gospel of Barnabas?’
‘It’s an apocryphal late-medieval gospel written by a Christian who converted to Islam. The Muslims like it because it says Jesus is a good man and a prophet but not the son of God. I told them that the Gospel of Barnabas was medieval and that its author obviously knew nothing, because he describes Jesus going up to Jerusalem by boat. We argued all day. Since then I’ve had no real trouble.’
I asked whether he had converted anyone in all the time he had been in the country. He shook his head. ‘Not one,’ he said, smiling. ‘There are only ten Catholic families here, all Maronites who came from Lebanon in the last century. But in the mountains there are many Armenians who have pretended to be Muslims ever since the massacres of 1915. Sometimes they come and get baptised by me, even though I am a Catholic. On their papers they say they are Muslim, but they know – and I know – the real situation.’
As I was leaving I asked Fr. Domenico whether he was lonely living on his own in a foreign country, a representative of what was now thought of as a foreign faith. He shrugged: ‘What is loneliness?’ he said.
The Buyuk Antakya Oteli is a remarkable example of the provincial Turkish talent for spending large sums of money building a very good hotel, then, in a matter of months, letting it decay into a morass of broken gadgets, leaking geysers and fraying electrics. There are no bulbs in the light sockets, no ballcocks in the lavatories, no water in the taps, no handles on many of the doors.
On returning from Fr. Domenico’s, I found a trail of red ants leading into my room, and a small rivulet of water from the flooded cistern snaking out of it in the opposite direction. The red plastic telephone was dead but the cockroach in the defunct shower unit was not. Worst of all, the air conditioner was bellowing hot muggy air into the room with a noise like a marching band. I went back down to Reception to try to get it fixed, and while standing around waiting for help I noticed an envelope in my pigeonhole.
It was from the manager, and contained two bits of bad news. The first was a brief note answering my query about the different ways of getting to the next stop on the way to the Tur Abdin: Urfa, the ancient Edessa. It appeared there was no train and only one bus service: inevitably it left late in the evening and arrived in the early hours of the morning – another night-bus journey. The second item was more ominous. It was a cutting from the English-language Turkish Daily News and concerned a PKK raid on a village near Midyat, the principal town of the Tur Abdin. There had been a firefight; two village guards had been killed and five others taken hostage by the Kurdish guerrillas and spirited away to the mountains.
I got out my map and searched for the village. It lay only a couple of miles from the monastery of Mar Gabriel, where I hope to spend much of next week.
HOTEL TURBAN, URFA, 12 AUGUST
The night bus dropped me off at a roundabout on the outskirts of Urfa at 3.00 a.m., and drove off into the night. Disorientated with sleep, it took a few minutes for it to sink in that I was alone, standing in the dark, at a considerable distance from the centre of town. Cursing the weight of the books in my baggage, I wandered through the deserted and dimly lit streets searching for a hotel.
Forty minutes later I arrived outside the Hotel Turban, and rattled like a madman on the door. After a while the owner appeared in his pyjamas. He seemed understandably surprised to see me standing there at four in the morning, hammering on his front door and howling to be admitted. For several minutes he peered warily through the glass, before his curiosity finally got the better of him and he let me in. I filled in a flutter of registration forms, and was admitted to a dingy room lit by a single, naked lightbulb. The room was filthy and contained only a plastic chair and a metal bedstead. But I was long past caring and immediately fell asleep on the bed, fully clothed.
I was woken by the light from the open window six hours later. It was not yet mid-morning, but already it was very hot. Outside, I could hear the tap-tapping of copper engravers at work in the bazaar outside. I shaved in a grimy basin at the top of the stairs, then went out into the glare.
Urfa was a proper Silk Route bazaar-town, straight out of the Arabian Nights: a warren of covered alleys loud with a Babel of different tongues – Arabic, Persian, Kurdish, Turoyo, Turkish. Everywhere the air was heavy with thick clouds of kebab-smoke and the smell of grilling meat. Through the shadows, lit intermittently by shafts of sunlight breaking through the skylights, passed a surging crowd of wild, tribal-looking men: lean, hawk-eyed, hard-mouthed Kurdish refugees from Iraq in their baggy pantaloons and cummerbunds; sallow Persian pilgrims from Isfahan in flapping black robes; weatherbeaten Yürük nomads from the mountains above Urfa; stocky Syrian Arabs in full jellaba and keffiyeh. Herds of fat-tailed sheep wobbled through the medieval arcades. Outside a tea house a party of nomad women, all dressed in different shades of purple calico, were sitting around a silver tray covered with white saucers full of oily vegetable delicacies. Their heads were shrouded under swathes of elaborate turban wraps, but their faces were uncovered and their cheeks were tattooed with crosses and swastika designs. Behind them a cauldron of pilaff steamed on a fire.
Urfa has always been a frontier town, filled with an explosive mix of different nationalities. At the time of John Moschos it lay on the most sensitive frontier in the world, separating the two great powers of late antiquity: Persia and Byzantium. As one of only two legal crossing points from East to West, Edessa – and especially the members of its large merchant class – grew plump on the trade which passed between the pair of hostile empires. From Byzantium the Persians bought gold and manuscript vellum; from Persia the Byzantines purchased Indian spices, Chinese silk and, above all, dark-skinned Asian slave girls. The Imperial treasury became rich from the customs duties – 12.5 per cent – levied on this merchandise, and checks at the border were rigorous. When Apollonius of Tyana, a pagan sage and wonder-worker, returned from a missionary journey to India and the East, he was asked by the Imperial customs officer what he had to declare, and replied: ‘Temperance, virtue, justice, chastity, fortitude and industry.’ The customs officer had heard all this before. ‘Where have you hidden the girls?’ he demanded.
Merchants were not the only people to cross the divide. Edessa was one of the great Byzantine university towns, and the scholars it attracted from Persia and beyond led to a rich cross-fertilisation of ideas in its lecture halls. There was a marked influence of Persian and Indian ideas on Edessa’s theology, and its theological school became notorious for the dangerous heterodoxy of its teachings. In this cosmopolitan environment the city’s most notorious heretic, Bardaisan of Edessa, was able to write an accurate account of the dietary regimes of Hindu priests and Buddhist monks, while Indian stories and legends came to be written down in unexpected new Christian incarnations: it may have been through Edessa that the Life of the Buddha passed into Byzantine (and ultimately Western) monastic libraries.
It was not a one-way traffic. There was a School of the Persians in Edessa, and in the sixth century no fewer than three Patriarchs of the Persian-based Nestorian Church were recorded as having spent much of their youth in Edessa studying Greek medicine and philosophy. Built as it was on the philosophical faultline that ran between the Eastern and Western worlds, Edessa became a great crucible fizzing with strange heresies and exotic Gnostic doctrines. One sect, the Elchasiates, believed that two gigantic angels had appeared to their founder, Elchasaios, and told him that Christ was reincarnated century after century, and that each time he was born of a virgin. The angels also instructed Elchasaios that his followers should venerate water as the source of life, and passed on a mystic formula to be used whenever members of the cult were bitten by a mad dog or a snake. To add to the richness of the mix, the Elchasiates observed the ancient Jewish Mosaic laws, circumcising their male children and scrupulously keeping the Sabbath, as well as holding out against new-fangled innovations to the New Testament such as the Letters of St Paul.
More unorthodox still were the Marcionites, who took a rather different attitude to Judaism: they believed that the stern Jehovah of the Old Testament was different from – and indeed was the enemy of – the true, kind, creator-God of the New Testament. If this was so, then, logically, the heroes of the Old Testament were actually villains: all over Edessa Marcionite churches rang with praise of Cain, the Sodomites, Nebuchadnezzar and, above all, the Serpent of the Garden of Eden.
In contrast, the Messalians, bitter enemies of the Marcionites, looked on the Cross as the object of their loathing, and refused to revere Mary as the mother of God. They strongly believed that it was possible to exorcise demons through prayer: if you prayed hard enough, they maintained, the demon would exit from the nose as mucus, or from the mouth as saliva. Once this had happened and the believer had achieved union with the Holy Spirit, he could henceforth do whatever he liked: no amount of sin and debauchery could harm his soul, as it was already part of God. A breakaway group from the Marcionites, the Carpocratians, took this view to an extreme: they maintained that to achieve true freedom the believer must scrupulously ignore the distinction between what is good and what is evil.
Straitlaced clerical visitors to Edessa were horrified to discover that Orthodoxy – true Christianity as understood elsewhere in the Christian world – was regarded by many in Edessa as only one among a considerable number of options available to the inquiring believer, and that the teachings of all these different sects tended to be regarded as equally valid. As in the very early Church of the first century, doctrine was still in a state of continual flux, and no one interpretation of the Christian message and no single set of gospels had yet achieved dominance over any others. Indeed in Edessa in the sixth century the Orthodox were known merely as Palutians, after a beleaguered former bishop of the town. Visitors were appalled: if it were possible to understand Christianity in so many radically different ways in one town, what would happen if these heretical tendencies were to spread across the Empire?
