by Giles Milton
A flurry of missionary activity followed in Grant's wake. English Bibles were translated into Syriac, and money was sent to restore their churches. But lavishing such gifts on them led these pitiful people astray. They began to harbour vain and impossible dreams of being granted statehood, and to this end, they descended from their mountain strongholds during the First World War and joined the Allied forces in Iraq in their fight against Turkey. After the war the Nestori-ans discovered just how fruitless their dreams were to be, for they were
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abandoned—despised and persecuted—on the hot plains of Iraq. There was even worse in store: offered the choice of abiding by Iraqi law or leaving Iraq, they chose to leave. But as they crossed the frontier into Syria, an Iraqi regiment—supported by local Kurds and Bedouin—attacked them. Thousands of Nestorians were massacred in cold blood. Of the already depleted population who had descended from the heights of Kurdistan, only a few families managed to cross the Euphrates into Syria.
And there, in a remote corner of desert, I was told they had remained to this day.
The bus to Hassake pulled up in Palmyra's town square the following afternoon. It was a rattletrap of rusty metal, and most of the passengers on board were not Arabs but Kurds.
"Why do you go to Hassake?" asked the man behind me. "Hassake is horrible. There is nothing to see. There is nothing to do. Palmyra is good, Hassake is not good."
I told him it sounded like an interesting place. "You are crazy," he said bluntly, before adding in his strangely formal English, "there is so much for the tourist person to see in Syria. We are pleased to offer you ruins. We are pleased to offer you crusader castles. We are pleased to offer you souks. And yet you choose to come to Hassake, where we are not pleased to offer you any of these. Excuse me, good sir, but I consider you a crazy man."
I explained that there was a church I wanted to see in Hassake. I was interested in the Nestorians; did he know anything about these people?
He shook his head and asked if they were friends of mine. When I said no, he had one more thing to say.
"You will arrive in Hassake tonight and you will be gone in the morning," he predicted, and passengers in the nearby seats nodded in agreement. "But we are pleased to welcome you in Syria," he added, as if by way of apology.
It grew dark as we neared Hassake, and the flat landscape melted into the night. Occasionally the darkness would be broken by the firelight of a Bedouin encampment or the bright flare of an oil well, for the Syrians have recently discovered oil in this remote land. But more of-
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ten, for hour after hour, we rattled along in silence and in darkness. At some point I must have drifted off. The continuous hum of the engine made me drowsy, and when I closed my eyes I found a succession of images dancing before me: medieval ramparts, monks wandering through the streets, and a string of brightly coloured fairy lights decorating the cathedral. We are pleased to offer you palaces ... we are pleased to offer you castles . . . you are welcome in Syria . . .
I awoke from my dream. The bright lights of Hassake lit the horizon, the road opened into dual carriageway, and the bus swung into the bus park. I stepped off the vehicle into an oily puddle and my left foot was sodden.
My friend from the bus offered to take me to a hotel and I readily accepted. My guidebook took just two lines to dismiss Hassake, warning that there was nothing to see here and nothing to do. This became all too apparent as we walked from the bus park into town: a twenty-minute hike through one of the most depressing urban landscapes I have ever seen. There were half-finished concrete buildings littering the roadside and half-finished concrete walls. There were roundabouts which had been abandoned long before they had been connected to the chaotic road system. Acres of wasteland filled with heaps of broken rubble. I had travelled seven arduous hours across a windswept desert only to arrive in Slough.
Worst of all was the mud, for Hassake was bogged down in the stuff. Cars sloshed through it with a satisfying squelch, and people walked along the pavements with giant moon steps as large clumps stuck to the undersides of their shoes. But the mud was not my only problem: my presence in the town seemed to be attracting considerable attention, and as I walked down the main street, people gathered in little groups to discuss what I was doing here. Who was I? Why had I come? It was not just the locals who seemed curious. The police, too, were watching me from the corner of their eyes: I hoped they would leave me alone.
When I got to my hotel, the owner—a shifty fellow with one eye the size of a gobstopper—demanded to know who I was and why I had come to Hassake.
"I'm a student," I told him.
He looked me up and down and muttered something in Arabic to
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his friend, who stirred from the television set and came to have a look at me.
"Why Hassake?" he demanded.
"I'm following a medieval ..." I stopped and began again. "The churches," I said. "I've come to see the churches."
He let out a sarcastic laugh and examined my passport. He wanted to know why my profession wasn't written in, and when I told him I'd forgotten to do so, he stared at me through his wobbly eyeball. "You are not a student," he told me. "I don't know who you are or why you are here . . ."—he coughed for dramatic effect—". . . but I have one room for forty dollars."
I refused and he laughed again. "In that case," he said, "you will sleep on the pavement tonight." His friend chuckled as I handed over four ten-dollar bills. It was a rip-off, but there was nothing I could do.
I took my bag to my room, stood over the toilet, and was sick. The room was disgusting. The floor was awash with stagnant water, there were four cockroaches in the cupboard, and I could only guess at what had taken place on the mattress. It looked as if it had been the site of a massacre. Worse still, I was ill. As I did battle against the cockroaches, my stomach was waging war with the kebab I had eaten.
Because I had expected Hassake to be tiny, I'd thought that finding the Nestorian church—if there really was one in the town—would be simple. As it happened, the place was immense and sprawled over many miles. It could take me days to track down the Nestorians, and even then, I would have no way of communicating with them.
I was never going to find them without help, but Hassake had little in the way of information for the foreign visitor. There was no tourist office and no large hotel. There didn't even seem to be a town hall. But a shop on the main street had caught my eye: it was smarter than the rest and was called Kaspo's, a patisserie with windows piled high with cakes. It was decorated with a string of lights, and its French sign looked so out of place in this ghastly town centre that I wondered for a moment whether I had stepped into Paris's seventh arrondissement. I felt sure that someone here must speak French or English, for whoever ran the shop had clearly been abroad.
As I opened the door, a bell tinkled and a plump and prosperous
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man—clearly the owner—looked up and smiled. His name was Pierre Kaspo and he welcomed me in French. Would 1 like a cake, perhaps, or a glass of fresh juice? As I drank the juice, he asked what 1 was doing in Hassake. I told him about Sir John and the church I was looking for— careful to call it the Assyrian, and not the Nestorian, church, for I'd read that the word Nestorian had long ago become pejorative and had been replaced by the term Assyrian.
Kaspo smiled as 1 told him of my quest for this church. His prosperity revealed itself in excess fat: the bags under his eyes drooped slightly, his cheeks sagged under the weight of gravity, and his double chin hung from his jaw like a bag filled with water. But Pierre Kaspo turned out to be a charming and generous man. He was also extremely helpful. Of course there was an Assyrian church in Hassake, he said. Oui, there would be a service tomorrow. Certainement, he would drive me there himself.
"Revenez ici vers neuf heures," he said as he shook my hand. "I will take you to this church. It will be my pleasure."
; I couldn't believe my luck. Tomorrow I would finally meet these Nestorians that Sir John had described all those centuries before.
I woke with a start: Was that the sound of bells I could hear? I jumped out of bed, ran across to the window, and threw open the curtain for a view across the town. I'd forgotten that my bedroom looked onto an unfinished concrete wall.
But I could hear bells—perhaps even now summoning the Nestorians to church. Were these the same bells that had once rung out over Tartary? The same that Sir John had once heard pealing throughout Persia and China? I threw on my clothes and ran to Kaspo's shop, but on arriving I found that he was in no hurry to move. "First we must take tea," he said, "et puis we must wait for my brother. Perhaps we shall even eat a few cakes? My cakes are the best in Hassake."
While we waited for his brother, Kaspo told me of his life. He was not Syrian at all but Armenian—a Christian refugee who had lived in Syria for many decades. He had been to Paris in his youth and had hoped to go to London but—he threw up his hands—he now had a wife and two children. How could he possibly go abroad? Anyway, business was good. He couldn't leave the shop.
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I asked him more about the Assyrian church. Did anyone still call it the Nestorian church? He gave me a confused look. "Nestorian church?" he said. "You're interested in the Nestorian church? I thought you wanted to see a Syrian Orthodox church."
My heart sank. We had spent the whole of yesterday afternoon talking at cross purposes, and my excitement over the Nestorians had all been for nothing. Kaspo must have noticed my disappointment, for he grabbed my arm and chuckled. "Don't worry, don't worry/' he said. "If you want to meet a Nestorian, then you need go no farther than my shop. Mustafa," he called. "There's someone to see you."
Mustafa, a small, thin man with a bald head, appeared from the basement. He was dressed in jeans and a black polo-neck jumper, and certainly didn't look like a descendant of one of the wildest tribes on earth. He shook my hand, and I asked him, with Kaspo's help, if he was indeed a Nestorian. He gave me a quizzical look, then nodded. "Yes," he said. "I am a Nestorian . . . why?"
Mustafa had Iraqi roots but had no idea from where his family originated. It was possible, he said, that he came from Kurdistan, but it was all a long time ago, and he was Syrian now and happy living in Hassake. He was a taciturn man who answered every question wdth either a yes or a no (usually it was no) and seemed bemused to learn that I had travelled thousands of miles to meet him.
Perhaps his reluctance to talk was the last vestige of that rebellious nature that had once been the hallmark of his tribe. For there was every likelihood that Mustafa was indeed descended from one of the families that—only a few generations ago—had left their mountain strongholds. In fact, it was possible that it was his very forefathers that Sir John had met six centuries previously.
Kaspo interrupted our conversation. "xMy brother's obviously not coming. Let's go and see Mustafa's Nestorian church. But I warn you now—don't get excited. The church is not at all interesting. There is no colour and no icons. You will find it very . . . very bland."
The church was fifteen minutes' drive from Kaspo's shop and stood right on the edge of town. To get there we drove through a building site, past unfinished houses and shops, and eventually drew up outside a building with no roof and gaping holes where windows ought to have been.
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"Voila," said Kaspo. "The Nestorian church/'
"But it's a building site," I said.
"We use the underground crypt/' explained Mustafa. "A few years ago we decided to build a new church, but we haven't got very far. No money."
That much was apparent. It would be many years before this church, half-built from breeze blocks, would be ready for services. Mustafa opened the door to the crypt and we entered a long room filled with neat rows of chairs stretching from the front to the rear wall. The front row was taken up by four comfortable armchairs; the rest were made of moulded plastic. Three enormous chandeliers hung so low from the ceiling that they almost reached the ground, while the paint had become so loosened by damp that the floor was scattered with flakes. The altar was concealed from view not by an iconostasis but by a theatrical pair of red velvet curtains, and when Kaspo pulled them open, I half expected him to reveal a cinema screen. But there was only a plain altar and an unadorned crucifix. Nothing else cluttered the sanctuary, and it was a far cry from the lavish descriptions Sir John gives of the Nestorian church. He speaks of gold crucifixes and grand buildings containing untold riches. This place looked like a committee room.
I asked Mustafa about the services; how, for example, would they be celebrating Christmas in a few weeks' time? He looked puzzled and muttered something in Arabic to Kaspo before turning back to me.
"We've had Christmas already/' he said. "Christmas is 7 November/'
Now it was my turn to be puzzled. Even taking into account the change from the Gregorian to the JuUan calendar, I couldn't understand how the Nestorians arrived at 7 November for Christmas day.
"What's wrong with 7 November?" said Mustafa defensively. "It's an excellent day for Christmas. Who can accurately say when Christ was born?—7 November is as good as any other."
I asked him if there were many Nestorians left in Hassake. "We are not so many," he said. "There are only about two thousand of us left. We have one church and one priest. It is sad."
We had arrived too late for the liturgy, and the congregation had returned to their homes. I was annoyed but couldn't complain. Without
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Kaspo, I would never have found this last fragment of a once-great and ancient church. Here, in the remote north-eastern corner of Syria, the bells of the Nestorian church still ring out across the desert, as they did in the days when Sir John claimed to have travelled through the Holy Land.
I returned directly to Damascus from Hassake and was walking along the congested trunk road that winds around Damascus's medieval walls when two men stopped me in the street. It was always happening in Syria. People stopped me and tried to sell me things, or invited me into their shop or to meet their uncle for tea. But these two had an altogether different approach.
"Excuse me," they said. "How can we help?"
I looked at them. Was this a trick? Were they going to open their bags and produce a carpet for me to buy?
"Forgive us," they continued. "You look like a gentleman who needs help."
As it happened, I did. I was looking for the chapel from which St. Paul had fled the Jews of Damascus. I had been told it was inside the city walls but couldn't find it anywhere. They pointed me in the right direction, then one of the men said: "You are Protestant. I, too, am Christian. I am Syrian Orthodox."
I had been told that there were a few communities of Syrian Orthodox who still spoke Aramaic, the language of Christ, and asked him if this was true. He paused for a moment's thought. Until recently, he said, Aramaic was still in use. But now it had all but died out. A few elderly people might remember the language, but the young didn't care about their traditions. No, he concluded, it was doubtful that I would find people who still spoke Aramaic.
His colleague muttered something in Arabic. "Ah yes," he said. "It's true. There are a couple of villages in the hills above Damascus where it is said they still speak Aramaic. If you're interested, that is where you should go."
I had been intending to visit these villages; they had aroused Sir John's curiosity as well. While his description of Damascus had been vague, his account of the hilltop village of Saidenaya—or Sardenake, as it was then called—was extremely detailed:
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From Damascus men come past a place called Nostre Dame de Sardenake. It is on a rock. It is a beautiful and delightful place, somewhat resembling a castle—there was one there once. There is a fine church where live Christian monks and nuns. They have excellent wine there. In this church, behind the High Altar on the wall, is a wooden panel on which a portrait of
Our Lady was once painted, which often became flesh; but that picture is now seen but little; nevertheless that panel constantly oozes oil, like olive oil; there is a marble vessel under the panel to catch it. They give some to pilgrims, for it heals many of their illnesses; and it is said that if it is kept well for seven years, it afterwards turns into flesh and blood.
I wondered if this icon would still be there. I doubted it, because such a relic was unlikely to have survived six centuries of Muslim rule.
The road to Saidenaya weaves slowly upwards towards the Lebanese mountains, curving around gentle pink hills. There were seven of us in the Mercedes taxi, and everyone stared out of the window in silence as the car struggled across moulded valleys and dry riverbeds. Soon the ground was dusted with light snow; collected by the wind, it lay across the stony ground in lace-thin folds. The driver gripped the wheel as he turned the last sharp corner in the road and a magnificent sight suddenly swung into view. Saidenaya—a fort-like monastery— sat stacked high upon a chunk of rock, and behind it was the massive bulk of Jebel ech Sheikh, its rounded shoulders dolloped with snow.
The entrance to the monastery looked every year of its vast age. The massive stone lintel had slumped like molten cheese to little more than four feet above the ground. The shallow steps scooped out of the rock were worn down with the footsteps of nearly twenty centuries. The courtyard was reached through a dark passage that once served to keep out hostile Bedouin, but inside the monastery all was bright and tidy, with lovingly tended pots of geraniums betraying a feminine touch. Saidenaya is a nunnery, cared for by a handful of Greek Orthodox nuns.
