From the Holy Mountain
A JOURNEY
IN THE SHADOW OF
BYZANTIUM

WILLIAM DALRYMPLE

Copyright

Harper Press

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Previously published in paperback by Flamingo 1998

Reprinted eleven times

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 1997

Copyright © William Hamilton-Dalrymple 1997

The Author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780006547747

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Praise

From the reviews of From the Holy Mountain:

‘From the Holy Mountain is a further landmark in a writing career unblemished by failure and enlightened by an erudition worn as lightly as a cloak. Dalrymple’s lucidity and learning are woven into a writing style which is never pompous or smug … This is a brave book, intellectually, spiritually and physically. In a missive which brims with intelligence and a voracious appetite for knowledge, Dalrymple paints wonderful sketches of a twentieth-century landscape bedevilled by the conflicts of the past … a book which provokes thought as often as it entertains and beguiles’

HUGH MACDONALD, Glasgow Herald

‘A delightful tale … this book brings pleasure back to reading history and travel’

CHARLES GLASS, Sunday Express

‘William Dalrymple has effortlessly assumed the mantle of Robert Byron and Patrick Leigh Fermor … From the Holy Mountain is destined to be this year’s big book … an impressive achievement’

LUCRETIA STEWART, Guardian Books of the Year

‘In his third book William Dalrymple has dug deep to present the case of the Middle East’s downtrodden Christians. More hard-hitting than either of his previous books, From the Holy Mountain is driven by indignation. While leavened with his characteristic jauntiness and humour, it is also profoundly shocking. Time and time again in the details of Dalrymple’s discoveries I found myself asking: why do we not know this? The sense of unsung tragedy accumulates throughout the chapters of this book … From the Holy Mountain is the most rewarding sort of travel book, combining flashes of lightly-worn scholarship with a powerful sense of place and the immediacy of the best journalism. But more than that it is a passionate cri de coeur for a forgotten people which few readers will be able to resist’

PHILIP MARSDEN, Spectator

‘Dalrymple brings the past alive wonderfully and is a brilliant communicator. If In Xanadu was reminiscent of early Evelyn Waugh or the devil-may-care Peter Fleming, From the Holy Mountain evokes Robert Byron and Bruce Chatwin. It is a more poetic and disturbing book and all the better for that. It marks the maturing of a very fine writer’

ALEX FORSYTH, Scotland on Sunday

‘William Dalrymple has earned a rapid reputation as a brilliant young travel writer and From the Holy Mountain is a splendid, effective and impressive book’

J.D.F. JONES, Financial Times

‘Since his magnificent In Xanadu, William Dalrymple has been generally acclaimed as one of our best contemporary travel writers. In From the Holy Mountain he travels the Silk Route of ancient Byzantium through the present-day Middle East tracing the AD 578 journey of John Moschos, the great Byzantine monk, traveller and oral historian avant la lettre. His aim is to uncover the human archaeology of Eastern Christianity. It is realised in meditative, sensuous prose’

Independent on Sunday

‘Utterly compelling: a meaty, intriguing volume and a worthy successor to In Xanadu and City of Djinns’

TOM FORT, Financial Times Books of the Year

‘A huge, breathtaking book about a colossal journey. The writing is by turns learned and lyrical … a magnificent achievement’

Publishing News

‘Any travel writer who is so good at his job as to be brilliant, applauded, loved and needed has to have an unusual list of qualities, and William Dalrymple has them all in aces. The most important is curiosity and the intrepidity it generates. Then there has to be the feeling that there never has been such a book as this, and never will be again. He must be enough of a scholar, and it helps if his jokes are really funny, and if he discovers something and goes to unexpected places. Dalrymple scores high on all these points. He knows more than Robert Byron, is less of a mythomane than Bruce Chatwin and not so dotty as Robert Fisk. He does not go slumming or patronise, but his ear for conversation – or can it be his talent for impersonation? – is as good as Alan Bennett’s. The book is a good, long read, like the works of Gibbon … The best and most unexpected book I have read since I forget when’

PETER LEVI, The Oldie

‘Terrorists, devil-worshippers, nights spent in monastery cells … Dalrymple didn’t have to search out troubles during his intrepid, five-month trek through the Levant. His mentor and guide for the journey was John Moschos, a monk who travelled the same route in the sixth century AD and described the final flourish of Eastern Christianity. Dalrymple now bears witness to the almost-defunct Christian monasteries and sects of the Middle East, while also managing to recreate the world Moschos knew. It’s a wonderfully evocative book’

HARRY RITCHIE, Mail on Sunday

‘Because he has the interests and enthusiasms of a scholar Dalrymple, with his magnificent zest, inspires the reader. We relish the tense air of south-east Turkey, the threat of Lebanon, the menace of Upper Egypt; and so does Dalrymple, at least in the vigorous telling of it. Massacres without number, enforced migrations, local wars: the effect of these events on human beings is burned into the pages of this excellent book. Yet Dalrymple is a delightful companion for the reader: a sunny equanimity shines around him. The self-portrait which emerges from these pages shows us a Renaissance head, not swollen but large with knowledge, painted like that of the Duke of Urbino by Piero della Francesca, in profile, against a library window through which may be discerned the delectable landscape of adventure’

PHILIP GLAZEBROOK, Literary Review

‘His biggest book yet: a large, scholarly, funny, meandering and passionate tome … Dalrymple’s enthusiasm is infectious, and his gentle osmotic supply of theological and historical background to Byzantine culture means that by the end any reader feels half expert’

NIGEL SPIVEY, Business Weekly

‘From the Holy Mountain is a remarkable travel book, beautifully written, alive to the politics of the day, and informed on the history and theology of the region’

ADAM FORD, Church Times

‘Neither the panache of William Dalrymple, nor the allure of the places he describes – Mount Athos, Damascus, the Egyptian desert – are what makes From the Holy Mountain so compelling. Its secret is the sense of history derived from the author’s decision to base his journey on The Spiritual Meadow, a guide to the monasteries and holy men of the eastern Roman Empire, written in the sixth century by the monk John Moschos. Following in his tracks, often to the same churches, the author travels through the Levant, listening to the prayers and fears of the region’s Christians … Dalrymple describes his encounters with monks and murderers with a combination of humour and scholarship’

PHILIP MANSEL, Country Life

‘An eloquent, poignant and courageous account of a journey that pits the idealism of the past against the hatred, dispossession and denial of the present’

KAREN ARMSTRONG

‘Fascinating, compelling and deeply moving’

WILLIAM BARLOW, Catholic Herald

‘Memorable … William Dalrymple’s raw and direct approach is something new, and despite its author’s eye for humour and irony, Dalrymple’s West Asian travelogue is harder, bleaker and expressed with an equality of spirit absent from the accounts of typical English romantics. As a result, From the Holy Mountain makes a profound impression’

CHRISTOPHER WALKER, Times Literary Supplement

‘An assured blend of travelogue and history … Dalrymple is a born travel writer, with a nose for adventure and a reporter’s healthy scepticism. His quirky, exhilarating mosaic will appeal to readers of all faiths’

Publishers Weekly

‘Outstanding … To be a good writer takes courage. To be a good travel writer may take more. Dalrymple is a good writer in an absolutely unpretentious way. The trouble with many good modern minds is that they ignore the past. Dalrymple does not, and by telling us of the past as it is enveloped by the present he is also telling of the future. He is not a prophet, simply one of the very few good, honest writers left’

DOM MORAES, Outlook

Dedication

For my parents with love and gratitude

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Praise

Dedication

I.

THE MONASTERY OF IVIRON, MOUNT ATHOS, GREECE 29 JUNE 1994. THE FEAST OF SS. PETER AND PAUL

II.

PERA PALAS HOTEL, ISTANBUL, TURKEY, 10 JULY 1994

III.

THE BARON HOTEL, ALEPPO, SYRIA, 28 AUGUST 1994

IV.

HOTEL CAVALIER, BEIRUT, LEBANON, 23 SEPTEMBER 1994

V.

THE MONASTERY OF MAR SABA, ISRAELI-OCCUPIED WEST BANK, 24 OCTOBER 1994

VI.

HOTEL METROPOLE, ALEXANDRIA, EGYPT, 1 DECEMBER 1994

KEEP READING

GLOSSARY

BIBLIOGRAPHY OF PRINCIPAL SOURCES

INDEX

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

About the Author

Also by William Dalrymple

About the Publisher

I

THE MONASTERY OF IVIRON, MOUNT ATHOS, GREECE 29 JUNE 1994. THE FEAST OF SS. PETER AND PAUL

My cell is bare and austere. It has white walls and a flagstone floor. Only two pieces of furniture break the severity of its emptiness: in one corner stands an olive-wood writing desk, in the other an iron bedstead. The latter is covered with a single white sheet, starched as stiff as a nun’s wimple.

Through the open window I can see a line of black habits: the monks at work in the vegetable garden, a monastic chain-gang hoeing the cabbage patch before the sun sets and the wooden simandron calls them in for compline. Beyond the garden is a vineyard, silhouetted against the bleak black pyramid of the Holy Mountain.

All is quiet now but for the distant breaking of surf on the jetty and the faint echo and clatter of metal plates in the monastery kitchens. The silence and solemnity of the place is hardly designed to raise the spirits, but you could hardly find a better place to order your mind. There are no distractions, and the monastic silence imposes its own brittle clarity.

It’s now nine o’clock. The time has finally come to concentrate my thoughts: to write down, as simply as I can, what has brought me here, what I have seen, and what I hope to achieve in the next few months.

My reference books are laid out in a line on the floor; the pads containing my library notes are open. Files full of photocopied articles lie piled up below the window; my pencils are sharpened and upended in a glass. A matchbox lies ready beside the paraffin storm lantern: the monastery generator is turned off after compline, and if am to write tonight I will have to do so by the light of its yellow flame.

Open on the desk is my paperback translation of The Spiritual Meadow of John Moschos, the unlikely little book which first brought me to this monastery, and the original manuscript of which I saw for the first time less than one hour ago. God willing, John Moschos will lead me on, eastwards to Constantinople and Anatolia, then southwards to the Nile and thence, if it is still possible, to the Great Kharga Oasis, once the southern frontier of Byzantium.

This morning, six days after leaving the damp of a dreich Scottish June, I caught ship from Ouranoupolis, the Gate of Heaven, down the peninsula to the Holy Mountain.

We passed a monastic fishing boat surrounded by a halo of seagulls. Opposite me, three large monks in ballooning cassocks sat sipping cappuccinos under an icon of the Virgin; over their grey moustaches there rested a light foam of frothed milk. Behind them, through the porthole, you could see the first of the great Athonite monasteries rising up from sandy bays to crown the foothills of the mountain. They are huge complexes of buildings, great ash-coloured fortresses the size of small Italian hill-towns, with timber-laced balconies hanging below domed cupolas and massive, unwieldy medieval buttresses.

The first monastic foundation on Athos was established in the ninth century by St Euthymius of Salonica who, having renounced the world at the age of eighteen, took to moving around on all fours and eating grass; he later became a stylite, and took to berating his brethren from atop a pillar. Some two hundred years later – by which time St Euthymius’s fame had led to many other monasteries and sketes springing up around the saint’s original foundation – it came to the ears of the Byzantine Emperor that the monks were in the habit of debauching the daughters of the shepherds who came to the mountain to sell milk and wool. Thereafter it was decreed that nothing female – no woman, no cow, no mare, no bitch – could step within its limits.

Today this rule is relaxed only for cats, and in the Middle Ages even a pair of Byzantine Empresses were said to have been turned away from the Holy Mountain by the Mother of God herself. But 140 years ago, in 1857, the Virgin was sufficiently flexible to allow one of my Victorian great-aunts, Virginia Somers, to spend two months in a tent on Mount Athos, along with her husband and the louche Pre-Raphaelite artist Coutts Lindsay. A letter Virginia wrote on her visit still survives, in which she describes how the monks had taken her over the monastery gardens and insisted on giving her fruit from every tree as they passed; she said she tasted pomegranate, citron and peach. It is the only recorded instance of a woman being allowed onto the mountain in the millennium-long history of Athos, and is certainly the only record of what appears to have been a most unholy Athonite ménage-à-trois.

This unique lapse apart, the Holy Mountain is still a self-governing monastic republic dedicated to prayer, chastity and pure, untarnished Orthodoxy. At the Council of Florence in 1439 it was Athonite monks who refused to let the Catholic and Orthodox Churches unite in return for Western military help against the Turk; as a result Constantinople fell to the Ottomans within two decades, but Orthodoxy survived doctrinally intact. That deep pride in Orthodoxy combined with a profound suspicion of all other creeds remains the defining ideology of Athos today.

I disembarked at Daphne, caught the old bus to the monastic capital at Karyes, then walked slowly down the ancient foot-polished cobbles, through knee-high sage and clouds of yellow butterflies, to the lavra* of Iviron.

The monks had just finished vespers. As it was a lovely balmy evening, many were standing around the courtyard enjoying the shade of the cypresses next to the katholikon. Fr. Yacovos, the guestmaster, was sitting on the steps of the domed Ottoman fountain, listening to the water dripping from the spout into the bowl. He stood up when he saw me enter the courtyard.

‘Welcome,’ he said. ‘We’ve been expecting you.’

Yacovos was a garrulous, thick-set, low-slung monk, bearded like a brigand. On his head, tilted at a jaunty angle, sat a knitted black bonnet. He took my bags and led me to the guest room, where he poured a glass of ouzo and offered me a bowl full of rose-scented loukoumi. As he did so, he chattered happily about his life in the merchant navy. He had visited Aberdeen on a Cypriot ship in the winter of 1959, he said, and had never forgotten the fog and the bitter cold. I asked where I could find the librarian, Fr. Christophoros. It had been Fr. Christophoros’s letter – surmounted by the great Imperial crest, the double-headed eagle of Byzantium – that had originally lured me to Athos. The manuscript I was looking for was in Iviron’s monastic library, he had said. Yes, it had survived, and he would try to get the Abbot’s permission for me to see it.

‘Christophoros will be down at the Arsenal at this time,’ said Fr. Yacovos, looking at his fob watch, ‘feeding his cats.’

I found the old man standing on the jetty, holding a bucket full of fishtails. A pair of enormous black spectacles perched precariously on his nose. Around him swirled two dozen cats.

‘Come, Justinian,’ called Fr. Christophoros. ‘Come now, Chrysostom, wisswisswisswiss … Come on, my darlings, ela, come …’

I walked up and introduced myself.

‘We thought you were coming last week,’ replied the monk, a little gruffly.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I had trouble getting a permit in Thessaloniki.’

The cats continued to swirl flirtatiously around Christophoros’s ankles, hissing at each other and snatching at the scattered fins.

‘Have you managed to have a word with the Abbot about my seeing the manuscript?’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Christophoros. ‘The Abbot’s away in Constantinople. He’s in council with the Ecumenical Patriarch. But you’re welcome to stay here until he returns.’

‘When will that be?’

‘He should be back by the Feast of the Transfiguration.’

‘But that’s – what? – over a fortnight away.’

‘Patience is a great monastic virtue,’ said Christophoros, nodding philosophically at Kallistos, a rather scraggy, bow-legged old tom-cat who had so far failed to catch a single fishtail.

‘My permit runs out the day after tomorrow,’ I said. ‘They only gave me a three-day diamonitirion. I have to leave by the morning boat.’ I looked at the old monk. ‘Please – I’ve come all the way just to see this book.’

‘I’m afraid the Abbot insists that he must first question anyone who …’

‘Is there nothing you could do?’

The old man pulled tentatively at his beard. ‘I shouldn’t do this,’ he said. ‘And anyway, the lights aren’t working in the library.’

‘There are some lamps in the guest room,’ I suggested.

He paused for a second, indecisive. Then he relented: ‘Go quickly,’ he said. ‘Ask Fr. Yacovos: see if he’ll lend you the lanterns.’

I thanked Christophoros and started walking briskly back towards the monastery before he could change his mind.

‘And don’t let Yacovos start telling you his life story,’ he called after me, ‘or you’ll never get to see this manuscript.’

At eight o’clock, I met Fr. Christophoros outside the katholikon. It was dusk now; the sun had already set over the Holy Mountain. In my hands I held the storm lantern from my room. We walked across the courtyard to the monastic library, and from his habit Fr. Christophoros produced a ring of keys as huge as those of a medieval jailer. He began to turn the largest of the keys in the topmost of the four locks.

‘We have to keep everything well locked these days,’ said Christophoros in explanation. ‘Three years ago, in the middle of winter, some raiders turned up in motorboats at the Great Lavra. They had Sten guns and were assisted by an ex-novice who had been thrown out by the Abbot. They got into the library and stole many of the most ancient manuscripts; they also took some gold reliquaries that were locked in the sanctuary.’

‘Were they caught?’

‘The monks managed to raise the alarm and they were arrested the following morning as they tried to get across the Bulgarian frontier. But by then they had done much damage: cut up the reliquaries into small pieces and removed the best illuminations from the manuscripts. Some of the pages have never been recovered.’

Three locks had now opened without problem; and eventually, with a loud creak, the fourth gave way too. The old library doors swung open, and with the lamps held aloft, we stepped inside.

Within, it was pitch dark; a strong odour of old buckram and rotting vellum filled the air. Manuscripts lay open in low cabinets, the gold leaf of illuminated letters and gilt haloes from illustrations of saints’ Lives shining out in the light of the lantern. In the gloom on the far wall I could just see a framed Ottoman firman, the curving gilt of the Sultan’s monogram clearly visible above the lines of calligraphy. Next to it, like a discarded suit jacket, hung a magnificent but rather crumpled silk coat. Confronted dragons and phoenixes were emblazoned down the side of either lapel.

‘What is that?’ I whispered.

‘It’s John Tzimiskes’s coat.’

‘The Emperor John Tzimiskes? But he lived in the tenth century.’

Christophoros shrugged his shoulders.

‘You can’t just leave something like that hanging up there,’ I said.

‘Well,’ said Christophoros irritably, ‘where else would you put it?’

In the gloom, we found our way past rank after rank of shelves groaning with leather-bound Byzantine manuscripts, before drawing to a halt in front of a cabinet in the far corner of the room. Christophoros unlocked and opened the glass covering. Codex G.9 was on the bottom shelf, wrapped up in a white canvas satchel.

It was a huge volume, as heavy as a crate of wine, and I staggered over to a reading desk with it, while Christophoros followed with the lamp.

‘Forgive me,’ he said, as I lowered the volume gently onto the desk, ‘but are you Orthodox or heretic?’

I considered for a second before answering. A Catholic friend who had visited Athos a few years previously had warned me above all never to admit to being a Catholic; he had made this mistake, and said that had he admitted to suffering from leprosy or tertiary syphilis he could not have been more resolutely shunned than he had been after that. He told me that in my case it was particularly important not to raise the monks’ suspicions, as they have learned to distrust, above all their visitors, those who ask to see their manuscripts. They have long memories on Athos, and if the monks have never forgiven the Papacy for authorising the ransacking of Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade over eight hundred years ago, they have certainly not forgotten the nineteenth-century bibliophiles who decimated the libraries of Athos only a century ago.

The English traveller the Hon. Robert Curzon is still considered one of the worst offenders: after a quick circuit around the monastic libraries of Athos in the late 1840s (in the company, I am ashamed to say, of my great-great-uncle), Curzon left the Holy Mountain with his trunks bulging with illuminated manuscripts and Byzantine chrysobuls; in his travel book Visits to Monasteries in the Levant he writes of buying the priceless manuscripts from the Abbot by weight, as if they were figs or pomegranates in an Ottoman market. Worse still is the memory of the German bibliophile Herman Tischendorff. Some twenty years after Curzon’s trip to Athos, Tischendorff left the Greek Orthodox Monastery of St Catherine’s in Sinai with the Codex Sinaiaticus – still the earliest existing copy of the New Testament – tucked into his camel bags. Tischendorff later claimed that he found the various leaves of the manuscript in a basket of firewood, and that he had saved it from the monks, who were intent on burning it to keep them warm in winter. The monks, however, maintain to this day that Tischendorff got the librarian drunk and discreetly swapped the priceless manuscript – which, like Curzon’s plunder, duly found its way into the British Library – for a bottle of good German schnapps.

Noticing my silence, Christophoros asked again: What was I, Orthodox or heretic?

‘I’m a Catholic,’ I replied.

‘My God,’ said the monk. ‘I’m so sorry.’ He shook his head in solicitude. ‘To be honest with you,’ he said, ‘the Abbot never gives permission for non-Orthodox to look at our holy books. Particularly Catholics. The Abbot thinks the present Pope is the Antichrist and that his mother is the Whore of Babylon. He says that they are now bringing about the Last Days spoken of by St John in the Book of Revelation.’

Christophoros murmured a prayer. ‘Please,’ he said, ‘don’t ever tell anyone in the monastery that you’re a heretic. If the Abbot ever found out, I’d be made to perform a thousand prostrations.’

‘I won’t tell a soul.’

Christophoros relaxed slightly, and took off his glasses to polish them on the front of his habit. ‘You know, we actually had another Catholic in the monastery earlier this year?’ he said.

‘Who was that?’ I asked.

‘He was a choirmaster from Bavaria,’ said Christophorus. ‘He had a beautiful voice.’

I eased the book up onto a reading stand, and began to unbutton its canvas cover.

‘He said our church had wonderful acoustics,’ continued Christophoros, arranging the lamps on the desk. ‘So he asked Fr. Yacovos if he could sing a Gloria inside the katholikon, under the dome.’

‘What did Fr. Yacovos say?’

‘He said that he didn’t think he could let a heretic pray inside the church. But just this once he said he would let him sing a little alleluia in the porch.’

I had now got the protective canvas off, and the beautifully worked leather binding gleamed golden in the light of the lantern.

I opened the cover. Inside, the text was written in purple ink on the finest vellum – strong, supple and waxy, but so thin as to be virtually translucent. The calligraphy was a beautifully clear and cursive form of early medieval Georgian. According to the library’s detailed catalogue, the volume had bound together a number of different early Byzantine devotional texts. The first folio I opened was apparently a shrill sermon by St Jerome, denouncing what he considered the thoroughly pagan practice of taking baths: ‘He who has bathed in Christ,’ fumed the saint, ‘does not need a second bath.’

Only towards the end, on folio 287 verso, did I come to the opening lines of the text I had come so far to see. Its author was the great Byzantine traveller-monk John Moschos, and the book had been compiled at the end of his life as he prepared for death in a monastery in Constantinople, 1,300 years ago.

‘In my opinion, the meadows in Spring present a particularly delightful prospect,’ he wrote. ‘One part of this meadow blushes with roses; in other places lilies predominate; in another violets blaze out, resembling the Imperial purple. Think of this present work in the same way, Sophronius, my sacred and faithful child. For from among the holy men, monks and hermits of the Empire, I have plucked the finest flowers of the unmown meadow and worked them into a crown which I now offer to you, most faithful child; and through you to the world at large …’

Turning up the lamp, I opened a fresh page.

In the spring of the year 578 A. D., had you been sitting on a bluff of rock overlooking Bethlehem, you might have been able to see two figures setting off, staves in hand, from the gates of the great desert monastery of St Theodosius. The two – an old grey-bearded monk accompanied by an upright, perhaps slightly stern, and certainly much younger companion – would have headed off south-west through the wastes of Judaea, towards the fabulously rich port-metropolis of Alexandria.

It was the start of an extraordinary journey that would take John Moschos and his pupil, Sophronius the Sophist, in an arc across the entire Eastern Byzantine world. Their aim was to collect the wisdom of the desert fathers, the sages and mystics of the Byzantine East, before their fragile world – already clearly in advanced decay – finally shattered and disappeared. The result was the volume in front of me now. If today in the West it is a fairly obscure text, a thousand years ago it was renowned as one of the most popular books in all the great literature of Byzantium.

Byzantine caravanserais were rough places, and the provincial Greek aristocracy did not enjoy entertaining: as the Byzantine writer Cecaumenus put it, ‘Houseparties are a mistake, for guests merely criticise your housekeeping and attempt to seduce your wife.’ So everywhere they went, the two travellers stayed in monasteries, caves and remote hermitages, dining frugally with the monks and ascetics. In each place, Moschos seems to have jotted down accounts that he had heard of the sayings of the fathers, and other anecdotes and miracle stories.

Moschos was taking to an extreme the old Orthodox tradition of the wandering monk. In the West, at least since St Benedict introduced the vow of stability in the early sixth century, monks have tended to be static, immured in their cells: as the saying went, ‘A monk out of his cell is like a fish out of water.’ But in the Eastern Churches, as in Hinduism and Buddhism, there has always been a tradition of monks being able to wander from guru to guru, from spiritual father to spiritual father, garnering the wisdom and advice of each, just as the Indian sadhus still do. Even today, modern Greek Orthodox monks take no vow of stability. If after a period of time in a monastery they decide they want to sit at the feet of another teacher in a different monastery, possibly in a completely different part of Greece (or indeed in Sinai or the Holy Land), then they are free to do so.

The Spiritual Meadow was a collection of the most memorable sayings, anecdotes and holy stories that Moschos gathered on his travels, and was written as part of a long tradition of such apophthegmata, or Sayings of the Fathers. However, Moschos’s writings are infinitely more evocative, graphic and humorous than those of any of his rivals or contemporaries, and almost alone of the surviving examples of the genre, they can still be read with genuine pleasure.

For as well as carrying a still potent spiritual message, on another level the book can be enjoyed today simply as a fascinating travel book. Moschos did what the modern travel writer still does: he wandered the world in search of strange stories and remarkable travellers’ tales. Indeed his book can legitimately be read as the great masterpiece of Byzantine travel writing. For not only was Moschos a vivid and amusing writer, he also had an extraordinary tale to tell.

Reading between the lines of John Moschos’s memoirs, it is clear that he and his friend were travelling in dangerous times. Following the collapse of Justinian’s great attempt at reviving the Empire, Byzantium was under assault: from the west by Avars, Slavs, Goths and Lombards; from the east by a crescendo of raids by desert nomads and the legions of Sassanian Persia. The great cities of the East Mediterranean were in fast decay: in Antioch, huts full of refugees were springing up in the middle of the wide Roman avenues which had once buzzed with trade and industry. The great Mediterranean ports – Tyre, Sidon, Beirut, Seleucia – were becoming idle; many were reverting to little more than fishing villages.

As the physical world fell into decay, thousands left their families, intent, like Moschos and Sophronius, on becoming monks and hermits in the desert. Yet even in the great monasteries there was no safety: frequently the two travellers arrived at a destination to find that the abbey where they intended to spend the night had been torched by raiders, and the monks massacred or led off in great stumbling caravans to the slave markets of Arabia. It was not a picture of total holocaust: in those isolated areas of the Empire unaffected by the Persian wars, the monastic scriptoria and workshops were hard at work producing some of the most beautiful Byzantine manuscripts, ivories and icons ever designed. But these oases of monastic calm were exceptions. John Moschos’s writings make clear the horrifying, almost apocalyptic, nature of the destruction he witnessed around him.

In 614 A.D. the travellers’ own home monastery of St Theodosius was burned to the ground by the marauding Persian army, and all their brethren – hundreds of unarmed monks were put to the sword. Shortly afterwards Jerusalem fell and those who survived the massacre – including the city’s Patriarch – were led off as slaves to the Sassanian capital of Ctesiphon. From then on John and Sophronius continued on the road as much refugees as travellers. They took shelter in Alexandria, and when the Persians massed outside the city walls, the pair managed to get onto the last galley out of the beleaguered city.

The following year, the two pilgrims finally reached the shelter of the great walls of Constantinople. There, just before exhaustion brought about his death, Moschos completed his travel memoirs. The Spiritual Meadow received an ecstatic reception across the Empire. Within a generation or two it had been translated into Latin, Georgian, Armenian, Arabic, and a variety of Slavonic languages; to this day many of its anecdotes are common currency among monks and peasants across the Orthodox world.

Most surviving Byzantine texts from the period have a curiously opaque quality: we read either of the flitting shadows of a hundred upstart emperors, rising suddenly through palace coups and disappearing equally rapidly via the assassin’s dagger; or else of saints so saintly as to be virtually beyond comprehension. Nor, for all its often hypnotic beauty, does the surviving corpus of Byzantine art much help in visualising the world that gave it birth. There are the great mosaics at Ravenna with their celebrated portraits of Justinian and Theodora accompanied by their retinues of eunuchs and admirals, generals and bishops, courtiers and sycophants; the same intrigue-ridden court familiar from the written sources. But away from these two isolated Ravenna panels, Byzantine art is strictly non-secular, strictly transcendent. Across the broken apses and shattered naves of a hundred ruined Byzantine churches, the same smooth, cold, neo-classical faces of the saints and apostles stare down like a gallery of deaf mutes; and through this thundering silence the everyday reality of life in the Byzantine provinces remains persistently difficult to visualise. The sacred and aristocratic nature of Byzantine art means that we have very little idea of what the early Byzantine peasant or shopkeeper looked like; we have even less idea of what he thought, what he longed for, what he loved or what he hated.

Yet through the pages of The Spiritual Meadow one can come closer to the ordinary Byzantine than is possible through virtually any other single source. Although it often seems a fairly bizarre book – an unlikely fricassee of anecdote, piety and strange miracles – as a historical text it adds up to the most rich and detailed portrait that survives of the Byzantine Levant immediately before the advent of Islam. Through its pages forgotten monasteries rise suddenly from the sand; even a great metropolis such as Byzantine Alexandria – from which not one building, indeed barely one wall, has survived – is brought back to life, peopled by credible characters, villains and eccentrics.

Most intriguing of all are the tales which tell of the more humble folk, the sort who normally slip through the net cast by the historian. One typical story tells of a muleteer from Rome whose donkeys trample and kill a small child at an inn. He takes ship to the Holy Land and flees to the desert, where he is overcome by remorse and tries to kill himself. Only when a lion refuses to savage him does he reconcile himself to the possibility of divine forgiveness. We meet a repentant Alexandrian grave-robber who claims he was seized by a corpse whose shroud he had tried to steal (he was not released until he promised to take up a more respectable profession); a novice who, overcome with desire, pays a visit to the brothel in Jericho (he is quickly struck down by leprosy); a merchant’s wife from Ascalon who is forced to prostitute herself after her husband’s ship goes down.

Some of the figures are oddly familiar. One story revolves around a Byzantine version of Fr. Christophoros, an animal-loving monk from a suburban monastery outside Alexandria who not only feeds the monastery’s dogs, but also gives flour to the ants and puts damp biscuits on the roof for the birds. Other characters are rather more exotic than anything you are likely to find today, such as the monk Adolas who ‘confined himself inside a hollow plane tree’ in Thessaloniki, cutting ‘a little window in the bark through which he could talk with people who came to see him’.

Moschos is an unpredictable narrator. He was a champion of Orthodoxy at a time when it was challenged by a dazzling variety of heterodox currents circulating through the caravan cities of the East, and Monophysites, Jews, Manicheans, Zoroastrians and Gnostics all receive short shrift from a man whose tolerance of the beliefs of others was clearly every bit as limited as that of his modern successors on Mount Athos. Yet there is also a carefree scholar-gypsy feel to The Spiritual Meadow, and an endearing lightness of touch and gentle sense of humour evident in its stories. One of my favourite tales concerns a novice from Antinoe in Upper Egypt ‘who was very careless with his own soul’. When the novice dies, his teacher is worried that he might have been sent to Hell for his sins, so he prays that it be revealed what has happened to his pupil’s soul. Eventually the teacher goes into a trance, and sees a river of fire with the novice submerged in it up to his neck. The teacher is horrified, but the novice turns to him, saying: ‘I thank God, oh my teacher, that there is relief for my head. Thanks to your prayers, I am standing on the head of a bishop.’

Of course to the modern eye much of the world described in The Spiritual Meadow is not just curious: its beliefs and values are so strange as to be virtually incomprehensible. It was a world where eunuchs led the imperial armies into battle; where groups of monks were known to lynch and murder pagan ladies as they passed in their litters through the fashionable bazaars of Alexandria; where ragged, half-naked stylites raved atop their pillars; and where dendrites took literally Christ’s instruction to imitate the birds of the air, living in trees and building little nests for themselves in the upper branches.

But what is perhaps most surprising about the Eastern Mediterranean as it emerges from the pages of Moschos is the fact that it is Christian at all. In the popular imagination, the Levant passes from a classical past to an Islamic present with hardly a break. It is easy to forget that for over three hundred years – from the age of Constantine in the early fourth century to the rise of Islam in the early seventh century – the Eastern Mediterranean world was almost entirely Christian. Indeed, at a time when Christianity had barely taken root in Britain, when Angles and Saxons were still sacrificing to Thor and Woden on the banks of the Thames and in the west the last Christian Britons were fighting a rearguard action under a leader who may have been called Arthur, the Levant was the heartland of Christianity and the centre of Christian civilisation. The monasteries of Byzantium were fortresses whose libraries and scriptoria preserved classical learning, philosophy and medicine against the encroaching hordes of raiders and nomads. Moreover, for all the decay, the Levant was still the richest, most populous and most highly educated part of the Mediterranean world: three quarters of the revenue of the Byzantine exchequer came from the eastern provinces. They contained the main centres of industry and within living memory their ships and caravans had conducted a hugely profitable trade with the Orient; even in the chaos of the late sixth century that trade had still not entirely disappeared. There was nothing in the West to compare with this high Eastern Byzantine culture. In the late sixth century, Byzantium was still the focus of the entire Eurasian land mass.

It was not to remain so for long. John Moschos was an almost exact contemporary of Mohammed. When Moschos died in 619, the Empire was still ruled, however shakily, from the Veneto to Southern Egypt. But a few years later, Moschos’s young companion Sophronius saw the eastern half of the Byzantine dominion shatter and fragment. In his old age Sophronius was appointed Patriarch of Jerusalem, and it was left to him to defend the Holy City against the first army of Islam as it swept up from Arabia, conquering all before it.

Fresh from the desert, the Arabs were not very adept at siege-craft: when stalled outside Damascus, the great army of the Prophet had to borrow a ladder from a nearby monastery to get over the walls. But with the Imperial legions already ambushed while crossing the River Yarmuck, there was no prospect of relief for Jerusalem. After a siege lasting twelve months Sophronius prepared to surrender, with only one condition: he would hand Jerusalem over to no general. The Holy City would surrender only to the Caliph himself.

On a February day in the year 638 A.D., the Caliph Omar entered Jerusalem, riding upon a white camel. The Caliph wore the filthy robes in which he had conducted his campaign; but the Patriarch was magnificently dressed in his robes of Imperial silk. Sophronius handed over the keys of the city and through his tears was heard to murmur: ‘Behold the abomination of desolation, spoken of by Daniel the Prophet.’

He died, heartbroken, a few months later. He was buried in the ruins of the Monastery of St Theodosius; in the next niche lay the body of his friend, teacher and travelling companion John Moschos. Sophronius had faithfully honoured his friend’s last wish: that his embalmed corpse be carried from Constantinople to be buried in what was left of his own home monastery, at the edge of the deserts of the Holy Land.

I first read about John Moschos in Sir Steven Runciman’s great three-volume History of the Crusades. Intrigued by a passing reference to The Spiritual Meadow, I wrote to Runciman and received – by return of post – a reply in Edwardian copperplate asking me over to the historian’s medieval tower house in the Scottish Borders. One cold April day I drove under grey cloudbanks, through the barren sheep tracts of Annandale and Eskdale, to take up the invitation.

Runciman has always been a most undonnish don: he has been besieged by Manchu warlords in the city of Tianjin, but escaped to play a piano duet with the Emperor of China; he has lectured Ataturk on Byzantium and been made a Grand Orator of the Great Church of Constantinople; he has smoked a hookah with the Çelebi Effendi of the Whirling Dervishes and, by reading their tarot cards, correctly predicted the death of King George II of the Hellenes and Fuad, King of Egypt.

He is well into his nineties: a tall, thin, frail old man, still very poised and intellectually alert, but now physically weak. He has heavy-lidded eyes and a slow, gravelly voice, with a hint of an old fashioned Cambridge drawl. During lunch, Runciman talked of the Levant as he knew it in his youth: of Istanbul only a month after the last Ottoman was expelled from the Topkapi, when there were camels in the streets, when there were still hundreds of thousands of Greeks in Anatolia, and the Turks still wore the red tarboosh; of the Lebanon, ‘the only place I’ve seen books bound in human skin’; of the monasteries of Palestine before the Zionists expelled half the Palestinians and began to turn the country into an American suburb; of Egypt when Alexandria was still the most cosmopolitan city east of Milan.

Later, over coffee, I broached the subject of John Moschos and his travels. What had attracted me to The Spiritual Meadow in the first place was the idea that Moschos and Sophronius were witnessing the first act in a process whose denouement was taking place only now: that that first onslaught on the Christian East observed by the two monks was now being completed by Christianity’s devastating decline in the land of its birth. The ever-accelerating exodus of the last Christians from the Middle East today meant that The Spiritual Meadow could be read less as a dead history book than as the prologue to an unfolding tragedy whose final chapter is still being written.

Islam has traditionally been tolerant of religious minorities: to see this, one has only to contrast the relatively privileged treatment of Christians under Muslim rule with the terrible fate of Christendom’s one totally distinct religious minority, the unfortunate European Jews. Nevertheless that Islamic tradition of tolerance is today wearing distinctly thin. After centuries of generally peaceful co-existence with their Muslim neighbours, things are suddenly becoming difficult for the last Christians of the Middle East. Almost everywhere in the Levant, for a variety of reasons – partly because of economic pressure, but more often due to discrimination and in some cases outright persecution – the Christians are leaving. Today they are a small minority of fourteen million struggling to keep afloat amid 180 million non-Christians, with their numbers shrinking annually through emigration. In the last twenty years at least two million have left the Middle East to make new lives for themselves in Europe, Australia and America.

In Istanbul the last descendants of the Byzantines are now leaving what was once the capital city of Christendom. In the east of Turkey, the Syrian Orthodox Church is virtually extinct, its ancient monasteries either empty or in the process of being evacuated. Those who have made it out to the West complain of protection rackets, land seizures and frequent murders. In Lebanon, the Maronites have now effectively lost the long civil war, and their stranglehold on political power has finally been broken. Most Maronites today live abroad, in exile. The same is true of the Palestinian Christians a little to the south: nearly half a century after the creation of the State of Israel, fewer Palestinian Christians now remain in Palestine than live outside it. According to a Palestinian Christian writer I talked to in London, things have got so bad that the remaining Christians in Jerusalem could be flown out in just nine jumbo jets; indeed there are now said to be more Jerusalem-born Christians living in Sydney than in Jerusalem itself. In Egypt, the Copts are also profoundly troubled and apprehensive: already facing a certain amount of discrimination under the current regime, they are well aware that things are likely to get much worse if President Mubarak falls and an Islamic revolution brings the fundamentalists to power.

Everywhere, in short, the living successors of those Christian merchants, monks and bishops visited by John Moschos now find themselves under intense pressure. Yet when I began to research into Moschos’s travels, I discovered that despite this great Christian exodus, a surprising number of the monasteries visited by Moschos and Sophronius still – just – survived.

The monasteries on Mount Athos and in Coptic Egypt are apparently relatively healthy. Elsewhere, in south-east Turkey, Lebanon and Palestine, these timeless islands of Byzantium, with their bells and black robes and candle-lit processions, are said to be occupied by an ever-diminishing population of elderly monks whose heavily-whiskered faces mirror those of the frescoed saints on the monastery walls. The monks’ vestments remain unchanged since Byzantine times; the same icons are still painted according to the same medieval iconographic rules. Even the superstitions have endured unaltered: relics of the True Cross and the Virgin’s Tears are still venerated; demons and devils are still said to lie in wait outside every monastery wall. In the early fifth century Bishop Parthenius of Lampsacus reported that he had been attacked by Satan in the form of a black dog; on my last visit I was told an almost identical story by an old Greek monk in the Holy Sepulchre. A couple of years ago there was great excitement in a Coptic quarter of Cairo, when the Virgin was clearly seen floating over the towers of the Church of St Damiana.

Driving back home from Runciman, I knew what I wanted to do: to spend six months circling the Levant, following roughly in John Moschos’s footsteps. Starting in Athos and working my way through to the Coptic monasteries of Upper Egypt, I wanted to do what no future generation of travellers would be able to do: to see wherever possible what Moschos and Sophronius had seen, to sleep in the same monasteries, to pray under the same frescoes and mosaics, to discover what was left, and to witness what was in effect the last ebbing twilight of Byzantium.

The wooden simandron has just begun to call from the church; matins will begin in ten minutes.

Soon it will be dawn. The first glimmer of light has begun to light up the silhouette of the Holy Mountain. The paraffin in my lamp is exhausted, and so am I. The day after tomorrow I must leave Athos; ahead lies four or five days’ travel across Thrace to Constantinople, the great Byzantine capital where John Moschos completed his Spiritual Meadow.

The simandron is being rung for the second time. I must shut this book and go down to the church to join the monks at prayer.

II

PERA PALAS HOTEL, ISTANBUL, TURKEY, 10 JULY 1994

After the penitential piety of Mount Athos, arriving here is like stepping into a sensuous Orientalist fantasy by Delacroix, all mock-Iznik tiles and pseudo-Ottoman marble inlay. A hotel masquerading as a Turkish bath; you almost expect some voluptuous Turkish odalisque to appear and disrobe behind the reception desk.

I ate breakfast in a vast Viennese ballroom with a sprung wooden floor and dadoes dripping with recently reapplied gilt. The lift is a giant baroque birdcage, entered through a rainforest of potted palms. On the wall nearby, newly dusted, is a framed diploma from the 1932 Ideal Homes Exhibition, signed by the Mayor of East Ham.

The Pera Palas was bought by the Turkish government last year, and attempts to renovate the old structure seem to have started manically, then been abruptly given up. In the dining room the gilt is so bright you have to wear sunglasses to look at it; but upstairs the carpets are as bald as the head of an Ottoman eunuch.

The hotel has a policy of naming its bedrooms after distinguished guests, which has unconsciously acted as a graph of its dramatic post-war decline: from before the war you can choose to sleep in Ataturk, Mata Hari or King Zog of Albania; after it there is nothing more exciting on offer than Julio Iglesias.

At dawn the Sea of Marmara appears like a sheet of silver, with the stationary ships sitting as if welded to its surface. Now, at night, it becomes invisible but for the lights of passing ships and the distant lamps of Uskudar and Kadi Koy – Byzantine Chalcedon – shining across the Bosphorus.

From the old Byzantine Acropolis to the waters of the Golden Horn, the yellow glow of the sulphurous streetlights silhouettes the city’s skyline, with its minarets and rippling domes and cupolas. The perfect reflections of the great Ottoman mosques and palaces that form in the water below are intermittently shattered by skiffs and caiques crossing and recrossing the Hellespont. No other city on earth has so magnificent a position. With its remarkable configuration of hills and water, sitting astride the land and sea routes connecting Europe with Asia, the Black Sea with the Mediterranean, and commanding one of the greatest anchorages in the world, there could be no more perfect position for a great imperial city.

For over a thousand years Constantinople was the capital of Christendom, the richest metropolis in Europe and the most populous city west of the great Chinese Silk Route terminus of Ch’ang-an. To the Barbarian West Byzantium was an almost mythical beacon of higher civilisation, the repository of all that had been salvaged from the wreck of classical antiquity. In their sagas, the Vikings called it merely Micklegarth, the Great City. It had no rival.

From the Great Palace on the shores of the Sea of Marmara Justinian, probably the greatest of the Byzantine emperors, controlled an empire that ran from the walls of Genoa clockwise around the Mediterranean to the Pillars of Hercules at Ceuta, embracing Italy, the Balkans, Turkey, the Middle East and the North African littoral. From Constantinople armies were dispatched to build a line of border fortresses on the Tigris, to repair the walls of Rome and to reconquer North Africa from the Vandals. Architects were ordered to construct basilicas in the marshes of Ravenna, on Mount Zion and in the sands of the Sinai. When the Emperor ordered Anthemius of Tralles and Isidore of Miletus to build the greatest church in the world and dedicate it to Haghia Sophia, the Divine Wisdom of Christ, stone was specially brought from as far afield as Libya, the Lebanon, the Atlantic coast of France, Mons Porphyrites in the distant deserts of Southern Egypt and the green marble quarries of Hellenic Sparta.

Half a century later, when John Moschos arrived in Constantinople, the city probably had a population of around three quarters of a million; it was said that seventy-two different tongues could be heard in its streets. Coptic monks rubbed shoulders with Jewish glassblowers, Persian silk traders and Gepid mercenaries who had walked to the city after padding across the ice of the frozen Danube. In the city’s great markets and bazaars, Aramaic-speaking Syrians would haggle with Latin-speaking North Africans, Armenian architects and Herule slave traders who knew only some debased dialect of Old German. Goldsmiths, silversmiths, jewellers, ivory carvers, workers in inlay and enamel, weavers of brocade, sculptors and mosaicists all found ready markets for their wares. Already, by the second quarter of the fifth century, the city boasted five imperial and nine princely palaces, eight public and 153 private bath houses; by the time of Justinian there were over three hundred monasteries within its walls.

Few who were brought up in this most cosmopolitan and sophisticated of cities could bear to leave it for long. ‘Oh, land of Byzantium, oh thrice-happy city, eye of the universe, ornament of the world, star shining afar, beacon of this lower world,’ wrote a twelfth-century Byzantine author forced to absent himself on a diplomatic mission, ‘would that I were within you, enjoying you to the full! Do not part me from your maternal bosom.’

After its fall to the Turks in 1453 the importance of the city was, if anything, increased. For the next two hundred years the Ottoman Empire was the most powerful force in all Eurasia, and Constantinople again became the Mediterranean’s greatest port. The sixteenth-century Grand Vizier Mehmed Sokollu Pasha simultaneously planned canals between the Don and the Volga, and the Red Sea and the Mediterranean; one day he might send armaments to Sumatra to thwart the Portuguese, the next choose a new King of Poland to thwart the Russians. He ordered pictures and clocks from Venice, decorated his capital with one of the most beautiful mosques ever built, and commissioned an eleven-arched bridge over the River Drina which was only recently destroyed by Croatian bombs.

The achievements of early Ottoman Constantinople were built on the foundation of religious and ethnic tolerance. The great majority of senior Ottoman officials were not ethnic Turks, but Christian or Jewish converts. At a time when every capital in Europe was ablaze with burning heretics, according to the exiled seventeenth-century Huguenot M. de la Motraye there was ‘no country on earth where the exercise of all Religions is more free and less subject to being troubled, than in Turkey’. It was the gradual erosion of that tradition of tolerance under the tidal wave of nineteenth-century nationalism that as much as anything finally brought down the Ottomans.

The end result of that sterile hardening of attitudes is that Istanbul, once home to an inspirational ferment of different ethnicities, is today a culturally barren and financially impoverished mono-ethnic megalopolis, 99 per cent Turkish. The Jews have gone to Israel, the Greeks to Athens, the Armenians to Armenia and the United States. The great European merchant houses have returned home, the embassies and the politicians moved to Ankara. For all its magnificent monuments, for the first time in two millennia, Istanbul now feels almost provincial.

It is ten years since my last visit to this city. Since then much has changed: many of the old wooden houses with their intricately latticed balconies have been swept away and replaced by grey apartment blocks. A smart new tram rattles around Sultanahmet, past new flotillas of Russians squatting on the pavements trying to sell their sad piles of Soviet junk: shapeless jeans, hideous shirts and sub-standard leather jackets. There is a blight of seedy news-stands filled with a surprising profusion of Turkish hard porn (there is even a glossy called Harem; one notices these things after a week in the celibate purity of Athos). The most striking change of all, however, is the rise of the Islamic right, which this sort of thing has helped to bring about. On every wall are election posters for the hardline Refah party, which recently won the municipal elections both here and in Ankara; there is now serious talk of them sweeping into power nationally at the next election. In the meantime many of the young men have taken to wearing thick, moustacheless Islamic beards, while their womenfolk are increasingly shrouded in veils.

In many ways, Turkey’s development since the Second World War seems to have followed exactly the opposite course to that of India. There Gandhi tried to wean the whole country onto dhotis, non-violence and spinning wheels; the result was crass materialism and the almost daily burning of brides in ‘kitchen accidents’ if they fail to deliver the new moped or colour television promised as dowry. In Turkey Ataturk tried the reverse approach: he banned the fez, outlawed the Arabic script and tried to drag the Turks kicking and screaming into Europe. The result: a resurgent Islamic movement, mullahs being cheered in the mosques whenever they announce that the earth is flat, and the sophisticated career women of Istanbul competing with each other to wear the most all-enveloping veil or medieval-looking burkha.

ISTANBUL, 17 JULY

This afternoon I walked along the Golden Horn to the Phanar, the oldest surviving institution in the city and the nearest thing the Greek Orthodox have to a Vatican. For in a series of humble buildings surrounded by a modest walled enclosure in Istanbul’s backstreets lives the successor of St John Chrysostom, the senior Patriarch to millions of Orthodox Christians around the world.

The Patriarch’s secretary, to whom Fr. Christophoros had given me an introduction, was out. So while I waited for him to return I drank tea in a small, dark chayhane nearby: sawdust on the floor, the acid stink of cheap Turkish cigarettes stinging the nostrils, the incessant thump of heavy hands on wooden card-tables; unshaven, unemployed men playing game after game of poker. Outside a man in a waistcoat, flat cap and dirty apron pushed a handcart of fruit along the cobbles. It could have been a Bill Brandt photograph of the London East End in the thirties.

I walked back to the Phanar an hour later. The Patriarch’s secretary had still not returned, but this time I did manage to speak to a member of his staff. Fr. Dimitrios was initially suspicious and evasive, but after reading Fr. Christophoros’s letter he took me up to his office overlooking the Patriarchal church. There we talked about the city’s dwindling Greek minority, the last descendants of the Byzantines left in what was once their capital city.

According to Fr. Dimitrios the population of Istanbul was still almost 50 per cent Christian at the end of the nineteenth century. The tumultuous events of the first quarter of the twentieth century – the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the Turkish victory in the 1922 Greco-Turkish War and the expulsion of all the Greeks in Anatolia in exchange for the Turkish population evicted from Northern Greece – did not alter this. By the terms of the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, the 400,000 Greeks in the city and its suburbs were specifically allowed to remain in their homes with their rights and property intact.

All this changed in 1955 when Istanbul played host to the worst race riot in Europe since Kristallnacht. In a single night, with the police looking on, thousands of hired thugs descended on the city’s Hellenic ghettos. Almost every Greek shop in the city had its windows broken; cemeteries were desecrated; the Tombs of the Patriarchs were destroyed; seventy-three Orthodox churches were gutted.

‘I was still a baby,’ said Fr. Dimitrios. ‘The rioters came into our house, but my mother had wrapped me up in the Turkish flag so the rioters did not harm me; instead they just broke the windows and the furniture then moved on. Afterwards the government said it was just a few ignorant people, but that’s not true: the riots were very well organised, all over Istanbul.’

‘I don’t understand what the Turks would gain by organising such a pogrom,’ I said.

‘The Greeks still controlled the commerce of the city,’ replied Dimitrios. ‘They wanted to drive us out and take over our business. They succeeded. By 1965, when I was ten, the Greek population had sunk to around seventy-five thousand. Today there are only – what? – five thousand Greeks left. All my childhood friends, everyone I grew up with, they’ve all moved away.’

Dimitrios shrugged his shoulders.

‘I love this city, of course: it is my home. But frankly life is impossible here if you are not a Turk. The boys get abused on their military service; they are always sent to the most dangerous postings on the Kurdish front line. Then afterwards, when they come out, they can’t get government jobs. If you live here you have to spend your life pretending you are Turkish. Those Greeks who have stayed have started calling themselves Turkish names: if you’re called Dimitrios, you change your name to Demir; if your name is Fedon, you ask your friends to call you Feridun.’

Dimitrios said that the war in Bosnia – with Orthodox Serbs committing atrocities against Muslims – and the recent resurgence of Islamic fundamentalism in Turkey, had made everything much worse. The Phanar windows were broken by stones on an almost daily basis, while its perimeter walls were regularly covered with spray-painted threats such as ‘Patriarch, you will die!’ Moreover, there had been a renewed bout of grave desecration at the disused Greek cemetery at Yenikoy; blazing rags soaked in petrol had been thrown over the Phanar walls, starting a small fire; and three small firebombs had gone off a month previously in two nearby Greek girls’ schools and the Church of the Panaghia.

But the most serious problem, said Dimitrios, revolved around the Phanar gateway. In 1821 the Greeks sealed the main door of the Phanar after the Sultan had hanged the then Patriarch, Gregorios, from its lintel. The Turks always considered the sealing a snub, and recently the Refah party had revived the issue by threatening to break open the gate by force. Then last month, on the eve of the anniversary of the fall of Byzantium to the Ottoman Turks, a huge bomb was found planted next to the gate inside the main courtyard. It was defused in time, but had it gone off not only the gate but the entire Phanar would have been reduced to a large crater.

‘They left a note near the bomb,’ said Dimitrios. ‘I’ve got a translation somewhere.’

He rummaged around in his drawers and drew out a file. From it he took a single sheet of foolscap. ‘Read this,’ he said.

FROM THE GENERAL HEADQUARTERS OF THE FIGHTERS OF LIGHT

Our administration has targeted the Patriarchate and its occupying leader, who behind what he considers insurmountable walls takes pleasure in the shedding of the blood of the Muslim people of the East, and to this end he is working on suspect and fiendish plans. We will fight until the Chief Devil and all the occupiers are chased off; until this place, which for years has contrived Byzantine intrigues against the Muslim peoples of the East, is exterminated. Occupiers disappear! These Lands are ours and will remain ours. We warn you one more time: there is no right to life for those who are occupiers.

Until the Greek Patriarchate and the Devil, the ridiculous Bartholomaios who wears the robes of the Patriarch, disappears from behind the thick walls where he plans his fiendish intrigues, our fight will continue. Patriarch you will perish!

Long live our Islamic Fight! Long live our Islamic Liberation War!

THE CENTRAL HEADQUARTERS OF LIGHT

‘After this,’ said Dimitrios, ‘our young have finally become convinced that there is no future for them here.’

‘I can see their point.’

‘Now it’s just the old who remain. Our priests here are sick and tired of funerals. A single baptism – or rarer still, a marriage – is the event of the year.’

I asked whether the Phanar was getting enough young priests coming up to keep the place going.

‘The Turks closed our only seminary in 1971,’ replied Dimitrios. ‘It’s cut the bloodline of our existence. A decade from now, when the older bishops have all died, there will be no clergy left. After 1,500 years, the Ecumenical Patriarch will have to leave Constantinople.’ Dimitrios sighed. ‘A century ago this was the centre of Greek Istanbul. Today there are no Greeks at all left around here. On a very good Sunday the Patriarch may still get a hundred people in this church. On a bad one he can’t even fill the first two rows of pews. Come down and see what it’s like at vespers.’

“Who will be there?’

‘I fear just you, me and the angels.’

Fr. Dimitrios’s apprehensions were justified. The service had already begun. One old bishop was standing at a lectern chanting hymns for the saint of the day. The other officiating priest, a bent-backed octogenarian, clanked a thurible from behind the iconostasis. There was no congregation in this, the senior church of Eastern Christendom, the Orthodox St Peter’s; not one person occupied the empty pews. After a few minutes the bishop gave the dismissal and both old men quickly left the church.

‘Look at your watch,’ said Fr. Dimitrios. ‘Exactly 4.15. It never takes a minute longer when it’s an empty church. Our priests don’t feel inspired. In fact they feel almost embarrassed.’

From the Phanar I walked through the old city to the Armenian Patriarchate in Kum Kapi, overlooking the Sea of Marmara. In London, Armenian friends had told me horror stories about the fate of the sixty thousand Armenians left in Istanbul: that Refah party activists had taken to slopping buckets of human urine into Armenian church services, as well as regularly vandalising the graveyards and churches. My friends had told me that the parish councils hushed these things up for fear that they would be accused of ‘making anti-Turkish propaganda’, but I hoped that the staff of the Patriarchate might at least be able to confirm or deny what I had heard.

The Patriarchate was a lovely wooden Ottoman building with a pediment and slatted louvres. After a short wait I was shown in to a plump Armenian priest, who called for tea and chatted happily about his trip to England twenty years previously. But when I turned the conversation to politics he just raised his palms and shrugged, indicating clearly – if wordlessly – that it would be undiplomatic for him to comment.

As I was leaving, I mentioned that I had just been to the Phanar: ‘Watch out, then,’ he whispered. ‘The Phanar is full of informers. Your phone will be tapped and they’ve probably followed you here. Don’t leave your notebooks – or anything valuable or incriminating – in your hotel room.’

The old Middle Eastern paranoia, one of the strongest legacies of the Ottomans, a shadow which falls uniformly from the Danube to the Nile. I smiled, but – as always happens after such a warning – did find myself looking behind me on my way back, to see if I was being followed.

Of course, there was nobody there.

ISTANBUL, 20 JULY

John Moschos did not like Constantinople, and he makes this dislike quite apparent in The Spiritual Meadow. One of his Constantinople stories concerns the astonishing sexual appetites of the Emperor Zeno; another is about a priest in the capital who ‘was indulging in murder and dabbling in witchcraft’; a third is an anti-Semitic rant against a Jewish glassblower who tries to burn his eldest son to death after the boy announces that he plans to convert to Christianity. There are several other such tales, all designed to show the Byzantine capital – ‘the city where the wicked rulers lived’ – in a very dim light.

In some ways, Moschos’s reaction is a little surprising. After all the monk admired the other two great Byzantine metropolises – Antioch and Alexandria – for their learning, and this was something in which the Imperial capital also excelled. Certainly Constantinople’s university could not compare with that of Alexandria, but ever since the Emperor Theodosius II endowed a number of chairs in subjects such as medicine, grammar, rhetoric, law and philosophy, it had grown in size and stature, its reputation augmented by the presence nearby of the city’s great public library.

Shortly before John Moschos arrived in the capital, his friend and mentor Stephen the Sophist had been lured to Constantinople from the School of Alexandria, where for many years he had lectured on medicine, philosophy, astronomy, astrology, horoscopy and ecclesiastical computus. Stephen should have been able to introduce Moschos to Constantinople’s leading luminaries, men like the great historian Theophylact Simocatta; yet there is no indication in Moschos’s writing that he met any particularly inspiring figures during his stay in the city.

There was another attraction which should have recommended Constantinople to Moschos: its extraordinary number of sacred relics. Moschos comments on the existence of such relics in almost every place he writes about; only in Constantinople does he omit to mention the number of holy objects on show in the churches, even though the capital’s collection was the finest in Christendom. In one shrine alone, that under the Porphyry Column in the Forum of Constantine, were secreted the holy nails used in the crucifixion, the axe with which Noah built the Ark, and the Dodekathronon, the twelve baskets in which had been collected the leftover loaves and fishes from the feeding of the five thousand, which had been miraculously rediscovered by the dowager Empress Helena near the Sea of Galilee. Elsewhere in the city could be found the Crown of Thorns, the head of John the Baptist (‘complete with hair and beard’, according to one source,) the bodies of most of the innocents murdered by King Herod, and great chunks of the True Cross.

However dubious their pedigrees may seem to our eyes, to the Byzantines relics were objects of priceless value. To see or to touch them was to come into direct contact with a God who was otherwise almost unimaginably distant and inaccessible. Relics were holes in the curtain wall separating the human from the divine. By contemplating them, and by reaching out and touching them, the Byzantines felt they were reaching through the great barrier which separated the visible from the invisible, the mundane from the transcendent. Gregory of Nyssa, a century before Moschos, described the emotion felt by ordinary Byzantines when they touched a sacred relic: ‘Those who behold them embrace them as the living body [of the saint] itself; they bring all their senses into play and shedding tears of passion address to the martyr their prayers of intercession as if he were alive and present.’

Moschos must have had good reason to dislike a city full of such precious and holy objects, and a quick reading of the sources gives a good idea of what it was. For it seems that even by metropolitan Byzantine standards, Constantinople was a deeply degenerate place. When Justinian legislated on the Empire’s brothels, the law he published contained a preamble which gives some details about the state of the capital’s morality. Agents, it seemed, toured the provinces luring girls – some of them younger than ten years old – into their clutches by offering them fine clothes and shoes; once in the capital they were made to sign contracts and provide guarantees for their attendance at their bordello. Otherwise the unfortunate girls were kept imprisoned inside the whorehouses, shackled to their beds.

Nor was Constantinople’s aristocratic elite renowned for its marital fidelity. Asterius of Amasia scolded his congregation: ‘You change your wives like your clothes, and build new bride-chambers as casually as stalls at a fair.’ St John Chrysostom blamed the city’s famously lascivious theatre: ‘When you seat yourself in a theatre and feast your eyes on the naked limbs of women, you are pleased for a time, but then, what a violent fever you have generated! Once your head is filled with such sights and the songs that go with them, you think about them even in your dreams. You would not choose to see a naked woman in the marketplace, yet you eagerly attend the theatre. What difference does it make if the stripper is a whore? It would be better to smear our faces with mud than to behold such spectacles.’

St John Damascene was even more shocked by what he heard of the ‘city filled with impiety’. Constantinople was the setting of dances and jests, he wrote disapprovingly, as well as of taverns, baths and brothels. Women went about with uncovered heads and moved their limbs in a provocative and deliberately sensuous way. Young men grew effeminate and let their hair grow long. Indeed, complained the monk, some went so far as to decorate their boots. In such a climate even the bishops grew foppish. The Ecclesiastical History of Socrates talks of Bishop Sisinnios, who ‘was accustomed to indulge himself by wearing smart new garments, and by bathing twice a day in the public baths. When someone asked him why he, a bishop, bathed himself twice a day, he replied: “Because you do not give me time for a third.” ‘

The chief witness for the prosecution must, however, be Procopius, Justinian’s official court historian. For most of his adult life, Procopius faithfully produced volume after volume of oily sycophancy, praising Justinian for his skill as a general, his taste as a builder and his wisdom as a ruler. Then quite suddenly, towards the end of his life, it seems he could stand it no more. He cracked, and the result was The Secret History, a short volume of the purest vitriol, in which the old historian sought to correct the honeyed lies he had been writing for thirty years. Justinian’s reign, he wrote, had been an unmitigated disaster, leading to fiascos on many fronts, but above all to a situation of unparalleled moral anarchy. And he knew who to blame: Justinian’s wife, the scheming Empress Theodora. Brought up in a circus family,

as soon as she was old enough she joined the women on the stage and promptly became a courtesan. For she was not a flautist or a harpist; she was not even qualified to join the corps of dancers; but she merely sold her attractions to anyone who came along, putting her whole body at his disposal …

There was not a particle of modesty in the little hussy: she complied with the most outrageous demands without the slightest hesitation. She would throw off her clothes and exhibit naked to all and sundry those regions, both in front and behind, which the rules of decency require to be kept veiled and hidden from masculine eyes … In the theatre, in full view of all the people, she would spread herself out and lie face upwards on the floor. Servants on whom this task had been imposed would sprinkle barley grains over her private parts, and geese trained for the purpose used to pick them off one by one with their bills and swallow them.

She used to tease her lovers by keeping them waiting, and by constantly playing about with novel methods of intercourse, she could always bring the lascivious to her feet; so far from waiting to be invited by anyone she encountered, by cracking dirty jokes and wiggling her hips suggestively she would invite all who came her way, especially if they were still in their teens. Never was anyone so completely given over to unlimited self-indulgence. Often she would go to a dinner party with ten young men or more, all at the peak of their physical prowess and with fornication as their chief object in life, and would lie with all her fellow diners in turn the whole night long: when she had reduced them all to a state of physical exhaustion she would go to their menials, as many as thirty on occasion, and copulate with every one of them; but not even so could she satisfy her lust.

And so it goes on, for (in the Penguin edition) 194 pages. It seems likely that Procopius had some personal grudge against the Empress, who may have been responsible for blocking his promotion or somehow harming his career. Even so, it is a remarkable testimony. At the end of the book, Procopius tells of Theodora’s attempts in her old age to control prostitution. Overcome with guilt for her former sins, she closed the brothels, bought up all the prostitutes, and put them in a former Imperial palace which she converted into a Convent of Repentance.

But, notes Procopius, this was one of Theodora’s less popular enterprises. According to him, the girls found this new way of life so dull that most ‘flung themselves down from the parapet during the night’ rather than be turned into nuns.

In the cool of the evening I walked over to the Hippodrome. In what was once the stalls, where the violent Byzantine circus factions once knifed it out, large Turkish ladies in headscarves now sit quietly gossiping on park benches. Their husbands squat nearby, under the chestnuts, cracking pistachio nuts. The occasional salesman with a glass cupboard on wheels wanders past, hawking paper cones full of chickpeas. Gulls hover silently overhead. It is strange to think that the hippodrome once held 120,000 people – double the present-day capacity of Wembley Stadium.

The obelisk of the Emperor Theodosius still stands in the centre of the old racetrack, rising from the plinth where it was placed in the 430s. A carving on the side shows the cat’s-cradle of ropes and pulleys which was used to raise it. On another face is carved a picture of the Emperor in the imperial baldachin overlooking the races; these are illustrated at the base with a series of small relief carvings of what look like horse-drawn bathtubs.

Between the Emperor and the charioteers stand his bodyguard, a remarkably effeminate gaggle of fops with long floppy 1970s fringes, every bit as willowy as St John Damascene’s blood-and-fire sermons might have led one to expect. Certainly these gentle cosmopolitans not only look remarkably unthreatening, they appear to be much more interested in the races than in guarding the Emperor. Here could lie part of the explanation for the large number of successful assassination attempts in Byzantine history.

At the end of the Hippodrome, then as now, rises the great dome of Justinian’s Haghia Sophia, the supreme masterpiece of Byzantine architecture, and still, in the eyes of many, the most beautiful church ever built. No other Christian building is so successful in transporting one to the threshold of another world, or so dazzlingly intimates the imminence of the transcendent. In the golden haze of its interior, with its extraordinary play of light and space, precious stone and mosaic, under a dome that blazes like the vault of Heaven, even the solid walls seem to cease being barriers and become like passages into a higher reality. When it was first built in the 530s, Procopius, in one of his finest passages, described the overwhelming effect it has on the visitor. ‘So bright is the glow of the interior that you might say that it is not illuminated by the sun from the outside but that the radiance is generated within,’ he wrote in The Buildings. ‘Rising above is an enormous spherical dome which seems not to be founded on solid masonry, but to be suspended from heaven by a Golden Chain. Whenever one goes into this church to pray, one understands immediately that this work has been fashioned not by human power and skill, but by the influence of God. And so the visitor’s mind is lifted up to God and floats aloft, thinking that He cannot be far away, but must love to dwell in this place which He himself has chosen.’

The power of the building has not been diminished by fourteen hundred years of earthquakes and rebuildings, the destruction of much of its mosaic, the stripping of its altars, nor even a city fire which caused molten lead from the dome to run down the gutters in a flood of boiling metal. As you stand in the narthex you can see even the gossiping tour groups falling silent as they enter the dome chamber; if anyone talks they do so in a hushed whisper. The sacred breaks in on the mundane; and one immediately understands what a Byzantine monk must have felt when he touched a relic or gazed at a sacred icon: for a moment the gates of perception open and one catches a momentary glimpse of the Divine. Here, as nowhere else, one is transported back to the mental world of the Byzantium of John Moschos.

Yet the miraculous preservation of this one building – judged by the Byzantines themselves as their most perfect creation – can easily blind one to the amount that has been lost. Geography apart, John Moschos would not recognise much in this city if he came back today. Of the five hundred churches and monasteries which once decorated the land rising up from the Golden Horn, the remains of less than thirty survive, most of them rebuilt and converted into mosques.

This morning I visited the site of St Polyeuctes, once the greatest church in the whole Christian Empire; Justinian was said to have built Haghia Sophia in an attempt to match it. It would have been a familiar monument to John Moschos; indeed it was probably in a monastery attached to some great church like this that he lodged when he came to the city to finish The Spiritual Meadow.

The church fell into disrepair, and after the Turkish conquest of 1453 it collapsed and was forgotten. In 1960 it was accidentally rediscovered. Briefly it became famous again, and art historians and archaeologists triumphantly announced that many of the innovations of Justinian’s reign were pre-empted by the work at St Polyeuctes.

Thirty years later the various archaeological reports are gathering dust, and St Polyeuctes seems to be returning to the earth. The ruins are an open latrine, and stink too badly to be examined at any length; only the most desperate Turkish tramps linger in its portals. Meanwhile the famous capitals – supposedly the first of the characteristic Byzantine basketwork impost-capitals that were to reach their fullest glory in Ravenna – are scattered around a nearby playground, where they provide seats for courting Turks. This means that anyone who wishes to study this crucial phase of early Byzantine sculpture is forced to spend an afternoon peering like a pervert beneath the legs of entwined couples.

Secular Byzantine architecture has fared even worse. The great Theodosian land walls, in their day the most sophisticated defensive military architecture the world had ever seen, are still there; there is also the great fourth-century aqueduct of Valens and a pair of superb arcaded cisterns dating from the time of Justinian. Yet not one single house from Byzantine Constantinople still stands. Even the two largest Imperial palace complexes, the Great Palace and the Palace of Blachernae, have disappeared but for a few arches, a line of windows, some buried foundations and a few splendid floor mosaics.

I spent much of the afternoon in the Mosaic Museum, admiring what has survived. All the work there dates from the late sixth century – just after the reign of Justinian – and is from the Great Palace, which once occupied the slope behind the Blue Mosque. These then are the very floors that the Emperor Heraclius must have paced as he heard of the Persian capture of Jerusalem or the fall of Alexandria.

The initial impression is of the unexpectedly persistent Hellenism. The style of most of the mosaics is pastoral and bucolic, and their warm naturalism seems at first to have more in common with the delicate frescoes of Pompeii than with the stiff, hieratic inhabitants of later Byzantine icons or the unsmiling Pantocrators which overwhelm the domes of so many medieval Byzantine churches. It is only after you have been in the museum for some time and look a little closer at the pastoral idylls that you begin to worry about the mental state of the mosaic-makers, or perhaps that of their patrons.

At first sight a horse appears to be giving suck to a lion: the perfect symbol of peace, like the Biblical wolf lying down with the lamb. Only when you look closely do you see that what is actually happening is that the lion is ripping the stomach out of the horse and biting off its testicles. Another lion rears up and attacks an elephant, but misjudges his leap and impales himself on a tusk. A wolf tears off the neck of a deer. Two gladiators in leather hauberks and plus-fours await the charge of a pink tiger (the tiger is already badly wounded in the neck, and blood is pouring out of its mouth). Elsewhere a winged gryphon swoops down and rips the back of an antelope; another gobbles up a lizard.

One can only speculate what induced the head mosaicist to make his creations so psychopathically violent: after all, with assassinations and palace coups as frequent as they were, it can hardly have been very calming for the Emperor to have to walk over these scenes of gruesome blood-letting day after day. On the other hand they are certainly a blessed antidote to the gloomy piety of most Byzantine literature: those endless saints’ Lives with their heroic ascetics resisting the lascivious enticements of demonic temptresses. Indeed, after enduring one of the Patriarch’s two hour sermons on chastity, the Emperor may actually have been relieved to return to these lively scenes of carnage and mayhem.

On the way back I passed through the Gulhane Gardens surrounding the Topkapi Palace. As I passed I was surprised to see that the basilica of Haghia Eirene appeared to be open. This was unexpected because, for some reason best known to the Turkish authorities, this magnificent building, one of the very greatest Byzantine churches surviving in the city, is normally kept resolutely locked. This time, however, the door was open and a couple of sophisticated-looking Turkish women were sitting chatting in the porch.

I thought I would take the opportunity to have a look at the church, but as I wandered past the women one of them called out: ‘I’m sorry, you can’t go in there. It’s closed.’

‘It looks open.’

‘I’m afraid you need a special pass to go in. For security reasons.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘There are VIPs inside.’

‘Politicians?’

‘No. Models.’

‘Models?’

‘Today they are having a beauty contest.’

‘In a church?’

‘Why not? All Turkey’s top models are there. They are currently changing into Rifat Ozbek bikinis.’

Haghia Eirene is the worst possible place to have a beauty contest: it is dark, gloomy and badly lit. But the Greeks desperately want this church back, and the Turks will go to any length, however absurd, to annoy their hereditary enemies. No doubt, however, the Greeks play similar games with the abandoned mosques of Salonica. They would probably do the same to those in Athens, too, had they not bulldozed the lot in the 1920s, in a sadly characteristic outbreak of virulent nationalism.

ISTANBUL, 28 JULY

By ferry to the island known to the Turks as Buyuk Ada, and to the Greeks as Prinkipo. Hazy, all-enveloping heat. Boys bathing by the Bosphorus. The scent of sea-salt, hot wood, rotting fish. We pull away from the Golden Horn, pass around the wooded ridge of the Topkapi Saray, and head out across the narrow stretch of water that separates Europe from Asia.

The other passengers: beside me, a sad-eyed conscript, perhaps eighteen years old, in ill-fitting fatigues. Small moustache. Cropped hair. Gazes vacantly over the sea. Perhaps he is on his way to do his military service on the Kurdish front.

Opposite, a girl in a lilac headscarf and long Islamic raincoat. She is earnestly studying an English-language pharmacology textbook: ‘Chapter Two – Drug Permeation’.

On the bench at the back, an old labourer with toothbrush moustache and no teeth. Unbuttoned flies. Cigarette hangs from the side of his mouth.

Shady-looking character in tight T-shirt. Stubble chin. He clacks worry beads from the palm to the back of his hand, and darts furtive looks around him. Fare dodger?

Shaven-headed sailor in war-movie sailor’s suit. Thickset and swarthy. His cap is on his knee. Drags deeply on a cigarette, then loses interest and throws it overboard.

Moving from bench to bench: a blind violinist, led by his son who bangs a small wooden hand-drum. Both wear flat caps.

Various salesmen selling Coke, biros, potato peelers, Rolex watches (fake), Lacoste socks (fake), Ray-Ban sunglasses (also fake) and Bic cigarette lighters (apparently genuine, but of the poorest quality). I buy a Coke and it turns out to be a fake too: tastes of warm deodorant.

Halfway through the voyage another fearsome-looking headscarf-and-raincoat lady appears at the top of the stairwell and begins to harangue us all. I assume she is telling us to vote Refah, or ticking off those few middle-aged women who are not wearing a veil. But I’m quite wrong. Her daughter is in hospital and she needs money for medicine. The passengers give generously, especially the old labourer with the open flies, who extinguishes his cigarette to dig deep in his pockets.

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?

Strange things certainly went on in Edessa. In 578, the year in which John Moschos set off on his travels, a group of prominent Edessans – including the provincial governor – were caught red-handed performing a sacrifice to Zeus. Even worse, many Edessans openly professed themselves Manicheans, members of a cult so weird and inventive – even by local standards – that it was unclear whether Manicheans were heretical Christians, heretical Zoroastrians, Pagan survivals or a completely new religion altogether.

In Edessa it seems that any belief or combination of beliefs was possible – as long as it was inventive, unorthodox, deeply weird and extremely complicated. But what such a flourishing proliferation of different faiths highlights is the fact that it was only by a series of historical accidents – or, if you like, the action of the Holy Spirit – that the broad outlines of our own understanding of Christianity came to be seen as accepted and established, and that Manichean, Marcionite and Gnostic ideas came to be deemed heretical. After all, a theologian as intelligent as St Augustine of Hippo could spend several years as a champion of Manicheism before being won over to what we now regard as more acceptable beliefs. In the uncertain world of early Christianity it does not seem impossible that the Manichees or the Gnostics could have won the day, so that on Sundays we would now read the Gospel of Philip (which emphasises Jesus’s lustily red-blooded attachment to Mary Magdalene) and applaud the Serpent of the Garden of Eden. Churches would be dedicated not to ‘heretics’ like St John Chrysostom but rather to Manichean godlings such as the Great Nous and the Primal Man; reincarnation would be accepted without a second thought, and Messalian mucus-exorcisms would take place every Sunday after evensong.

For months before I set off on this journey, while waiting for my wife to recover from a burst appendix and the succession of operations which followed it, I sat by her hospital bed reading about the bizarre percolation of heresies that once flourished in the Edessan bazaars. But it was only this afternoon, coming out of the bazaar and stumbling by accident across the old Edessa museum, that I was actually able to picture the milieu in which this whirligig of strange theologies could flourish. For there in the garden of the museum lay the finely-carved stone images of late antique Edessans who may once have subscribed to some of the heresies that circulated so promiscuously in the city between the first and seventh centuries A.D.

On the left as you entered the sculpture garden stood a figure dressed like a Roman senator, complete but for his missing head. It was an Imperial Roman sculpture the double of which you might expect to see in any archaeological museum from Newcastle to Tunis, from Pergamum to Cologne. Classical superciliousness was expressed in every inch of the man’s bearing: one arm hung loose, the other was hitched up to his breast by the fold of his toga; one leg was pushed slightly forward, the shoulders were pulled slightly back. The robes fell easily over a slight but firm physique. The head may have been missing, but the figure’s bearing still managed to give the impression of effortless Imperial superiority, the same pose that was adopted by the late Victorians to portray their empire-builders (and whose statues, sometimes similarly headless, now lie tucked into similar corners of museums across India). Who was this toga-wearing plutocrat? A governor posted to the East from his home in Alexandria, Antioch or Byzantium? Some Imperial functionary’s ambitious nephew or promising younger son, sent briefly to the Persian frontier before being promoted to a senior position at the Imperial court?

Three feet to the right of the Roman, but representing a world many thousands of miles to the East, stood another male figure, this time in the dress of a Parthian noble: the long flowing shirt and baggy pantaloons, drawn in tight at the ankle, that are still worn with little alteration as the salvar kemise of modern Pakistan. Unlike the Roman, this Edessan nobleman was thickly bearded and his hair piled high over his head in a topknot. A sword lay buckled at his waist and he wore a pair of Central Asian ankle boots. The same figure could be seen in a hundred Kushan sculptures across northern India, Afghanistan and Iran; he stood here between the Tigris and the Euphrates, but he would have been equally at home beside the Oxus, or even further to the east, the Yamuna.

Near this Parthian warrior stood a third figure, who represents the typically Edessan synthesis of both the other sculptures. He was also wearing Parthian dress, but his face and hairstyle were Roman: cropped short, with a tightly clipped beard; moreover he did not wear Parthian boots but a pair of Roman sandals. He appeared lost in thought, and held not a sword but a book. He looked bourgeois, educated and highly literate, cross-cultural and probably multilingual. Here then was exactly the sort of character who could have fitted happily into one of those hybrid Edessan cults, their Christian skeleton fleshed out with Indian- or Persian-inspired mystical speculation.

Throughout the rest of the sculpture garden there was a vivid impression of the different cultures that converged at this Imperial crossroads: busts of grand Palmyrene ladies, perhaps courtiers of Zenobia, mysterious and semi-veiled, their identities hidden behind defaced Aramaic inscriptions; Hittite stelae – long lines of bearded men in peaked witches’ caps; semi-pagan Seljuk friezes of the Lord of the Beasts; Arabic tombstones; Byzantine hunting mosaics; Roman putti; early Christian fonts covered in tangles of lapid vine scrolls.

But perhaps most intriguing of all were those pieces which could have come from any of the great cultures that converged at this point. One sculpture in dark black Hauran basalt showed a magnificently winged female figure, her robes swirling like a Romanesque Christ, as if caught in some divine slipstream. Her navel was visible through her diaphanous robes; one breast was loose, the other covered; there was a terrific impression of forward movement. But her head was missing, and now no one will ever know whether she was a Roman Victory, a Parthian goddess, a Manichean messenger of Darkness or simply a Gnostic archangel.

I slammed the logbook shut.

Night had fallen. I was still sitting in a tea house near the museum; it was hot and muggy, and mosquitoes were whining around the sulphurous yellow lights of the streetlamps. In the background there was the incessant burr of cicadas. Tucking my notes under my arm, I set off back towards the hotel.

On the way I stopped in at the Ulu Jami, which at the time of John Moschos, before its conversion into a mosque, was the cathedral of the Orthodox. Now all that remains of the Byzantine period is an arch, a few fragments of the east wall and the base of the octagonal minaret, once the cathedral tower.

As I was trying to see where the Byzantine masonry ended and the Turkish masonry began, the old blind muezzin came tap-tapping along the path from the prayer hall. Unaware that I was in his way, he brushed past me and, arriving at the door at the base of the minaret, fumbled as he tried to get the right key into the keyhole. Eventually there was a click, and soon I heard the tap-tapping as he wound his way up the stairs.

When he got to the top, the muezzin switched on the microphone a little before he was ready to sing the call to prayer. The sound of his breathless wheezes echoed out over the rooftops of Urfa. Down in the courtyard, under the fir trees, the faithful gathered, several of the old men seating themselves on the upended Byzantine capitals to exchange gossip before going in to pray.

Then the azan began: a deep, nasal, forceful sound, echoing out into the blackness of the night: Allaaaaaaaaah-hu-Akbar! The words came faster and faster, deeper, louder, more and more resonant, and from all over Urfa people began to stream into the mosque. The call went on for ten minutes, until the prayer hall was full and the courtyard deserted again. The blind muezzin stopped. There was a moment of silence, filled only by the whirring cicadas.

Then the muezzin let out a great heartfelt wheeze of a sigh.

Back at the hotel, I put a call through to the Monastery of Mar Gabriel. By good fortune it was Afrem Budak who answered. Afrem was a layman who had lived in the monastery for many years and assisted the monks. We had corresponded, had friends in common, and most important of all, Afrem spoke fluent English.

I told him I hoped to be with him in three days’ time, on Thursday night, the eighteenth. He said the road was open, but warned me to be careful. Apparently since the PKK raid I had read about in the Turkish Daily News, the army had been out in force. There should be no problem, he said, as long as I was off the roads by 4 p.m., when the Peshmerga guerrilla units begin coming down from the mountains for the night. Afrem also advised that I take the longer route to the monastery, via Midyat: apparently the short cut via Nisibis is unsafe, being often and easily ambushed.

Unsettled by all this, I went and had a Turkish bath in a subterranean vault next to the hotel. For forty minutes I sat in the steam being pummelled black and blue by a half-naked Turk in a loincloth: my legs were twisted in their sockets, my knuckles cracked and my neck half-dislocated from my torso. It was extremely uncomfortable, but I suppose it did at least succeed in taking my mind off the coming day’s journey.

URFA BUS STATION, LUNCHTIME, 15 AUGUST

A perfect morning. A storm during the night cleared the air, and it has dawned fresh and cool and clear: a blue sky, a gentle breeze and the whole town looking renewed and refreshed; a faint scent of almond blossom after the rain.

In the early-morning cool I walked through the slowly waking town. At the end of the bazaar, above the eggbox semi-domes of the baths, rose the walls of the ancient citadel, and nestling below these crags, surrounded by a rich thicket of willows, mulberries and cypresses, lay the Fishponds of Abraham, Urfa’s most extraordinary survival.

Few of the heresies which flourished in late antique Edessa outlasted the early centuries of the Christian era. Suppressed by the fiercely Orthodox Byzantine Emperors of the late sixth century, then extinguished by the arrival of Islam, a few last embers of Gnostic thought crossed the Mediterranean to reach the southern shores of France in the eleventh century, where they inspired the Cathars – until the Cathars were in turn massacred by the ‘crusade’ of Simon de Montfort.

Yet some vague memories of these strange cults do linger on in some of the more inaccessible corners of Mesopotamia. In the mountains around the upper Orontes, it is said that the heretical Nusairi Muslims still profess doctrines that derive from the neo-Platonic paganism of late antiquity. Similarly, on the lower Tigris near Baghdad, a secretive sect called the Mandeans claim to be the last followers of John the Baptist, and still practise a religion that represents a dim survival of some early Gnostic sect. There is nothing like that left in Edessa, which is now solidly Sunni Muslim; nevertheless the fishponds do represent a last living link with the city’s heterodox past.

The principal pond is a long, brown, rectangular pool fed by its own superabundant spring. Up and down its edge walk tribesmen taking the air with their womenfolk – great walking tents who stagger along in the midday heat, a few steps to the rear of their husbands, smothered under huge flaps of muslin.

On one side of the pool lies an elegant honey-coloured Ottoman mosque from which springs an arcade of delicate arches; on the other is a shady tea garden, surrounded by a screen of tamarisks and lulled by the coo of rock doves and the rhythmic clatter of backgammon pieces. I took a seat and ordered a cup of Turkish coffee; it arrived on a round steel tray accompanied by a saucer of melon seeds and a plate of sweet green grapes. I nibbled the seeds and waited to see what would happen at the ponds.

Every so often one of the tea drinkers would walk up to a boy sitting outside the mosque, buy a packet of herbs from him, and throw a pellet into the pool. Immediately there would be an almost primeval churning of the waters – a horrible convulsion of fin and tail and hungry yellow eyes – as the carp jumped for their food, jaws open, tails flailing.

Close-up, the fish looked like miniature sharks, with slippery brown-gilt scales, great thick bodies and cavernous mouths. They streaked greedily through the water, tails slashing as they leapt to grab the pellet – terrifying the smaller fish, who did their best to swim as far away as they could for fear they might themselves become targets of their larger cousins’ appetites. Some of the slower movers were blotchy with bites and the white fungus infections that had taken root in the gashes. Cannibalism is apparently the only danger these fish face, for they are held to be sacred, and believed to be the descendants of fish once loved by Abraham; it is said that anyone who eats them will immediately go blind.

An old imam from the mosque was drinking a glass of tea at a table beside mine. One of his eyes was clouded with a trachoma, and when he smiled he revealed a wide horizon of gum. He invited me to sit, and I asked him about the legend of the creation of the pool.

Father Abraham, said the imam, was born in a cave on the citadel mount, where he lay hidden from its castellan, Nimrod the Hunter. Nimrod nevertheless tracked down Abraham’s cradle, and using the two pagan pillars on the acropolis as a catapult, he propelled the baby into a furnace at the bottom of the hill. Luckily the Almighty, realising that his divine plan for mankind was in danger, intervened at this point and promptly turned the furnace into a pool full of carp. The carp, obedient to divine promptings, came together to form a sort of lifeboat. They caught the baby and carried him to the poolside. In his gratitude, Abraham promised that anyone who ate the carp would go blind.

I heard several other versions of the story while in Urfa, most of which tended to contradict each other in the details, but which all agreed on the broad outlines of the tale, one way or another linking Abraham, the citadel, the pond and the carp, with a walk-on part for Nimrod the Hunter. While the Book of Genesis does quite specifically mention Abraham’s visit to Haran, only twenty miles from here, quite why Nimrod should turn up in Urfa is a mystery. His brief appearance in the Bible after the Flood in no way links him either to Abraham or to Urfa, yet the imam firmly insisted that it was Nimrod who founded the town, and raised its walls and palace: a bizarre dogleg from both Biblical and Koranic tradition.

But the true history of the fishponds as disentangled by historians is no less bizarre than the versions I heard by the pool. Apparently the ponds may well go back to the era of Abraham, and even the taboo on the consumption of the fish seems to be a remarkable survival from ancient Mesopotamia. For historians are unanimous that the origins of the fishponds are not linked to Islam, nor even to early Christian or Jewish legend. Instead it seems almost certain that they are a relic of one of the most ancient cults in the Middle East, that of the Syrian fertility goddess Attargatis.

The second-century writer Lucian of Samosata, the only reliable ancient source for the goddess’s cult, describes the worship of Attargatis as being centred on the adoration of water – naturally enough for a fertility cult that grew up in a desert. In the goddess’s temples, statues of mermaids stood on the edge of ponds in which – then as now – swam fish of immense size. The fish were never eaten and were so tame, claimed Lucian, that they came when summoned by name. Attargatis’s altar lay in the middle of the lake, in which devotees used to swim and perform erotic ceremonies in honour of the Goddess of Love and Fertility.

When Edessa was converted to Christianity, the new religion took on much of the colouring of pre-existing pagan cults in the town. The priests of Attargatis used to emasculate themselves; as late as the fifth century A.D. the Christian Bishop of Edessa was still frantically trying to stop his priests from taking knives to their own genitalia. In the same way, astonishingly, the fishponds seem to have succeeded in making the transition from being sacred to an orgiastic pagan fertility cult to being holy to Christianity instead.

In 384 Egeria, the abbess of a Spanish nunnery, arrived in Edessa on her epic pilgrimage to Jerusalem and was invited for a poolside picnic by the bishop. Had she read Lucian’s description of the fertility ceremonies performed by the fishponds she might have suspected the bishop’s intentions. As it was, clearly ignorant of the ponds’ pagan origins, she recounts that they were miraculously created by God and were ‘full of fish such as I had never seen before, that is fish of such great size, of such great lustre’.

After the Arab conquest the fishponds continued to attract reverence, but under a new Islamic guise; Islam thus became the third faith to which these fish have been sacred. The name of the religion and the sex of the deity has altered with the centuries, but the fish have remained sacred age after age, culture after culture. It is a quite extraordinary example of continuity despite surface change: as remarkable as finding Egyptians still building pyramids, or a sect of modern Greeks still worshipping at the shrine of Zeus.

In my reading I have found only one reference to these sacred fish ever being eaten. This occurs in the imperious dispatches of the Rev. George Percy Badger, an Anglican missionary who passed through Edessa in 1824 while attempting to persuade the local Christians that what they really wanted to do was to abandon two thousand years of tradition and join the Anglican communion. He was not impressed by Edessa. The Ottoman troops there were ‘a cowardly set of poltroons on horseback’; the women ‘were excessively ignorant, untidy and not over clean in their persons or habits’; and as elsewhere in the Levant there was a ‘severe lack of English clergy … I had ample opportunity to explain the doctrines and discipline of our church, of which they were profoundly ignorant … and they seemed pleased when I promised to send them a stock of books on our ritual.’ There was not even any rhubarb to be had in the Edessa bazaars, the one thing which recommended Diyarbakir to Badger, for there at least ‘Mrs Badger could not resist her home associations’ and had made a ‘good rhubarb pudding’.

In Edessa Badger visited the fishponds. Dismissing Muslim superstition he commented that: ‘the Christians often partake of the forbidden dainty, the fish being easily secured in the streams which flow from the pond through the gardens. They generally cook them with a wine sauce,’ notes Badger approvingly, ‘and declare them excellent.’

I climbed to the citadel and looked down over Urfa. On every side the hills were brown and parched. It was nearly noon, and beyond the town’s limits nothing moved except the shimmering heatwaves and, in the distance, a single spiral of wheeling vultures. But the town itself was a riot of greens, reds and oranges: trees and gardens backing onto flat-topped Turkish houses, with the whole vista broken by the vertical punctuation of a hundred minarets. Some of these were the conventional Turkish pencil-shape, others were more unusual: the Ulu Jami retained its Byzantine octagon, while a square campanile rising above the fishponds with four double-arched horseshoe openings may once also have been the bell-tower of an early medieval church.

But there are no functioning churches in Edessa any more. Although legend has it that Edessa was the first town outside Palestine to accept Christianity – according to Eusebius, its King Abgar heard about Jesus from the Edessan Jews and corresponded with Him, accepting the new religion a year before Christ’s Passion – there has been no Christian community here since the First World War. For in 1915 the governor began ‘deporting’ the Armenians: rounding them up in groups, marching them out of town with a ‘bodyguard’ of Ottoman irregulars, then murdering them in the discreet emptiness of the desert. Fearing this treatment would be extended to the rest of the Christian community, the two thousand remaining Christian families in the town barricaded themselves into their quarter and successfully defended themselves for several weeks. But eventually the Ottoman troops broke through the makeshift defences. Some Christians escaped; a few were spared. More were massacred.

On my way back to the hotel I passed the old Armenian cathedral. Between 1915 and last year it was a fire station; now, as I discovered, it is being converted into a mosque. The altar has been dismantled, leaving the apse empty. A mihrab has been punched into the south wall. A new carpet covers the floor; outside lies a pile of old ecclesiastical woodwork destined for firewood. Two labourers in baggy pantaloons were at work on the façade, balanced on a rickety lattice of scaffolding, plastering the decorative stonework over the principal arch. I wondered if they knew the history of the building, so I asked them if it was an old mosque.

‘No,’ one of the workmen shouted down. ‘It’s a church.’

‘Greek?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘Armenian.’

‘Are there any Armenians left in Urfa?’

‘No,’ he said, smiling broadly and laughing. His friend made a throat-cutting gesture with his trowel.

‘They’ve all gone,’ said the first man, smiling.

‘Where to?’

The two looked at each other: ‘Israel,’ said the first man, after a pause. He was grinning from ear to ear.

‘I thought Israel was for Jews,’ I said.

‘Jews, Armenians,’ he replied, shrugging his shoulders. ‘Same thing.’

The two men went back to work, cackling with laughter as they did so.

HOTEL KARAVANSARAY, DIYARBAKIR, 16 AUGUST

A bleak journey: mile after mile of blinding white heat and arid, barren grasslands, blasted flat and colourless by the incessant sun. Occasionally a small stone village clustered on top of a tell. Otherwise the plains were completely uninhabited.

Diyarbakir, a once-famous Silk Route city on the banks of the River Tigris, was announced by nothing more exotic than a ring of belching smokestacks. The old town lies to one side, on a steep hill above the Tigris. It is still ringed by the original Byzantine fortifications built by Julian the Apostate in the austere local black basalt, and their sombre, somehow unnatural darkness gives them a grim and almost diabolic air.

The Byzantines knew Diyarbakir as ‘the Black’, and it has a history worthy of its sinister fortifications. Between the fourth and seventh centuries it passed back and forth between Byzantine, Persian and Arab armies. Each time it changed hands its inhabitants were massacred or deported. In 502 A.D. it fell to the Persians after the Zoroastrian troops found a group of monks drunk at their posts on the walls; after the subsequent massacre, no fewer than eight thousand dead bodies had to be carried out of the gates.

Today the city retains its bloody reputation. It is now the centre of the Turkish government’s ruthless attempt to crush the current Kurdish insurgency, and indeed anyone who speaks out, however moderately, for Kurdish rights. In Istanbul journalists had told me that Diyarbakir crawled with Turkish secret police; apparently in the last four years there have been more than five hundred unsolved murders and ‘disappearances’ in the town. One correspondent said that shortly after his last visit, the editor of a Diyarbakir newspaper who had given him a slightly outspoken interview had an ‘accident’, tumbling to his death from the top floor of his newspaper offices; after this the political atmosphere became so tense that local newspapers could only be bought from police stations. No one, said the journalist, dared to speak to him, other than one shopkeeper who whispered the old Turkish proverb: ‘May the snake that does not bite me live for a thousand years.’

As we drove, I wondered if my taxi driver would prove equally tongue-tied, so I asked him if things were still as bad as they had been. ‘There is no problem,’ he replied automatically. ‘In Turkey everything is very peaceful.’

As we passed along the black city walls, I noticed a crowd gathering on the other side of the crash-barrier. Armed policemen in flak jackets and sunglasses were jumping out of jeeps and patrol cars and running towards the crowd. I asked the driver what was happening. He pulled in and asked a passer-by, an old Kurd in a dusty pinstripe jacket. The two exchanged anxious words in Kurdish, then he drove on.

‘What did he say?’

‘Don’t worry,’ said the driver. ‘It’s nothing.’

‘Something must have happened.’

We pulled up in front of a huge green armoured car that was parked immediately in front of my hotel; from the top of its glossy metallic carapace protruded the proboscis of a heavy machine gun.

‘It’s nothing,’ repeated the driver. ‘The police have just shot somebody. Everyone is calm. There is no problem.’

That evening I found my way through back alleys to Diyarbakir’s last remaining Armenian church.

In the mid-nineteenth century the town had had one of the largest Armenian communities in Anatolia. Like the Jews of Eastern Europe, the Armenians ran the businesses, stocked the shops and lent the money. Like the East European Jews, their prominence led to resentment and, eventually, to a horrific backlash.

In 1895, during the first round of massacres, 2,500 Armenians were clubbed to death, shut up in their quarter like rabbits in a sealed burrow. When the English clergyman the Rev. W.A. Wigram visited the town in 1913 he reported seeing ‘the doors still splintered and patched in the houses which were stormed by the rioters … and the ghastly bald patch in the midst of the city where the Armenian quarter was razed to the ground and has never been re-erected to this day’. He warned that further massacres were an ever-present danger; and his prophecy was proved horribly accurate only two years later. During the First World War the sadistic Ottoman Governor of Diyarbakir, Dr Reşid Bey, was responsible for some of the very worst atrocities against Christians – both Armenian and Syrian Orthodox – to take place anywhere in the entire Ottoman Empire: men had horse-shoes nailed to their feet; women were gang-raped. One Arab source close to those who carried out the 1915 massacres in Diyarbakir Province estimated the number of murdered Christians across the governorate as 570,000: a high, but not entirely unbelievable, estimate.

Yet despite all this, a handful of Armenians were said still to cling on in the city, and my architectural gazetteer, written in 1987, said that one Armenian church was still functioning. I found the compound easily enough, and was astonished by the size and magnificence of the church: it was inlaid with fine sculptural panels and looked large enough to contain maybe a thousand people. It was only when I looked through the grilles on the window that I realised the church was now a ruin. Holy pictures still decorated the walls; a gilt iconostasis still separated nave from sanctuary; a book stand still rested on the high altar. All that was missing was the roof.

I found a family of Kurdish refugees huddled in the lee of the west porch, cooking a cauldron of soup on an open fire. I asked if they knew what had happened, but they shook their heads and explained that they had only been sheltering there for a few days. They directed me to the door of a house at the back of the compound.

Inside lived two Kurdish brothers, Fesih and Rehman, and in a little annexe to one side, a very old lady called Lucine. Lucine was an Armenian. One of the brothers went to get tea, and I tried to ask the old lady what had happened to the church. She didn’t reply. I asked again. It was Fesih who answered.

‘It fell in last winter,’ he said. ‘There was no one left to look after it. A heavy fall of snow brought the roof down.’

‘Does she not like to talk about this?’ I asked.

‘She can’t speak,’ said Fesih. ‘She hasn’t said a word for years. Since her husband was killed.’

Lucine smiled absent-mindedly and fingered a cross around her neck. She rearranged her headscarf. Then she walked off.

‘Her mind is dead,’ said Fesih.

‘We look after her now,’ said his brother, returning with three glasses of tea. ‘We give her food and whatever else she needs.’

‘What about her family?’

‘They are all dead.’

‘And other Armenians?’

‘There are none,’ said Fesih. ‘There used to be thousands of them. Even when I was small there were very many. I remember them streaming out of here every Sunday, led by their priest. But not now. She is the last.’

We talked for twenty minutes, but Fesih would not let me stay to finish my tea.

‘You must go now,’ he said firmly. ‘It is not good to be on the streets of Diyarbakir after nightfall. It’s getting dark. You must hurry. Go now.’

Seeing what had happened in the last few months to the Armenian churches of Edessa and Diyarbakir – one in the process of being converted into a mosque, the other collapsing into a state of roofless ruination – reminded me of my first encounter with the increasingly rapid disappearance of Turkey’s Armenian heritage.

In the summer of 1987, a year after following Marco Polo’s route from Jerusalem to Xanadu, I returned to eastern Turkey to fill out my notes on the region, before setting about writing a book on the journey. The previous year I had spent a happy afternoon in Sivas, admiring the old Seljuk colleges there, and had noticed that in front of the Shifaye Medresse there lay a most unusual graveyard where tombstones inscribed in Ottoman Turkish, Armenian and Greek were all jostled together side by side.

On reflection I decided it must actually have been a lapidarium, or sculpture garden, rather than an ecumenical graveyard, for at no period have Muslims and Christians ever been buried side by side. But whatever it was, when I returned the following year the Armenian stones had all disappeared. The removal of perhaps fifteen heavy slabs and memorials would have been a considerable operation, and it had clearly taken place very recently, for the grass was still depressed and discoloured where they had rested; but when I asked the custodian where they had gone, he resolutely denied that any such stones had ever existed. I could probably have persuaded myself that I was mistaken and that the stones were my own invention, had I not actually written quite full descriptions of them in my notebooks the previous year. It was all very strange.

A week later I left Sivas and went to see a cousin who was working as an agricultural engineer in Erzerum, attempting to reintroduce silk farming to the region. Over dinner one night I happened to mention what I had seen, whereupon my cousin said that he had had a similar experience himself only the previous month. He told me that for four years he had been in the habit of taking an annual fishing holiday in the village of Maydanlar in the hills to the north of Tortum. On previous occasions he had admired a magnificent collection of early medieval Armenian cross-stones (known as khatchkars) which lay piled up near the village well; but this year the stones had all vanished. When he asked the villagers what had happened to them they became visibly nervous and would not tell him; it was only when he was alone with one old man that he learned what he believed to be the real story. Government officials from Erzerum had come through the village the previous month; they had asked the villagers for the whereabouts of any Armenian antiquities, and then proceeded to smash the stones up. Afterwards they had carefully removed the rubble.

I had heard other similar stories of the mysterious disappearance of Armenian remains, and the following year, working as a journalist on the Independent, I was able to investigate the subject in some detail. The trail led from the Armenian community in Paris, through Anatolia, to the library of the Armenian community in Jerusalem. By the end I had amassed a body of evidence which showed the alarming speed at which the beautiful, ancient and architecturally important Armenian churches of Anatolia were simply vanishing from the face of the earth.

An incomplete inventory of actively used Armenian churches compiled by the Armenian Patriarchate of Constantinople in 1914, immediately before the genocide, recorded 210 Armenian monasteries, seven hundred monastic churches and 1,639 parish churches, a total of 2,549 ecclesiastical buildings. A 1974 survey of the 913 buildings whose locations were still known found that 464 had completely disappeared, 252 were in ruins and only 197 remained in any sort of sound condition. Since then there had been several new discoveries, but the condition of most of the others had continued to deteriorate dramatically. Many still standing in 1974 had begun to crumble, while some extremely beautiful buildings had collapsed and completely disappeared.

There was nothing very sinister in the cause of the condition of many of the buildings. Some had been damaged by earthquakes; and the explosion of Turkey’s population had caused a demand for building materials which the churches readily supplied; others had been fatally undermined by Turkish peasants digging for ‘Armenian gold’, the legendary El Dorado of riches supposedly buried by the Armenians before they were ‘deported’ in 1915.

Nevertheless it was clear that the Turkish antiquity authorities had not exactly gone out of their way to stop the Armenian monuments from falling into decay. During the 1980s numerous Seljuk and Ottoman mosques and caravanserais had been restored and consolidated, but this treatment had not been extended to one single Armenian church. The Armenian monastery on the island of Aghtamar in Lake Van, arguably the most famous monument in eastern Anatolia, had belatedly been given a guardian, but this had not stopped the building’s decay: five of the main sculptures – including the famous image of Adam and Eve – had been defaced since the guardian’s appointment, and there had been no attempt to consolidate the building in any way. One British architectural historian I talked to maintained that there was a ‘systematic bias’ in what the Turks restored or preserved.

Moreover it was clear that academics – both Turkish and foreign – were strongly discouraged from working on Armenian archaeological sites or writing Armenian history. A British archaeologist (who, like almost everyone I talked to on this subject, begged to remain nameless) told me, ‘It is simply not possible to work on the Armenians. Officially they do not exist and have never done so. If you try to get permission to dig an Armenian site it will be withheld, and if you go ahead without permission you will be prosecuted.’ The truth of this was graphically illustrated in 1975 when the distinguished French art historian J.M. Thierry was arrested while making a plan of an Armenian church near Van. He was taken to police headquarters where he was fiercely interrogated for three days and three nights. He was released on bail and managed to escape the country. In his absence he was sentenced to three months’ hard labour.

Fear of this sort of thing severely restricts the investigation of Armenian remains and leads to a kind of selective blindness in those scholars whose professional careers demand that they continue to work in Turkey. In 1965 plans were announced for the building of a huge hydro-electric scheme centred on the Keban dam, near Elazig in the south-east of the country. The artificial lake this created threatened a number of important monuments, and a team of international scholars co-operated in the rescue operation.

Five buildings were of particular importance: a pair of fine Ottoman mosques, a small Syrian Orthodox church, and two Armenian churches, one of which contained exceptional tenth-century frescoes. The rescue operation is recorded in the Middle East Technical University (Ankara) Keban Project Proceedings. The report describes how the two mosques were moved stone by stone to a new site. The Syrian Orthodox church was surveyed and excavated. The two Armenian churches were completely ignored. Although the most ancient and perhaps the most interesting of the threatened monuments, they did not even receive a mention in the report. They now lie for ever submerged beneath the waters of the lake.

Those who flout the unspoken rules on Armenian history still find themselves facing almost ludicrously severe penalties. In early December 1986 Hilda Hulya Potuoglu was arrested by the Turkish security police and charged with ‘making propaganda with intent to destroy or weaken national feelings’. The prosecutor of the Istanbul State Security deemed that her offence merited severe punishment, and asked for between a seven-and-a-half- and fifteen-year jail sentence. Her crime was to edit the Turkish edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, in which was included a footnote reading: ‘During the Crusades the mountainous regions of Cilicia were under the hegemony of the Armenian Cilician Kingdom.’ It would be impossible to find a respectable academic anywhere in the world who could possibly take issue with the historical accuracy of this statement, but in the view of the prosecutor, Potuoglu was guilty of distorting the facts on a politically sensitive issue: the Britannica quickly joined the index of forbidden books, along with such other politically dubious publications as The Times Atlas of World History and The National Geographic Atlas of the World.

During the 1970s and early 1980s it was clear that the censorship of publications dealing with the Armenians had been dramatically stepped up. The reason for this was the rise of ASALA – the Armenian Secret Army for the Liberation of Armenia – which in the early eighties began attracting international attention with a series of terrorist attacks, directed mainly at Turkish diplomats. The resulting publicity succeeded in bringing the issue of the Armenian genocide back onto the political agenda. This culminated in 1987 in the passing of a resolution in the European Parliament which recognised that the refusal of Turkey to acknowledge the Armenian genocide was an ‘insurmountable obstacle’ to the consideration of its bid to join the European Community.

The Turkish government argued that although some Armenians may have been killed in disturbances or deportations during the First World War, so were many Turks. Moreover, the Turks insisted, there were never very many Armenians in Anatolia in the first place, and the numbers supposedly massacred – around one and a half million – actually exceeded the total Armenian population of the Ottoman Empire. In 1989 the previously classified Ottoman archives relating to the period were opened up to a select group of Turkish scholars and combed for material to prove the Turkish case. The Turkish Foreign Minister claimed that when the process of declassification is complete, ‘allegations of an Armenian massacre will be no more than a matter of political abuse’.

None of this, of course, created a particularly favourable environment for the conservation of the principal legacy left by the Armenians in Turkey, the hundreds of Armenian churches and gravestones which still littered eastern Anatolia. It is probably no coincidence that it was at exactly this time that reports of deliberate Turkish government destruction of Armenian remains began to multiply. The stories were always difficult to corroborate, for what witnesses there were in these remote regions tended to be illiterate Turkish peasants, and after the destruction of a building it is extremely difficult to distinguish what is alleged to be dynamiting from what could well be earthquake damage.

There are however a small number of intriguing incidents which are difficult to explain away. At Osk Vank, for example, the village kaymakam (headman) told J. M. Thierry that a government official from Erzerum had come to the village in 1985. The official asked for help in destroying the church, but the kaymakam refused, saying it was far too useful: his people used it as a garage, granary, stable and football pitch.

Another case concerns the once magnificent group of churches sitting astride a deep canyon near Khitzkonk, south-east of Kars. In photographs taken at the beginning of the century, five superb churches can be seen. After the massacres the area was closed off to visitors, and was not reopened until the 1960s. When scholars returned, only one church, the eleventh-century rotunda of St Sergius, was still standing; the other four were no more than one or two courses high. Two had been completely levelled and the stones removed. The peasants told of border guards arriving with high explosives. More reliable witness to what had happened was contained in the remaining building: the cupola was untouched, but the side walls had been blown outwards in four places where small charges appeared to have been laid.

Certainly Armenian scholars are convinced that a deliberate campaign is under way to destroy all evidence of the Armenians’ long presence in eastern Anatolia. As my friend George Hintlian, curator of the Armenian Museum in Jerusalem, put it: ‘You can attribute disappearing churches to earthquakes, robbers, Kurds, Islamic fundamentalists, men from outer space or anything else you care to blame. The end result is exactly the same. Every passing year another Armenian church disappears and for this the Turkish authorities can only be pleased. They have already changed all the Armenian village names in eastern Anatolia; the churches are all we have left. Soon there will be virtually no evidence that the Armenians were ever in Turkey. We will have become a historical myth.’

THE MONASTERY OF MAR GABRIEL, TUR ABDIN, 18 AUGUST

Mas’ud, the driver I had been recommended, turned up at the hotel at seven in the morning.

We left Diyarbakir by the Mardin Gate and drove down into the brilliant green of the river valley. The Tigris, at its lowest in midsummer, was no wider than the Tweed at Berwick. Its banks were marshy with reeds and lined by poplars and cedars; beyond stretched fields of ripe corn. A fisherman on a flat skiff was spearing fish, like the gold figure of Tutankhamen in the Cairo museum; nearby children were wading in the shallows.

A little downstream, a black basalt bridge several hundred yards wide spanned the river. The central piers – built of great blocks of stones each the size of a coffin – were early Byzantine; the outer ones were more delicate, the work of Diyarbakir’s Arab conquerors: the fine kufic inscriptions they carved to record their work still decorated the upper registers. I had just got out my camera to take a picture of the bridge, with the grim black bastions of Diyarbakir crowning the hill in the background, when Mas’ud hissed at me to stop: ‘The men in the white car are plainclothes security police,’ he said.

I looked where he was indicating. A little behind us a white Turkish-made Fiat had pulled in opposite the fishing skiff. The passenger door was open and a burly Turk was standing looking at us. ‘They followed us down from the hotel. If you photograph the bridge they may arrest you.’

I was unsure whether Mas’ud was imagining things, but still put the camera away and got back in the car. We drove on; the white car stayed where it was.

The road followed the slowly meandering banks of the Tigris; soon the walls of Diyarbakir slipped out of view behind a curve in the river. We passed a ford where a shepherd was leading a string of long-haired Angora goats over the rushing water; nearby a party of peasants were dressing a vineyard full of young vines. On either bank the land was rich and fertile; above the sky was bright blue, and a light breeze cooled the already intense heat of the sun. It was difficult to imagine that this peaceful, plentiful countryside held any threat to anyone.

Then, turning a corner, we saw a barricade blocking the road in front of us. A group of men in ragged khaki uniforms, some topped with chequered keffiyehs, stood behind a line of petrol cans. Some held pistols, others snub-nosed sub-machine guns; a few held assault rifles.

‘Police?’ I asked.

‘Inshallah, village guards,’ said Mas’ud, slowing down. ‘Just hope it’s not PKK. You can’t tell at this distance. Either way, hide that notebook.’

We slowed down. The men walked towards us, guns levelled. They were village guards. The leader exchanged a few words with Mas’ud and waved us through without checking our documents. But at a second checkpoint a few miles later we were not so lucky. The commando at the barricade indicated that we should pull in. We did as we were instructed and parked beside a large single-storeyed building.

The building had once been a police station but had now been taken over by the army. Troops were milling around in full camouflage. To one side, in front of a fortified sandbag emplacement, stood a six-wheeled Russian armoured personnel carrier; on the other were two light tanks and four or five Land-Rovers with their canvas back-covers removed and heavy machine guns mounted over the cabins.

The commando took our documents – Mas’ud’s ID and my passport – and left us waiting in a corridor, saying he had to get permission from his superior before we could proceed. After half an hour a telephone rang, and shortly afterwards a group of maybe twenty soldiers jumped into the Land-Rovers and set off at speed. We continued to stand in the corridor.

Eventually we were admitted to a room where an officer was sitting behind a desk. He spoke a little English, told us to sit down, and offered us tea. Then he asked me what I was doing and where I was going. I told him my destination, but following the advice of the journalists in Istanbul, I did not produce my press card, which I kept in my pocket. The officer scribbled down a few details, repeated the advice that we should be off the road by four at the latest, and handed back our documents.

‘Be careful,’ he said.

We saw what he meant a few miles later. By the side of the road lay the fire-blackened hulk of a car. It had been burned the previous week, said Mas’ud, at a PKK night-time roadblock.

Soon after we passed the skeleton of the car, the road left the Tigris and the landscape began to dry out. The vines disappeared and were replaced by fields of sunflowers; a few coppices filled the valley bottoms. Then they too vanished and we entered a plain of rocky, barren scrub. A convoy of six APCs passed us from the opposite direction. We drove on, passing a succession of roadblocks and more armoured convoys.

Shortly before lunchtime we drove through Mardin, then turned off the main road onto a track; over a hillock, surrounded by silver-grey slopes of olive groves, rose the unmistakable silhouette of the melon-ribbed cupolas of Deir el-Zaferan, the Saffron Monastery.

Until the First World War, Deir el-Zaferan was the headquarters of the Syrian Orthodox Church, the ancient Church of Antioch. The Syrian Orthodox split off from the Byzantine mainstream because they refused to accept the theological decisions of the Council of Chalcedon in 451 A.D. The divorce took place, however, along an already established linguistic fault-line, separating the Greek-speaking Byzantines of western Anatolia from those to the east who still spoke Aramaic, the language of Christ. Severely persecuted as heretical Monophysites by the Byzantine Emperors, the Syrian Orthodox Church hierarchy retreated into the inaccessible shelter of the barren hills of the Tur Abdin. There, far from the centres of power, three hundred Syrian Orthodox monasteries successfully maintained the ancient Antiochene liturgies in the original Aramaic. But remoteness led to marginalisation, and the Church steadily dwindled both in numbers and in importance. By the end of the nineteenth century only 200,000 Suriani were left in the Middle East, most of them concentrated around the Patriarchal seat at Deir el-Zaferan.

The twentieth century proved as cataclysmic for the Suriani as it had been for the Armenians. During the First World War death throes of the Ottoman Empire, starvation, deportation and massacre decimated the already dwindling Suriani population. Then, in 1924, Ataturk decapitated the remnants of the community by expelling the Syrian Orthodox Patriarch; he took with him the ancient library of Deir el-Zaferan, and eventually settled with it in Damascus. Finally, in 1978, the Turkish authorities sealed the community’s fate by summarily closing the monastery’s Aramaic school.

From 200,000 in the last century, the size of the community fell to around seventy thousand by 1920. By 1990 there were barely four thousand Suriani left in the whole region; now there are around nine hundred, plus about a dozen monks and nuns, spread over the five extant monasteries. One village with an astonishing seventeen churches now only has one inhabitant, its elderly priest. In Deir el-Zaferan two monks rattle around in the echoing expanse of sixth-century buildings, more caretakers of a religious relic than fragments of a living monastic community.

Nineteenth-century travellers who visited Deir el-Zaferan often thought it looked more like a fortress than a monastery, and they had a point. Standing under the great ochre battlements, I hammered on the thick, heavily reinforced beaten-metal gate while Mas’ud locked the car. After a few minutes a young monk’s bearded face peered suspiciously at us through an arrow-slit. Soon afterwards there was a rattling of bolts and chains and the gate swung open. Abouna Symeon stared at us with amazement.

‘You had no trouble getting here?’ he said in English.

I described our journey.

‘Things are very bad at the moment,’ he said. ‘We have not had any visitors for many months. No one will come. There is no security in these mountains.’

Abouna Symeon led us up a dark gallery which opened into a wide and shady cloister. In the bright light of the cloister-garth a flat-capped (but barefoot) gardener was watering pots full of geraniums and anemones. To his side rose an astonishing arcaded portico, supported on two deeply cut pilasters rising to a pair of elaborate Corinthian capitals. It was late Roman, yet, astonishingly, it was still employed for its original purpose, and was inhabited by the direct spiritual descendants of the original builders. Here bands of classical acanthus decoration, of a quality equal to the finest Byzantine sculpture surviving in Istanbul, covered sanctuaries in which the Aramaic liturgy was still chanted, unchanged from the day they were built. It was odd to think that these barren and remote hills, now terrorised by troops and guerrillas, and home only to poor and illiterate peasant farmers, were once places of considerable sophistication.

‘It is beautiful,’ said Abouna Symeon, coming up behind me. ‘But for how much longer? Maybe the next time you come sheep will be grazing here.’

‘Is that likely?’

‘All our people are leaving. One by one our monasteries and our Christian villages are emptying. In the last five years – what? – twenty villages around here have been deserted. Perhaps nine are left; maybe ten. None has more than twenty houses. If the door were open – if the rest of our people could get visas for the West – they would all go tomorrow. No one wants to bring up their children in this atmosphere. They want to go to Holland, Sweden, Belgium, France. Not many years are left for us here.’

We walked through the cloister. At one end sat another monk, a much older man, wearing the characteristic Syrian Orthodox black hood embroidered with thirteen white crosses representing Jesus and his apostles. He was bent over a desk, peering shortsightedly at the page in front of him, and in his hand he held a pen. As we drew near I saw that he was writing in Aramaic with a thick, broad-nibbed pen. I was just about to introduce myself when he looked up.

‘You are Mr William?’

‘Yes …’

‘And this is Mr Mas’ud?’

‘Yes. How … ?’

‘The police telephoned from Mardin five minutes ago to see if you had arrived. They said we should phone them when you got here.’

‘They followed us from the first checkpoint as far as Mardin,’ said Mas’ud. ‘Another white car.’

‘We were being followed again? Why didn’t you tell me?’

Mas’ud shrugged: ‘Always they do this.’

As we were speaking the telephone rang again. Symeon went to answer it. Mas’ud and I looked at each other.

‘That was the police again,’ said Symeon on his return. ‘They told us to find out where you are going and to tell them when you leave.’

‘You must see the monastery and leave quickly,’ said the old monk. ‘We don’t want the police in here.’

‘Anyway, you haven’t got much time if you are to get to Mar Gabriel by nightfall,’ said Symeon. ‘For your own sake you must hurry.’

We left the old monk at his writing desk and Symeon took us down some stairs into the darkness of a vaulted undercroft. It was built of huge quoins with a stone roof, and constructed without mortar. Inside it was hot and damp. We stood in silence, waiting for our eyes to adjust to the semi-darkness.

‘This was built about 1,000 B.C.,’ said Symeon. ‘There was a pagan sun temple here before the monastery. Then when Christianity …’ He broke off suddenly. ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘That banging. Can you hear?’

In the dark of the crypt we listened to a distant clash of metal against metal.

‘It’s the front gate again,’ said Symeon. ‘But who can it be?’

We climbed the stairs and Symeon sent the gardener off to see who had come. We were now standing next to a great Roman doorway, above which was sculpted an equal-armed Byzantine cross, set in a classical laurel wreath which in turn rested on a pair of confronted dolphins.

‘What’s this?’ I asked.

‘In the sixth century it used to be the medical school. It was famous even in Constantinople. Later it became a mortuary. We call it the House of Saints.’

He took us inside. In the middle of the room, a ribbed dome rose from a rectangle of squinches. The walls were lined with an arcade of blind arches, each niche forming a separate burial chamber.

‘All the Patriarchs and all our fathers are buried in here,’ said Symeon. ‘It is said the monastery contains the bones of seventeen thousand saints.’

He led us through a rectangular Roman doorway into the small, square monastery church. Every architectural element was decorated with an almost baroque richness of late antique sculpture: over the omega-shaped sanctuary arch, friezes of animals tumbled amid bucolic vine scrolls and palmettes; feathery volutes of windblown acanthus wound their way from the capitals to the voussoirs of the arches, and thence down exuberant and richly carved pilaster strips. The church was sixth-century, yet the architectural tradition from which it grew was far older: the same decorative vocabulary could be seen on Roman monuments two hundred years earlier at Ba’albek and Leptis Magna. At the time of its construction, this sculpture must have appeared not just astonishingly rich; it must also have seemed deliberately conservative, even nostalgic, a deliberate attempt at recalling the grand old Imperial traditions during a time of corruption and decline.

At this point the barefoot gardener reappeared with the new visitors. They were three men, all Turks, dressed in casual holiday clothes: T-shirts, slacks and trainers. They ignored us and began looking around the cloister, making a great show of examining the pot plants and the architecture. It was only when the back pockets of all three men simultaneously burst into crackles of static from hidden walkie-talkies that what was already obvious to Mas’ud and Abouna Symeon became clear to me: the men were plainclothes security police.

A few minutes later, I was still looking at the extraordinary sculpture in the church when the old monk, Abouna Abraham, appeared at the door. He seemed anxious and began nervously turning off the lights, indicating as politely as he could that my visit should be drawing to a close. Abouna Symeon, however, was determined not to be intimidated by this latest batch of uninvited visitors, and asked me upstairs to see the rooms of the old Patriarchs. I followed him up the steps onto the roof terrace.

‘Look!’ said Symeon. ‘On the top of the ridge. Do you see: the ruins of five more monasteries.’

I looked up to where he was pointing. On the rim of the crags high above Deir el-Zaferan rose the jagged silhouette of several lines of ruins.

‘On the left, do you see that cave? That’s the Monastery of St Mary of the Waterfall. And those ruins? That’s the monastery of St Jacob. Next to it, that’s St Azozoyel. Then those cells: that’s St Joseph, and the last one – another St Jacob’s.’

‘So many monasteries …’

‘Two hundred years ago there were seven hundred monks on this mountain. The community has survived so long – survived the Byzantines, the Persians, the Arabs, Tamurlane, the Ottomans. Now there are just the two of us left.’

‘Do you think you’ll be the last?’

‘God alone knows,’ said Symeon, leading me over to the other side of the terrace. ‘But I certainly hope I’ll outlive Fr. Abraham.’

From the battlements we looked south, over the olive-covered hillsides, past the monastic vineyard and on down to the flat plains of Mesopotamia. We stood in silence.

‘It’s very lovely, isn’t it?’ said Symeon. ‘When I went abroad to do my studies it was this view I always remembered when I thought of home: these vineyards stretching away into the distance.’

‘Does the monastery make its own wine?’

‘The fundamentalists don’t like us doing it. In Dereici village ten miles from here they shot a Christian winemaker. After that most of the village vintners abandoned their vines. But that’s not why we stopped. The old monk who used to superintend the vintage died six years ago. Now the grapes are too small and bitter for wine. They’re a lot of work and there are simply not enough Christians left in the villages to help us harvest and dress the vines properly. Even the man who is looking after them now is off to Germany next month. His relatives are all there already, and his visa has finally come through.’

‘Is the exodus speeding up?’ I asked.

‘Certainly,’ he said. ‘It’s partly economic. Life is hard here at the best of times, and the stories of the wages and social welfare payments they get in Sweden and Germany have got around by now. But our people also have political problems. I can’t ever remember things being as bad as they are at present. Our people are caught in the crossfire between the government and the PKK. And now there is the Hezbollah too.’

‘Here? I thought the Hezbollah were in Lebanon.’

‘They’ve just set up here. The authorities seem to tolerate them as a counterweight to the PKK. They help the government in many ways, but of course they hate the Christians. Three or four months ago they kidnapped a monk in Idil district. He was on his way to officiate at a wedding when two gunmen in a car stopped the minibus he was on and ordered him out. They buried him up to his neck, and later hung him upside down in chains. They kept him for two weeks, until a ransom was paid.

‘Sometimes the Hezbollah kidnap Christian girls from remote farms and villages and force them to marry Muslims. They say they are saving their souls; it happened to four girls last year. Another Hezbollah unit has taken over Mar Bobo, a Christian village near here: about ten or fifteen gunmen live there now. They’ve seized the roof of the church as their strongpoint, and they make the Christian women wear veils. They say we should go back to Europe where Christians come from, as if we were all French or German, as if our ancestors weren’t here for centuries before the first Muslim settled here. Now our people live in fear. Anything can happen to them.’

‘Can’t you tell the police?’

‘If anyone did the Hezbollah would kill the family … Wait: look!’

Fr. Symeon pointed to a dust cloud now rising on the track from Mardin.

‘More visitors.’

‘It’s the army,’ said Symeon. ‘Two Land-Rovers.’

Below us, Mas’ud had also spotted them and was rushing over to his car.

‘What’s he doing?’ I asked.

‘I think he’s turning his tape machine off. It was playing a Kurdish nationalist song. The soldiers might have arrested him if they heard it.’

The Land-Rovers pulled to a halt by the monastery walls, and armed soldiers began to pour out, some carrying heavy machine guns.

‘My God,’ said Symeon. ‘Is it war?’

But the soldiers did not enter the monastery. Instead they fanned out into the olive groves, jumping over the fence. One soldier kicked down a gate as he passed; another began to throw stones at a pomegranate tree, attempting to dislodge the ripe fruit. Symeon shouted down at them to stop: ‘Use the gate! Don’t break the fence.’

He turned to me: ‘Look at them! Breaking the tree to get at the fruit. Smashing our fencing. This is too much.’

‘Is this all because of my visit?’

‘I fear so,’ said Symeon.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I’d better go.’

‘You must go anyway. The sun is beginning to go down. You won’t get to Mar Gabriel unless you leave now.’

We walked down through the cloister to the car.

‘I’m very sorry for all this,’ I said.

‘Just make sure you tell the outside world what is happening here,’ said Symeon. ‘Go quickly now. God be with you.’

Mas’ud pulled away. When I looked behind me I could see the short black-robed figure of Symeon gesticulating at an officer, as the soldiers closed in around him.

The shadows were lengthening into a deep blue slur, spreading softly over the ridges and gullies of the Izlo Mountains. In the narrow river valleys shepherds were leading their flocks through rich groves of fig, walnut and pistachio trees. Women were fetching cooking water from roadside pumps; donkeys with bulging pack-saddles were ambling along the road. It was so easy to forget the troubles: only the continuous gauntlet of checkpoints and the occasional shell of an incinerated vehicle lying abandoned by the roadside reminded one of the dangers that the imminent twilight would bring.

We were making good time. It had just passed 4.30 and we were nearing Midyat, the nearest town to Mar Gabriel. In the distance on the left we could see the church towers of the Christian half of the town, flanked on the right by the minarets of the new Muslim quarter. On the edge of Midyat a large checkpoint had been erected, with a strip of sharpened nails laid out across the road like a fakir’s bed in a cartoon; behind it stood a slalom of oil cans. A line of bored soldiers were sitting in the shade, watching the cars zigzag through the obstacles. We were three quarters of the way through before one of the men – an officious looking conscript with a shaven head – decided to pull us in.

The man asked for our documents. He looked through my passport, pausing suspiciously at one of my Indian visas as if he had just uncovered conclusive evidence of my Kurdish sympathies. He examined Mas’ud’s ID, turning it over with a growing sneer on his face. Then he asked Mas’ud for the documents concerning the car. Mas’ud fumbled around in the glove compartment looking for them. It was clear we were in for trouble.

The conscript chose to take exception to something written on Mas’ud’s driving licence, and spent the next forty-five minutes cross-questioning him. I began to look nervously at the sinking sun and the minute hand on my watch. Eventually Mas’ud passed over a large banknote, folded up in his ID card. The man looked at it, and for an awful five seconds I thought he was about to expose Mas’ud’s attempt to bribe him. But he slipped it into his pocket without his colleagues seeing, and after complaining about the state of Mas’ud’s tyres, let us go. Mas’ud drove away muttering violent Kurdish curses under his breath.

It was now after 5.30. The sun was sinking behind the hills as we headed into the desolate country on the far side of Midyat. The road was now little better than a track; it contained no other traffic and was surrounded by no signs of habitation. There was no noise, no birdsong. It was completely silent; unnervingly so.

It was only when I began to look carefully at the shadowy country through which we were passing that I realised what it was that was so unsettling about it. It was not just barren: it had been deliberately laid waste. The olive groves on the upper slopes were not naturally so twisted and gnarled: someone had actually burned them, so that their skeletons formed a charred and jagged silhouette on the skyline. It was like a Paul Nash picture of Arras or Ypres in 1916. We were passing through scorched earth.

‘The soldiers have done this,’ said Mas’ud.

‘Why?’

‘If they think the PKK are using trees or buildings for cover, the army burns them. It’s partly to hurt the guerrillas, partly to punish the local people for allowing the PKK to use their land. Further east, around Hakkari, whole districts have been laid waste. Many villages have been destroyed.’

Eventually we rose over the crest of a low hill. There was just enough light to distinguish ahead of us the crenellated ghost of Mar Gabriel’s monastery. The huddled buildings stood alone and exposed on a bare and stony hillside, surrounded by a high wall; as we drew near the rising moon silhouetted the cupolas and spires of the churches, and illuminated a tall tower to one side.

A moonwashed gateway rose out of the gloom; and from beyond came the faint but comforting sound of monastic chant. A porter opened the narrow wicket, and as we unloaded our baggage from the car, the monks and nuns began to stream out of vespers. In the lead was the Archbishop; and a little behind him, dressed in a blazer, was a layman. He came up and introduced himself. It was Afrem Budak, to whom I had talked on the telephone. He was welcoming, but clearly also a little angry.

‘You should have been here at least an hour ago,’ he said quietly, shaking his head. He took my rucksack. ‘The risks you take yourself are your business. But you could have got us all into trouble if something had happened to you.’

THE MONASTERY OF MAR GABRIEL, 23 AUGUST

I am sitting outside my cell, under a vine trellis. For the first time I am sleeping in a monastery which John Moschos could have stayed in, hearing the same fifth-century chant sung under the same mosaics. Facing me is the south wall of what is probably the oldest functioning church in Anatolia. It was built by the Emperor Anastasius in 512: before Haghia Sophia, before Ravenna, before Mount Sinai; it was already eighty years old by the time St Augustine landed at Thanet to bring Christianity to Anglo-Saxon England. Yet some parts of the monastery date back even earlier, to the abbey’s original foundation in 397 A.D.

There is only a handful of churches anywhere in the world this old. It is incredible that it has survived at all, but that it has survived intact and still practising when Persians, Arabs, Mongol and Timurid hordes have all come and gone, Constantinople has fallen to the Turks and Asia Minor has been completely cleared of Greeks – this is little short of a miracle.

One of the monks, Brother Yacoub, has just dropped by, and handed me a bunch of grapes freshly picked from the trellis. He is now standing behind me, watching me write. After years of visiting ruined churches across the length of Anatolia, finding these monks wearing almost identical robes to those John Moschos may himself have worn, still inhabiting a building of this antiquity, feels almost as odd as stumbling across a long-lost party of Roman legionaries guarding some remote watchtower on Hadrian’s Wall.

I had had my first unforgettable glimpse of the interior of the churches and buildings of Mar Gabriel on the night of my arrival. After our baggage was brought in, the monastery gate was locked and bolted behind us. I ate supper with the monks in their ancient refectory and afterwards drank Turkish coffee in the cool of a raised roof terrace near the Archbishop’s rooms. By nine o’clock the monks were beginning to return to their cells, and Yacoub, a gentle novice of my own age, offered to show me around before I retired for the night.

Yacoub led the way, holding a storm lantern aloft like a figure in a Pre-Raphaelite painting. The electricity supply had failed some time before, a common occurrence, explained my guide, due sometimes to ‘load-shedding’ by the electricity company, and sometimes to the PKK’s irritating habit of blowing up the region’s generating stations. I followed Yacoub down a wide flight of stairs, along a vaulted corridor and into the thick, inky blackness of the crypt. In the flickering light of the lantern, shadows danced along an arcade of arches.

‘This is the Cemetery of the Martyrs,’ said Yacoub. ‘During the Gulf War this was our bomb shelter. On the floor there: see that capping stone? That’s where Mar Gabriel’s arm is buried.’

‘What happened to the rest of him?’ I asked.

‘I’m not entirely sure,’ said Yacoub. ‘In the fifth and sixth centuries our monastery used to fight many battles with the local villagers for the remains of our more saintly fathers. Sometimes monks were killed trying to defend our stock of relics.’

‘And you think maybe the villagers got the rest of Mar Gabriel?’

‘Maybe. Or perhaps one of the monks hid the rest of the body and took the secret of its resting place with him to the grave.’

‘Do the villagers still take an interest in your relics?’ I asked.

‘Certainly,’ said Yacoub. ‘And not just the Christians: we get Muslims and even Yezidis [Devil-propitiators] coming here to pray to our saints. Many of the Muslims in this region are descended from Suriani Christians who converted to Islam centuries ago. They go to the mosque, and listen to the imams – but if ever they are in real trouble they still come here.’

Yacoub bent down with the lantern and pointed to a small aperture below the capping stone of the grave. ‘You see here? This is where the villagers come and take the dust of the saint.’

‘What do they do with it?’

‘It has many uses,’ said Yacoub. ‘They keep it in their houses to get rid of demons, they give it to their animals and their children to keep them healthy during epidemics …’

‘They actually eat the dust?’

‘Of course. It is pure and full of blessings.’

‘What sort of blessings?’

‘If ever they dig a new well, for example, they place some of the dust of the saint in it so that the water will remain pure for ever.’

I told Yacoub that in Istanbul I had seen barren women come to a shrine of St George if they wanted children. Did the same happen here?

‘Mar Gabriel is good for sickness and demons only,’ replied Yacoub. ‘If they want children they go upstairs.’

‘Upstairs?’

‘To the Shrine of St John the Arab. Come, I’ll show you.’

Yacoub led the way out of the crypt. At the top of the stairs, in a niche covered by a close-fitting arch of dark basalt, stood a small plinth, similar to the one downstairs.

‘This is his tomb,’ said Yacoub. ‘Or rather it is the tomb of his torso.’

‘The villagers have been at your bones again?’

‘No. The nuns this time.’

‘The nuns?’

‘Yes,’ said Yacoub. ‘They are in charge of the tomb, and they keep St John’s skull in their quarters.’

‘What on earth do they do with it?’

‘When the local women come, the nuns fill a bowl of water and place it for an hour on the tomb. Then they take St John’s skull and, saying the appropriate prayers, they fill the skull with water, then pour it onto the woman’s head. This makes the lady have a baby.’

‘And people believe all this?’

‘Why not?’ said Yacoub. ‘The nuns think it never fails.’

Yacoub led me out of the shrine into the starlight outside. ‘At the moment, because of the troubles, not so many are coming,’ he said. ‘But before, in the days of peace, there would be long queues every Sunday: people would come from as far as Diyarbakir, especially after they were married. Now of course it is dangerous to travel. Also the Hezbollah are telling the Muslims that they must not come to a Christian shrine.’

We walked over to the main church and Yacoub opened the great door. Amid the herringbone patterns of the brick vaults, the light of the storm lantern picked out the glittering mosaics with an almost magical brilliance. As we drew nearer, the shapes of crosses, vine scrolls and double-handled amphorae glinted in the dancing flame. With Yacoub still holding his lamp aloft, we passed through the sanctuary and into a small side-chapel. In the back wall were two openings, one near the ceiling, the other at shin-height.

‘At the end of his life Mar Gabriel walled himself up behind here,’ said Yacoub. ‘His food was put through that hole at the bottom. If he wanted to take communion he would stick his hand through there at the top.’ Yacoub pointed to the upper hole. ‘Mar Gabriel was a great ascetic,’ he said. ‘Behind that wall he punished his flesh in order to liberate his soul. Come and see what I mean.’

Before I had time to demur, Yacoub had pushed the lamp through the small lower aperture and wriggled in after it. Left in total darkness, I had no option but to follow. Lying flat on my back and pulling in my stomach, I found I could just fit through the hole. Yacoub extended a hand and helped me to my feet.

‘Look here,’ he said, pointing to a narrow slit in the wall. ‘Sometimes our Holy Father Mar Gabriel felt he was not being hard enough on himself, that he was sinking into luxury. So he would squeeze into this slit and spend a month standing up.’

‘Why?’

‘He used to say no slave should sit or lie down in the presence of his master, and that as he was always in the presence of his Lord he should always stand up. At other times, to remind himself of his mortality, he would bury himself in that hole in the corner.’

‘That’s a bit extreme, isn’t it?’

Yacoub was already on the floor, about to wriggle his way back to the church.

‘I don’t understand what you mean,’ he said, before disappearing into the blackness. ‘Mar Gabriel was a very great saint. We should all try to follow his example.’

The day at Mar Gabriel starts at 5.15 with the tolling of the monastery bells, announcing the service of matins. After four days enjoying the monks’ hospitality but sleeping late, I thought I had better make an appearance. So this morning when the bells began to peal, rather than covering my head with the nearest pillow, I rolled out of bed, dressed by the light of a lantern, then picked my way through the empty courtyard towards the echo of monastic chant.

It was still dark, with only a faint glimmer of dawn on the horizon. In the church the lamps were all lit, casting a dim and flickering light over the early Byzantine mosaics of the choir. I kicked off my shoes by the door and stood at the back of the church. To my right four nuns dressed in black skirts and bodices were prostrating themselves on a reed mat. Ahead of me a file of little boys stood in line, listening to an old monk. He had a long patriarchal beard and stood chanting from a huge hand-written codex laid on a stone lectern to the north of the sanctuary. Each phrase rose to a climax, then sank to a low, almost inaudible conclusion.

Slowly the church began to fill up; soon the line of boys stretched right across the length of the nave. Another monk, Abouna Kyriacos, appeared and walked up to the sanctuary. He started chanting at another lectern, parallel but a little to the south of the other, echoing the old monk’s chant: a phrase would be sung by the first monk, then passed over to Kyriacos who would repeat it and send it back again. The chant passed from lectern to lectern, quick-paced syllables of Aramaic slurring into a single elision of sacred song.

By now some of the older boys had also begun to go up to the lecterns and were standing behind the monks, joining in with them. The chant rolled on, as deep and resonant as Gregorian plainsong, but with a more Oriental feel, the strangely elusive monodic modulations reverberating under the rolling Byzantine vaults.

Before long an unseen hand was pulling back the curtains from the sanctuary; a boy holding a smoking thurible rattled its chains. The entire congregation began a long series of prostrations: from their standing position, the worshippers fell to their knees, and lowered their heads to the ground so that all that could be seen from the rear of the church was a line of upturned bottoms. All that distinguished the worship from that which might have taken place in a mosque was that the worshippers crossed and recrossed themselves as they performed their prostrations. This was the way the early Christians prayed, and is exactly the form of worship described by Moschos in The Spiritual Meadow. In the sixth century, the Muslims appear to have derived their techniques of worship from existing Christian practice. Islam and the Eastern Christians have retained the original early Christian convention; it is the Western Christians who have broken with sacred tradition.

The white light of dawn was filtering in through the great splayed Byzantine windows in the south wall. Inside the church, the tempo of the chant was now sinking. The curtains closed; silence fell. A last eddy of prostration passed through the congregation. The Archbishop appeared and the boys queued to kiss his cross.

Slowly the church emptied; from outside you could hear the birds stirring in the vine trellising.

However alien and eccentric Eastern asceticism sometimes seems, it had an extraordinary influence on the medieval West; indeed the European monks of the early Middle Ages were merely provincial imitators of the Eastern desert fathers. The monastic ideal came out of Egypt, that of the stylite from Syria. Both forms travelled westwards, stylitism, amazingly enough, getting as far as Trier before being abandoned as impossible in a northern climate, with the aspiring German stylite eventually yielding to pressure from his bishop to come down before he froze to his pillar. It was as clear and unstoppable a one-way traffic, east to west, as the reverse cultural invasion of fast food and satellite television is today.

What has always fascinated me is the extent to which the austere desert fathers were the models and heroes of the Celtic monks on whose exploits I was brought up in Scotland. Like their Byzantine exemplars, the Celtic Culdees deliberately sought out the most wild and deserted places – the isolation of lonely bogs and forests, the bare crags and islands of the Atlantic coast – where they could find the solitude that they believed would lead them to God.

Moreover, despite the difficulties of travel, the links between the monastic world of the Levant and that which grew up in imitation of it in the north of Europe were unexpectedly close. Seventh-century Rome had four resident communities of Oriental monks and many Eastern church fathers travelled ‘beyond the Pillars of Hercules’ to the extreme west. Theodore, the seventh Archbishop of Canterbury, was a Byzantine from Tarsus who had studied at Antioch and visited Edessa; his surviving Biblical commentaries, written in England, show the extent to which he brought the teaching of the School of Antioch and an awareness of Syriac literature to the far shores of Anglo-Saxon Kent.

Many other more anonymous figures seem to have followed in his footsteps. The ‘seven monks of Egypt [who lived] in Disert Uilaig’ in the west of Ireland were proudly remembered in manuscripts of the Irish Litany of Saints, along with coracle-fulls of other nameless ‘Romani’ (i.e. Byzantines) and ‘the Cerrui from Armenia’. All these diverse figures seem to have found their way to the most extreme ends of the Celtic fringe, where they were revered for centuries to come: indeed so holy was the reputation of these travelling Byzantines that according to the Irish Litany of Saints even to read their names over a sick man was believed to prevent ‘boils, and jaundice and the plague and every other pestilence’.

If an intermittent flow of living monks from east to west was possible, then the flow of inanimate books was greater still. Up to the eighth century, The Life of St Antony of Egypt by Athanasius of Alexandria was probably the most read and imitated book in Europe after the Bible, and what was true of manuscripts in general was particularly true of manuscript illumination: that early Irish and Northumbrian gospel books took as their principal model work from the Byzantine east Mediterranean is now beyond question.

At Cambridge I spent my final year specialising in the study of Hiberno-Saxon art, and what above all pushed me on to try and get through to the Tur Abdin was the knowledge of the extent to which the early medieval art of Britain was indebted to the artists of the scriptoria of the monasteries there. For though these monasteries now lie forgotten and half-deserted in an obscure corner of a predominantly Muslim country, some scholars believe that work produced in the Tur Abdin may well once have provided the inspiration for the very first figurative Christian art in Britain.

As I lay on my hard monastic bed, unable to sleep, I turned over in my mind an art historical controversy I had once studied in some detail. The debate revolved around a most intriguing tale.

In the mid-sixteenth century Stephanos, the Catholicos of Armenia, prepared to make a journey which he hoped would change the history of the east Mediterranean. Finding his Patriarchal seat of Echmiadzin surrounded on the east by the resurgent Persian Empire, and on the west by the new Ottoman dynasty, he saw his people facing the same fate as had befallen the Byzantines a century earlier: conquest followed by a bitter subjection under the dusty sandal of Islam. Like the Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Palaeologus, the Patriarch saw only one hope for his people: that he should travel to Europe, somehow forge an alliance with the West, and so surround the Turkish armies in a Christian pincer movement.

Manuel had travelled to the West in vain: though he had acquiesced to many of the doctrinal demands of the Catholic Church at the Council of Florence, and had even been received with honour by King Henry IV of England at a grand banquet at Eltham on Christmas Day 1400, he came back to Constantinople empty-handed, without securing the dispatch of a single Western knight to defend the eastern frontiers of Christendom. Fifty years later, in 1453, his successor Constantine XI Paleologus died fighting on the walls of Byzantium as the Turks finally burst into what had once been the capital of the Christian world.

Catholicos Stephanos thought he could do better; and he hung his hopes on the support of the Pope, Paul III Farnese. Stephanos’s spies had told him that Pope Paul had made it his special pontifical objective to liberate the oppressed churches of the Orient. They also told him that the Pope had a special interest in the study of scripture, and that he had called a council of scholars to establish once and for all the authentic text of the Bible. Stephanos knew that if he was to succeed in his mission he would have to establish a personal rapport with the Pope, and for this reason he cast around for a suitable present for the Roman Pontiff. Eventually his advisers hit upon a brilliant idea.

Someone in Echmiadzin had heard that in the libraries of the monasteries of the Tur Abdin there lay an astonishing collection of early Christian gospel manuscripts. One of these was a copy of the Diatessaron, a very early and very unusual gospel harmony – the four canonical gospels united into a single life of Christ – originally composed by the priest Tatian in the early second century A.D. For a century or so the Diatessaron had been the standard New Testament text in use in the Church of Antioch, but as copies of the original gospels became more widely available, it slipped out of common use and eventually came to be seen as a heretical text. At some stage it seems to have been ordered that manuscripts of Tatian’s work were to be destroyed, and only in the obscure recesses of a few remote monastic libraries did copies of the Diatessaron survive.

Stephanos sent an envoy hundreds of miles south from the Caucasus to Mesopotamia to locate one of these last Diatessaron manuscripts. When eventually one was found, it was agreed that a local scribe, a Syrian Orthodox priest, should copy out the text. It was this copy that was taken to Rome by Stephanos. According to a colophon in the manuscript, the scribe was a native of Hasankeif, a town on the Tigris, a few miles south of Diyarbakir near Deir el-Zaferan. The overwhelming likelihood is that the original manuscript from which the papal copy was made came from the monastic library of Deir el-Zaferan.

In the event the Catholicos’s embassy to the West was a fiasco. Stephanos never saw the Pope, and within a century his people, like the Byzantines before them, had been conquered and their land divided between the Persians and the Turks. The copy of Tatian’s Diatessaron was never presented to the Holy Father, only getting as far as the office of his secretary. Later it found its way from the Vatican to the Bibliotheca Medicea Laurentiana in Florence.

Four hundred years later, in the winter of 1967, the Danish art historian Carl Nordenfalk was at work in the Laurentian Library when he came across the manuscript and began to browse through its pages. Suddenly he found himself staring at a set of illustrations that made him stop dead in his tracks. Nordenfalk was a specialist in Celtic manuscripts, and he saw immediately that these illustrations in the Diatessaron were iconographically identical to those in the first of the great illuminated Celtic gospel books, the Book of Durrow. The Diatessaron pictures also had a close relationship with a slightly later Celtic manuscript, the Gospels of St Willibrord.

In the Book of Durrow each gospel is preceded by a whole-page illustration showing the sacred symbol of the Evangelist who wrote the book (in this early case, a man to represent St Matthew, an eagle for St Mark, a bull for St Luke and a lion for St John). Most scholars would accept that these paintings in the Book of Durrow, probably executed in the last years of the sixth century A.D., are the first figurative paintings in British art.

Although the style of the Diatessaron and the two Celtic Gospel Books are very different – as you would expect from two manuscripts drawn centuries apart – the poses of the symbols, the angles at which they were drawn and the attitudes they strike are identical with each other, and totally different to anything else in Christian iconography. Moreover, both sets of manuscripts open with nearly identical full-page illuminations showing a double-armed cross embedded in a weave of intricate interlace. The same pattern also found its way onto a Pictish cross-slab, the Rosemarkie Stone, which still lies on the Beauly Firth, a few miles north-east of Inverness.

It took several months of intense study before Nordenfalk felt confident that he had worked out how an obscure mid-sixteenth-century copy of a manuscript from eastern Turkey could have such a close relationship with a pair of Celtic gospel books which were probably illustrated on the isle of Iona, off the distant west coast of Scotland, some eight centuries earlier.

Nordenfalk’s thesis was that the illustrations of the Book of Durrow were based on an earlier copy of the Diatessaron which had somehow reached Iona from the Levant in the early Middle Ages. He even had a suspect for the carrier of the manuscript from east to west.

In his History, the Venerable Bede records that one winter night at the very end of the seventh century, a Frankish galley on its way back from the Holy Land was wrecked off the coast of Iona; a storm had blown the ship around the north coast of Scotland until it came to rest, as fate would have it, on the shores below the island’s abbey church. Bede records that on board the vessel was a Gaulish nobleman named Arculph, who dictated a description of the holy places of the Levant to Adamnan, Iona’s Abbot. (A copy of the manuscript of Arculph’s descriptions, entitled De Locis Sanctis, later reached Bede’s own scriptorium in Jarrow and became a source of much future Anglo-Saxon comment – both factual and legendary – on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean from Constantinople to Alexandria.) ‘It is extremely tempting to assume,’ wrote Nordenfalk, ‘that [a copy of] the illustrated Diatessaron was among the books in Arculph’s baggage.’

The realistic portraits in such an Eastern manuscript would have come as a revelation to Celtic monks familiar only with the geometric whorls and trumpet spirals of pagan Celtic art. Nordenfalk proposed, not unreasonably, that the arrival of the Diatessaron was the spark which ignited the almost miraculous blaze of Celtic book illumination during the seventh and eighth centuries, a process which culminated in such masterpieces as the Lindisfarne Gospels and the Book of Kells.

In his excitement Nordenfalk went on to make several other, much wilder claims for the Florence Diatessaron which were later questioned by rival academics. But the core of his thesis has never been successfully challenged. There can be no doubt that the miniatures and interlace patterns of the Florence Diatessaron, a manuscript originally illuminated in a monastic scriptorium somewhere in the Tur Abdin, comes from the same family of manuscripts as those contained within the Book of Durrow and the Gospels of St Willibrord.

Somehow, perhaps in the baggage of a shipwrecked Frankish nobleman, a set of pictures probably originally drawn in a monastery in eastern Turkey came to form the seed from which sprung the first Christian figurative paintings ever drawn in the British Isles. It is a considerable cultural debt, and one that is little known, and certainly unrepaid.

This evening, an hour before vespers, the monks, the novices and the schoolchildren got out the ladders and began the harvest of Mar Gabriel’s pistachio trees.

The orchards stood on a ripple of narrow terraces sloping down from the front gate of the monastery. On the lower terraces the grapes were growing black with sweetness and the sheaths of the almonds were near to bursting; but the pistachio trees were so ripe that they would clearly rot if they were not picked that week. So the boys swarmed around the pistachio trees, trying to clamber up into the boughs without using step-ladders, pulling themselves up and swinging over to the ends of the branches. There hung the clusters of green buds which enclosed the soft white nuts. The boys plucked at the trees and threw down the buds to the novices who stood below, holding tin buckets.

As they scrabbled around, the harvesters were chatting to each other in Turoyo, the modern dialect of Aramaic still spoken as the first language of the Suriani. It had a completely different sound to Turkish or Kurdish or any other Anatolian tongue I had ever heard, sounding instead far closer to the guttural elisions of Hebrew or Arabic. Jesus must have sounded much like this when, as a boy, he spoke Aramaic in the carpenter’s shop at home or chatted to his friends beside the Sea of Galilee.

After half an hour plucking at the buds, I took a rest and looked on from the edge of the terrace. Afrem came over to join me. He pointed out the burned earth of the slopes of the Izlo Mountains ahead of us, dramatically lit up now in the last light of the sun. ‘You see over there?’ he said. ‘Those were all olive groves. Now they have been burned. It will be years before any trees that are replanted will be ready to harvest.’

‘You think there will be a chance to replant them?’

‘We have to hope,’ he said. ‘Without hope we cannot live.’

Yacoub came up and joined us. He put down his bucketful of pistachio buds and sat with his legs dangling over the edge of the terrace.

‘We should be thankful,’ he said. ‘Here they’ve only burned the trees. Further east, towards Hakkari, they’ve been clearing all the villages too: seven or eight this year alone. Since the trouble with the PKK began ten years ago they have cleared many Muslim villages, and nearly twenty-five Christian ones.’

Afrem said that a refugee from one of the destroyed Christian villages, a priest, Fr. Tomas Bektaş, was being sheltered by the monastery until he found somewhere to live. He said I should talk to him, and promised to introduce me after dinner.

Afrem kept his promise. After we had all eaten in the monastic refectory – the normal bracing Suriani dinner, a haunch of boiled goat with salty porridge and sticky rice, followed by pekmez, a thick slurry of pressed grapes considered the greatest of delicacies in polite Suriani society – the monks withdrew as usual to take coffee on the roof terrace. Fr. Tomas was sitting a little to the side. He was an unremarkable-looking man with a small toothbrush moustache and a nervous tick which made him wink his right eye every few seconds. Afrem had warned me that the clearance of his village had led to Fr. Tomas having a major nervous breakdown from which he had yet to fully recover, and that the priest might not want to talk about what had happened to his village: ‘He will get nightmares again,’ said Afrem.

In the event, however, Fr. Tomas poured out his heart without hesitation. I sat back on my stool, and the priest talked. ‘It was the middle of winter,’ he said. ‘One day an army officer in a Land-Rover dug his way through the snowdrifts. We gave him tea and then he simply told us that we had twenty days to leave. At first we did not understand what he meant. He said we had all been helping the PKK, that we had been supporting them with food and giving them guns. It was all nonsense, of course: what business do we have with the Kurds?

‘The next day I went to the sub-governor in Silopi and pleaded for Hassana, but he would not receive me. His assistant said, “He does not want to speak.” So I had to return to my village and tell my people that we had to leave, that there was no choice.

‘We all left on the last day, all two hundred of us: thirty-two families in all. My family was the last. I was the priest: I had to make sure they all left safely.

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