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.'