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 Bektas, 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.
'They came in the evening: five Land-Rovers packed with troops. They did not apologise or give compensation: they simply burned the empty houses and destroyed the gardens. There were no better gardens in Turkey. We had springs and water and earth and flowers and vegetables. The gardens were the livelihood of the village. Now they are barren and destroyed.
'Afterwards some Muslim village guards detained seven Suriani shepherds. They accused them of being Armenian sympathisers of the PKK and tortured them, using molten plastic to brand crosses on their faces.
'I was shocked and became very ill, mourning for my village. My family took me to hospital in Istanbul and I was there for four months. For thirty years I was a priest in that village. How can I start again? With a new congregation somewhere else? I couldn't do it. I cannot forget Hassana.
'Even now I don't feel well about it. My village burned, every house gone, my people dispersed. Some are sheltering here, four more families are at Deir ul-Zaferan; the others have gone to Istanbul. All want to emigrate now. They think there is nothing for them here. They are just waiting for their visas. Not since Ein Wardo has the situation been so desperate for us here.'
I had had my head down, taking notes as Fr. Tomas talked. It was only when I looked up that I saw his shoulders were heaving slightly and tears were streaming down his face. I put my hand gently on his shoulder.
The old priest was crying like an abandoned child.
Later, I asked Afrem what Fr. Tomas had meant when he referred to Ein Wardo.
According to Afrem, at the beginning of the First World War the Suriani saw the Armenians being led away by the Ottoman troops and heard the rumours of what was happening to them. They feared that they would be next, so they made preparations. They bought guns and stored wheat. They chose the most inaccessible of their mountain villages, Ein Wardo, and began to fortify it. They strengthened the walls of the church and secretly prepared barricades to fill the gaps between the houses.
When the Ottomans, backed by Kurd irregulars, began their attacks on the Suriani villages, the then Patriarch gave orders for all the villagers to retreat with their food and weapons to Ein Wardo. For three years the Suriani defended themselves there. Anyone outside the barricades was killed. Nearly every Suriani alive in eastern Turkey today is there because his parents or grandparents took shelter within those walls.
Afrem said that the village still stands, and that one of the defenders is still alive: a priest, ninety-four years old, who had been a child during the siege. He now lives with his son near Midyat. Tomorrow I hope to talk to him.
The Monastery of Mar Gabriel,
24
August
A bad start this morning.
Mas'ud, who has spent the last two days with his cousins in a village near Midyat, was due to return to the monastery early this morning. He did not show up until well after noon. When he did so, he looked white and shaken.
I asked what was wrong. He said that he had been stopped by the security police on his way through Midyat earlier that morning, and subjected to a lengthy interrogation, all on my behalf.
'The police asked me: "Where have you taken the English? Who has he talked to?" They said they had followed you from Ankara to Antakya, then on from Urfa to Diyarbakir, and that they were still watching now. Was that your route? Did you come from Ankara to Antakya to Urfa? You did not tell me that. I said you were just a tourist looking at old buildings, but they said they knew I was lying and that they knew you were a journalist.'
'It's OK,' I said, trying to reassure him. 'I have a press card. The Foreign Ministry must have got in touch with the police here and told them my itinerary. There's no problem.'