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- Herausgeber: Eland Publishing
- Kategorie: Lebensstil
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016
The Street Philosopher and the Holy Fool chronicles a series of friendships and conversations pursued over ten years with an erratic cast of Syrians that includes Abed, the unemployable 'street philosopher' and Sulayman, 'the holy fool', alongside Myrna, a Christian healer marked by the stigmata of Christ, Abu al-Talib, the prince of fools and Father Paolo, the Desert Father of Deir Mar Musa monastery. In the company of a witty, irreverent Canadian poet with a gift for listening, we touch on madness and divine possession, alchemy and the Sufi masters, melancholia and the marriage of true minds. We inhabit the dreams, fears and aspirations of the old Levantine Syria, a fascinating flux of faiths in the years before the mobile telephone and a mere decade before civil war tore this nation apart. It is a precious gift, bearing testimony to the tolerant coexistence which made the country so attractive, and which will hopefully one day be reestablished.
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THE STREET PHILOSOPHERAND THE HOLY FOOL
A SYRIAN JOURNEY
MARIUS KOCIEJOWSKI
for Christopher Middleton
Truly it is good to speak, and to hear is better and to converse is best, and to add what is fitting to the fortunes of one’s friends, rejoicing with them in some things, sorrowing with them in others, and to have the same return from them; and in addition to these there are ten thousand things in being near to one another.
Libanius, Orat. xi, 214
Contents
Part One
ONE
A Full Moon Over Antioch
Know ye the land where the cypress and myrtle Are emblems of deeds that are done in their clime? Where the rage of the vulture, the love of the turtle, Now melt into sorrow, now madden to crime?
Lord Byron, TheBrideofAbydos.ATurkishTale
As we passed through the Syrian Gates my thoughts were not where I’d trained them to be, on Strabo or Alexander, but on a turtle I had encountered a few days earlier on the road from Urgüp to Mustafapasha. I had been walking the five miles that separate those two places with a young American woman, Grace, who was all that her name implies, a ghost of the Old South in her voice. Although oddly out of place, she had come to Cappadocia in search of the late Byzantine. We were walking through one of the world’s stranger landscapes, the tufa formations like dream cities in the distance, when we came upon a turtle standing at one side of the road, debating whether or not to cross over to the other side. I had a grim vision of asphalt spattered with turtle, so I picked up the creature, intending to move it a few feet over onto the grassy verge. At that moment a red car sped around the corner, from the direction of Mustafapasha, and screeched to a stop. The driver jumped out, opened the boot of his car, came up to me, muttered a single word in Turkish, plucked the turtle out of my hands, dropped it into the boot – clunk – and, as if this were his sole mission in life, jumped back into his car, made a U-turn and drove back from whence he came. All this happened so quickly that any protest I might have made was only just beginning to take shape.
‘Well, I reckon there goes somebody’s supper,’ said Grace.
Was this mockery in her voice? The fact is, by drawing attention to the turtle’s existence I had become the agent of its destruction.
A couple of days later, I met Grace again, on a guided tour of Cappadocia. Our guide, Mustafa, whose enthusiasm for his subject was genuine, was pointing out some of the more extraordinary rock formations near Göreme, inviting us to draw visual comparisons.
‘You see Napoleon over there,’ he said, the joke dying on his lips, probably for the thousandth time.
‘And there you’ll see one resembling a—’
‘Turtle!’ Grace and I simultaneously exclaimed.
What we saw, perched upon one of the pillars of stone, like some terrible ghost summoned to remind us of old crimes, did indeed resemble the hapless chelonian of a couple of days before. (I have to confess that although, by and large, I’ve shed the skin of a North American childhood I am still prone to call a tortoise a turtle.) Mustafa smiled uneasily at the tears of laughter in our eyes.
‘Do Turks eat turtles?’ I asked him.
A look of disgust formed around his mouth.
‘No, the French do.’
I told him the story of my turtle.
‘Maybe he was rescuing it from you,’ he answered.
My spirits lifted to an imagined newspaper banner:
MAN SAVES TURTLE
Our bus climbed slowly through the twisting pass of the Amanus Mountains, the Syrian Gates, where Alexander the Great came, fresh from victory, in 333 BC, over Darius on the plain of Issos. The Crusaders came this way too. Along the roadside were small trees which the harikaya, the winter mistral that blows through these parts, whipped into grotesque shapes. The fertile plain of Amuk was in the distance and beyond that, Antakya, the modern Turkish name for Antioch.
Antioch, ah, the very sound that word made.
I had read about ‘the fair crown of the Orient’ (Orientisapicempulcrum) whose streets were positioned at such an angle that they would catch the breeze blowing off the Orontes. Antioch was, after Byzantium, the most magnificent city in the eastern Roman Empire but, as though such beauty were not sustainable, it was built over two zones of seismic disturbance. The ancients said that when Jupiter in his rage struck the dragon, Typhon, at the foot of Mount Amanus, Typhon, fleeing the god’s thunderbolts, burrowed deep into the ground, his subterranean panic resulting in earthquakes. It was here, in the middle of the first century, beneath the gaze of the goddess Tyche, that Christianity got its name. Antioch has also been described as ‘the eye of the Eastern church’. What fascinated me above all, though, were the third-century figures of Libanius, the last great pagan orator, author of the Antiochikos, the celebrated encomium of his town, and his pupil, John Chrysostom, ‘John of the Golden Mouth’, arguably the greatest Christian orator of his time. If the legend is true, and it sounds too attractive not to believe, when Libanius was on his deathbed his disciples begged that the school he founded be put in the hands of his most brilliant student, and he answered, ‘It ought to have been John had not the Christians stolen him from us.’ Libanius’s melancholic disposition could be put down to his having been struck on the head when young by a bolt of lightning. We know he suffered from migraine. Christianity, which in his own writings he disdains to mention by name, must have struck him like a second bolt. A habitual bather, Libanius recoiled from the unwashed monks in their dark sackcloth, these fools spouting pieties. If they wished to free themselves of earthly passions, he reasoned, why undo the very education that provided them with the means to do so? Was not classical Greek literature mankind’s most precious possession, its study the most effective means of receiving moral training? And was not a rhetorical education the main ingredient of civilisation? My sympathies were with this old heathen whose singed head ached all the more to see the ancient Hellenistic world with its civilised values possessed by ‘the Galilean madness’.
As for Chrysostom, he truly was one of ‘Christ’s athletes’. Like so many ascetics of the day he ate but little, went into the desert to engage in contemplation and wore threadbare clothes. What distinguished him from the Great Unwashed, however, was his magnificent eloquence. When he preached the cathedral filled and it is said his sermons were frequently interrupted with applause. The common people who spoke only Syriac would gather around a deacon who translated from the Greek while Chrysostom spoke. Moreover, Chrysostom knew the hearts of the people he preached to, and with his acute sensitivity to matters of the human soul and his deep knowledge of the Scriptures he would render even the most difficult concepts in terms to which his listeners could immediately relate. If the world were about to break in two, with Antioch perched on its fault line, it would do so to the clamour of great voices. Antioch was already becoming for me a poetic landscape, every bit as potent as Yeats’s Byzantium, a theatre of the imagination where pagan and Christian are locked in perpetual struggle. Historically, Syria is almost unthinkable without Antioch. If Damascus were Syria’s historical centre, Antioch would still be my mythical one.
A young man in a turtleneck sweater, who – how shall I say this? – resembled a turtle, kept glancing over at me. He was reading a newspaper, the front and middle pages of which appeared to be devoted to some woman with a slightly mannish face or perhaps a man with a rather womanish one.
‘Zeki Müren is dead,’ he said with a curious grin on his face.
The previous night Zeki, one of Turkey’s most popular singers, collapsed and died of heart failure, only minutes after being presented, on live television, with the gift of his (or her) first ever microphone.
‘At precisely one minute to nine!’
My neighbour seemed to attach much significance to the time of death.
‘You see, it could have happened at one minute past nine which means people would have said he died at about ten o’clock, rather than nine. A minute in Turkey can be the same as an hour.’
‘Are you telling me Zeki was a transvestite?’
‘Sorry?’
I pointed to a photograph of Zeki looking most fetching in a one-piece woman’s bathing costume. Quite clearly, the waves had gone nowhere near her (or his) pompadour.
‘It would appear,’ I said, not wishing to ruffle Ottoman sensibilities, ‘that she was in fact a he.’
The young man pondered this for a moment.
‘Yes, maybe!’
There had been a fresh attack on the Kurds in the east of the country, news of which occupied only a square inch of space, whereas the death of Zeki, one of Turkey’s national treasures, filled most of the paper.
‘Zeki Müren was born in 1931, in Bursa.’ My neighbour began to translate for me one of the many articles. ‘His grandfather was a muezzin at the mosque there, and it was from him that Zeki learned to sing. The girls used to crowd around him, and, at the age of six he fell in love with Ayten, a girl with green eyes.’
I struggled with this early instance of heterosexual love.
‘… At sixteen, Zeki made his first record—’
‘What can you tell me about turtles?’
The young man, his shaven head protruding from the dark shell of his clothes, seemed not in the least unsettled by my sudden change of direction. I told him about the troublesome business on the road to Mustafapasha.
‘Well, it was quite obviously his turtle.’
After mulling over the issue, however, he returned with a fresh explanation.
‘I read not so long ago, in the newspaper, of an American who believes he has discovered a cure for cancer, which is drinking the blood of turtle.’
TURTLE SAVES MAN
According to Pliny the Elder the flesh of the turtle is an antidote ‘highly salutary for repelling the malpractice of magic and for neutralising poisons’ (Nat.Hist. xxxii, 14) and as such appears in his catalogue of remedies sixty-six times. My heart sank, and before I could prevent my neighbour from reaching the obvious conclusion, he explained, ‘You see, this man who took your turtle might have read the same article.’
As we approached ‘the fair crown of the Orient’ I saw in the distance women in bright colours picking cotton. They had been trucked in, magenta scarves whipping about their faces, from the nearby towns and villages. They were the lucky ones, my companion explained to me. Every morning these women would gather in the marketplace, hoping to be among the few chosen from the many poor willing to break their backs for a pittance.
When I reached modern Antakya my heart sank in the time it takes for a stone to reach the bottom of the Orontes. Although I knew to expect little, I was appalled nevertheless. Antakya was not the sleepy backwater I had imagined – it was ugly, congested, and seemingly without a centre. The ghosts of Chrysostom and Libanius seemed to dissolve in the traffic fumes. I stood on a ‘Roman’ bridge somewhere in the body of which presumably was the original stone. A traveller standing on this same bridge, in 1847, wrote of the wonderful and fearful sight the swollen river made ‘as it tears by, roaring and foaming towards the sea’. And he wrote of being able to see from there distant blue mountains, pastures and green hillocks, poplars and evergreens, handsome buildings on one side and crumbling old ruins, minarets and mosques, on the other. It was difficult now to imagine Mounts Staurus, Orocassius and Silpius as cradle to the third city of the Roman Empire, and that upon their slopes lived monks and hermits, many of them holy fools, who had turned their backs on a civilisation given to seeking pleasure, whether it be at the theatre, at the horse races or in easy sexual encounters at Daphne. ‘The loss of Antioch is as if the sun dropped into a hole and left its rays behind it,’ wrote Freya Stark, ‘for its influence is still visible in spite of all.’ The town has changed still more since Gertrude Bell and Freya Stark first recorded their impressions. The Orontes, which the Turks call the Asi Nehri, is now a slow, green effluence, its concrete banks covered with advertisements. I stared down at a slowly moving plastic bottle.
Awhiteobjectflasheduponthewater.
AyoungmanwithanoversizedheadandpiercingeyeswaswalkingwithaclosefriendthroughthegardensalongsidetheOrontes.Theywerebothwearingthecoarse,sleevelessrobes – lebiton – whichbespoketheirwithdrawalfromtheworldanditsvanities.Theirsolemn,abstractedmovementssuggestedamonkishattitude.Theyspoke,headsbowed,inhushedtones.Theywereontheirwaytovisitamartyr’sshrinewhentheynoticedthefloatingobjectwhichatfirsttheytooktobeapieceoflinen.Whenthey,bothofthemeagerbibliophiles,sawitwasanunboundbooktheytookturnsintryingtofishitout,jokingallthewhile,wonderingwhowouldsecuretheprize.Thefriendteasedthebooktoshore.
‘Iwillhavesharesinthis,’theotherlaughed.
‘Butfirstletussee,’saidthewinner,‘whatintheworlditis.’
Thesoggypageswerecoveredwithmagicalformulae.
‘Yourealisewhosebookthiswas?’
Theothernodded.Theyguessedimmediatelywhothepreviousownerwas,amanwhoearlierhadbeencarriedallaboutthecityinbondsandthenexecuted.ThismanthinkingtoescapetheauthoritiesthrewtheincriminatingobjectintotheOrontes– allinvain,forfurtherevidence(asiffurtherevidencewereneeded)wasbroughtagainsthim.Whatbothyoungmenknewwasthatifcaughtwiththemanuscripttheywouldsufferthesamefate.Theirfailuretotakeimmediateactionreflectedacertaingrimfascination.TheyoungmanwiththebigheadandspideryframewasJohnChrysostom;thefriendmayhavebeenEvagrios,orperhapsTheodoreorevenMaximus,anyoneofwhomwouldqualifyfortherole,forlikeChrysostomtheytoohadturnedtheirbacksontheexcessesofthematerialworld.
SuchwasthemoodinAntiochatthattime,when,accordingtoAmmianus,mencreptabout ‘asifinCimmeriandarkness’.ItwasthelateautumnofAD371;theemperorFlaviusValenswasnewlyarrivedinAntioch.Thewholecitywasinatremble.Abigoted,deeplysuperstitiousChristian,amannotwithoutfoes,Valenshadheardrumoursofdivinationbywhichmeansitcouldbeascertainedwhenhewoulddie,underwhatcircumstances,and,morevitally,whohissuccessorwouldbe.Ouijaboardshadbeenusedtoproduceoracles,whichrespondedinGreekhexameters.Alsotheurgyinvolvingmagicaltechniquesforreligiousenlightenmentwaswidelypractised.Libaniuswritesof alektromanteia, aformofdivinationwhichinvolvedscratchingthelettersofthealphabetonthegroundandlayingagrainofwheatontopofeachone;fowlwouldbesetloose,and,accordingtothesequenceinwhichtheypickedthegrain,theenquirerwouldbeprovidedwithanswerstohisquestions.Valenshadtocontendwithanentirecultureofmagic,bothpaganandChristian.Valens‘carryingdeathatthetipofhistongue,bleweverythingdownwithanuntimelyhurricane,hasteningtooverturnutterlytherichesthouses.’ Hissoldierscombedthecityforevidence,particularlybooksofsorceryandmagic.Wholelibrarieswereputtothetorch,andeventhosebookswhichcouldbereadinperfectinnocenceorwhichtheauthoritiespassedovertheAntiochenesthemselvesburned.Aninnocuouspassagereadbyignoranteyescouldamounttoadeathsentence.Anyonecaughtdabblingintheblackartsorevenpossessingbooksonthesubjectwastriedand,inmostinstances,summarilyexecuted.Ironically,thejudgeswouldask‘conspirators’whethertheyhadpredictedtheirownfate.
‘Everywhere,’Ammianuswrites,‘thescenewaslikeaslaughteringofcattle.’AmanhadbeenexecutedforconsultingthehoroscopeofanotherValenswhowasinfacthisownbrother;another,Bassianus,whosoughtbydivinationtodeterminethesexofhisunbornchild,hadallhispropertyconfiscated.Someunfortunateswhomadethemistakeofpassingatombatnightweresuspectedofseekingtocommunicatewiththedeadand,becauseraisingtheghostsofthedeadwasacapitaloffence,shortlyafterfollowedthemtothegrave.Afarmerwhousedamuletsandmagicalcharmsforsummoninggoodweatherandcropswasdrivenintoexile.AphilosophercalledCoeraniuswrotetohiswife,tellingherto‘crownthedoorofthehouse’,acommonexpressionofthetimemeaningthatsomethingofgreaterimportancethanusualwastobedone;hewasexecutedaftersavagetorture.Anoldwomanwasputtodeathfortreatingafeverwithcharms,atechniquethatshehadappliedwithsuccesstothedaughteroftheverymanwhopassedsentenceonher.Ayouthwasbeheadedbecausehehadbeenspottedinthebathstouchingthemarbleandthenhisbreast,whilerecitingthesevenvowelsoftheGreekalphabet.Thevowelswiththeirmysticalconnectiontothesevenplanetswereoftenusedinmagicalformulae;theyouthinquestionwassufferingfromabellyache.Manyhadbeencondemnedtodeathbeforetheythemselvesknewtheywereundersuspicion.
AcelebratedcaseinScythopolisrevealed‘anendlesscableofcrimes’.Atripodoflaurelwoodwasdisplayedinacourtroomasevidenceofaséance.Acircularmetalplatewiththetwenty-fourlettersoftheGreekalphabetengravedonitsrimwasplacedbeneathit,andsuspendedbyathreadfromtheapexofthetripodwasaringwhich,whensetinmotion,wouldspelloutinhexameterversesresponsestothequestionsaskedofit.TheséancewasconductedinahousepurifiedwithArabicperfumes.TheemperorwoulddieontheplainsofMimas,itsaid.Whentheparticipantsoftheséanceaskedwhowouldsucceedhimthependulumswungtofourletters: theta, epsilon, omikron and delta. Althoughthereweremanynamesbeginningwith‘THEO’suspicionfellupononeTheodorus,animperialsecretaryofhighbirthanderudition,whowasapopularfigureamongthepeople.Iftheparticipantsintheséancehadfinishedspellingthename,Theodorusmighthaveescaped;ironically,thefourletterswouldhaveappliedequallywelltoTheodosiuswhoinfactsucceededValens.Theodoruswassodespairingofjusticethatheattendedthetrialwearingblackrobes.Oneofthewitnesses,Hilarius,saidthatTheodoruswascompletelyignorantofwhathadtakenplace.Whenexaminedbythejudge,Theodorus,afterlyingprostrateprayingforpardon,drylyremarkedthattherewasnoneedforanattemptonthethronesincefatewouldbringabouttheoutcomeinanycase.Allthewitnesseswerestrangled,saveforone,ayoungphilosopher,Simonides,whostoodmotionlessamidtheflames.
AllthismusthavebeenpassingthroughthemindsofChrysostomandhisfriendwhiletheystaredatthemysterioussignsandformulae.Asoldierapproached,andforthenextfewminutespacedbackandforthbetweenthemandtheriver.Yearslater,inoneofhishomilies,Chrysostomwouldspeakofthemselvesasbeing‘congealedwithfear’.Theycouldneithertossthebookawaynortearittopieceswithoutattractingnotice.‘Godgaveusmeans’,althoughwhatthesewereChrysostomdoesnotsay;perhapsthepageswerestuffedinanintimateplace.Finally,whenthesoldierwasatasafedistance,theycastthebookasideandquicklymadetheirdeparture.Chrysostom,relatingthisyouthfuladventure,oneofanumberofsuchcases,pointedtoGod’sinterventionwhen‘wehavefallenintodangersandcalamities’asbeinggoodcauseforpeopletoglorifyHim.
Antioch was not always the most congenial of places.
That evening, beneath an almost full moon, I walked through what little survives of the old town, the narrow streets with the appearance of stone walls, their continuity broken only by shuttered wooden balconies and closed entrances. A century ago, women in the houses would have peered down through the slats, hidden from public gaze. The area was almost attractive. I heard drums and singing in the distance, and, following the sound, soon found myself peering in at the open entrance of a house.
The music stopped, I was waved inside.
A space was made for me, and within minutes I was offered apples, pomegranates and coffee. The women recommenced beating their drums and singing with an even greater rhythmic fervour. It was a wedding party, although the actual ceremony would be taking place the next day, at the registry office. When the couple danced together just the once, probably the only time in their lives they would ever do so, there was no meeting of the eyes. The people gathered here appeared happier for the couple than the couple were for themselves. The clapping of hands and the beating of drums would chase away devilish uncertainties. Such glumness, however, was only part of the ritual; it would be poor manners for the happy couple to appear overjoyed at the prospect of leaving home. An older Arab woman with a stern face got up to dance. She snaked her hands through the air, closed her eyes and smiled. The drums beat louder and faster. She shook her ample breasts wildly while the other women encouraged her with their ziraleet.
‘And light your shrines and chaunt your ziraleets,’ writes Thomas Moore in ‘The Veiled Prophet of Khorassan’ from his LallaRookh. The ziraleet is that sound which Alexander Russell, in his ANaturalHistoryofAleppo (1794), describes as ‘the common manner of a company of women expressing joy, or any sudden exultation. The words expressed are Lillé, Lillé, Lillé, repeated as often as the person can do at one breath, and, being rapidly uttered in a very shrill tone, they are heard at a great distance.’ Russell continues with a comparison to passages from ancient Greek literature, pointing to when, for example, upon Xenophon’s retreat, the Greek women attending the army shout in this manner; and also when Penelope, after the first transports of grief on the discovery of her son’s departure, prepares a sacrifice to Minerva, and having finished her supplication makes a similar sound:
She ceas’d: shrill ecstasies of joy declare,
The fav’ring goddess present to the pray’r:
The suitors heard, and deem’d the mirthful voice
A signal of her hymeneal choice.
Odyssey, iv, 1013–6 (Pope trans.)
A friend of the bridegroom, Ibrāhīm, spoke English. He had lived for a couple of years in Ealing and expressed a deep affection for England. Or was it only for Ealing Broadway? I had little sense of his having been elsewhere. Ibrāhīm, his eyes mournful behind thick spectacles, looked as though he had spent an eternity filing papers in a dusty office, where neither youth nor old age would ever trouble him. If there was anything he could show me in Antakya he would be free to do so the following morning, he told me. I expressed a desire to see the old Ottoman houses.
‘Ah, easily done,’ he said, ‘I know many old houses.’
‘Would we be able to go inside them?’
‘Yes, yes, I know people.’
The next morning Ibrāhīm seemed only dimly aware of our conversation of the night before.
‘Old houses? Huh! Yes, ah, houses.’
‘Only if it’s not too much trouble.’
‘What trouble?’ he snapped. ‘Where’s trouble?’
Ibrāhīm was all nerves. We entered one courtyard only to find the broken outlines of what once must have been quite a handsome residence. Anything of aesthetic value had been destroyed. Sheets of corrugated iron patched holes in the walls. A waterless fountain stank of garbage.
‘This is an old house,’ he explained.
‘Do you know its date?’
‘Yes, old!’
Ibrāhīm seemed not to understand what I was looking for. I surmised that perhaps he was feeling awkward about knocking at strangers’ doors but at the same time did not want to disappoint me. I wondered how I might, without offending him, release him from his earlier promise.
‘The mosque of Ḥabīb al-Nadjdjār.’
We sped by without stopping to look inside.
‘Who was he?’
‘A Muslim saint who lived alone in a cave up on the mountain. When they cut off his head it rolled all the way down the mountainside, and where it stopped they built the mosque.’
‘Who killed him and why?’
Ibrāhīm seemed not to hear me and, as though he had entered upon some mad trajectory of his own, rushed me through a dismal area of dilapidated houses. I stopped to look behind me. The mosque was perhaps a mile or more from the foot of the mountain. I wondered how it might be possible for a severed head to roll that distance. After a few minutes we found ourselves at a door upon which Ibrāhīm knocked hard several times. There was a crazed look in his eyes. A man in pyjamas answered, and, shrugging his shoulders at our architectural mission, summoned us inside.
‘If these people knew who I was,’ said Ibrāhīm, ‘we would be asked to leave.’
We were invited to sit in a row of chairs in the courtyard where in the middle stood a tree, a single pomegranate hanging from one of its branches. A woman sliced onions, only rarely looking up from her task while a group of children with sores on their faces silently watched me. A chained dog whimpered beneath an unsupported stone staircase. The man in pyjamas, perhaps following the movement of my eyes, walked over to the tree, and, as though against my willing him not to, picked the only pomegranate that was hanging there and put it in front of me, together with a knife. The dog whined. Our host, his wife and their children watched as I cut into what might have been the last fruit in the universe. A red drop ran down over its green surface. The fruit was not yet ripe, and its bitter seeds wrung the moisture from my mouth. A midday sun filled the courtyard. Ibrāhīm invited me to inspect the rooms upstairs. Would the steps with nothing beneath them finally collapse? I felt like part of an invading force. The master of the house followed us as though he, too, might make a few discoveries.
The rooms upstairs were in a considerably worse state than the area below. Ibrāhīm scowled with disgust as we inspected one where the walls had begun to bubble.
‘Ibrāhīm, should we be here?’
I was hugely embarrassed, but he wasn’t listening to me.
‘I used to play in this room,’ he hissed.
‘What? You’ve been here before!’
Any answer he gave now was not to me but to some other question coiled like a snake deep within himself. Ibrāhīm submitted himself to its poisonous lashes.
‘This was my grandmother’s house. My second childhood home! See what these people have allowed it to become.’
Our host smiled uncomprehendingly.
‘When my grandmother died they squatted this place. This happens all the time, especially with these old houses, and because the squatters cannot afford to make repairs to them the houses are falling apart.’
‘And this is the first time you’ve returned?’
‘Yes!’
I wondered at what point the idea occurred to him to make this dark pilgrimage. Clearly I had provided him with an excuse to come here.
‘What’s worse, if one of these people has an accident we can be held legally responsible. If one of these fools goes through the floor and breaks his neck we can be sued. It’s the crazy law here. What can we do? My family fought to have them removed, but the legal costs were too great for us to be able to pursue the case.’
We stopped at the entrance to one of the bedrooms. I could see through a breach where floor and wall had separated a boy parking his bicycle. The floorboards felt spongy, as though about to give.
‘Her bedroom!’ Although I could comprehend Ibrāhīm’s sorrow I felt sympathy too for the family who lived here. ‘She was from Aleppo and was legendary for her beauty.’
Ibrāhīm noticed me searching, perhaps a little too closely, for traces of that same beauty in him.
‘My mother was beautiful too, she still is, but not me.’
All this was said without a smile. Ibrāhīm’s eyes were beady with murderous rage for those who now occupied his family’s house.
‘Where do you live now?’
‘We moved in the seventies like everybody else, into the new apartment blocks north of the river, and when we left people from the villages moved into our old place.’ There was a fresh note of pity in his voice. ‘They really are poor, these people.’
We left the house, Ibrāhīm clearly much shaken by the experience. I bowed out of going to the wedding, saying that I did not wish to intrude. In truth, I was relieved to make my escape.
The next morning I walked along the Kurtuluş Caddesi, which follows the course of the famous street that Herod and Tiberius built. Almost two miles in length, this ancient thoroughfare with its many shops, its second-storey galleries and covered colonnades was one of Antioch’s glories. There, one might sip cooled wine in the shade, watch camels and asses being led through the porticoes ‘as though they were brides’, jugglers and acrobats, pipers and dancers, barefoot monks and bearded philosophers, girls carrying amphorae on their shoulders, schoolboys chaperoned by slaves, women in brightly coloured carriages drawn by mules. A noisy road now, with miserable shops on either side, there is nothing for the mind to settle upon, unless it be the garage advertising AMERICAN PARTS or the small shop where all the bottles of water were thickly covered with dust. I followed this dismal stretch to where a path turned off up to the Grotto of St Peter, or, as the Turks call it, Sen Piyer Kilisesi.
A special Mass was being said, in Italian, for a group of pilgrims.
It may have been at this cave, on the west side of Mount Staurus (Mount of the Cross), that, according to Acts 11:26, the followers of a new religion were called Christians for the first time. A damp space thirteen metres long and nine metres wide constitutes what local tradition says is the first church in existence. If true, scholars and theologians are silent on the matter. The Crusaders were perhaps a little too enthusiastic to find holy places. When, under Bohemond, they conquered Antioch on 3 June 1098 and slaughtered all the Turks so that the streets were filled with corpses and then pillaged the houses of Muslims and, yes, even Christians, they might well have felt the need for spiritual solace. The remains of mosaic on the floor of the cave and the barely visible frescoes on the right side of the altar appear to date from between the fifth and seventh centuries, thereby suggesting that when they came this already was a site of importance. The Crusaders extended the cave by a couple of metres, adding two arches; the oriental façade was erected in 1883 and is soon to be replaced. With what, concrete?
Did St Peter actually preach here? All we know for certain is that he was in Antioch between AD 47 and 54 and that, with Paul and Barnabas, he founded one of the world’s first Christian communities, most importantly, the first congregation to include Jews and Gentiles. On 29 June each year, the anniversary of St Peter’s martyrdom, the small Christian population of Antakya congregates for a special service. There is a legend that fishermen used to come to bathe and be cleansed of their sins in a small sculpted building not far from here, but of this there is no archaeological evidence. The priest celebrating Mass, Padre Domenico, invited me to visit him the next day at his church in Antakya.
Only a hundred yards or so from the Grotto is a stone bust carved out of limestone, which the Antiochenes called the Charonian. The white stone is visible to most of the town. The Byzantine historian, John Malalas, writing in the sixth century, notes that during the reign of Antiochus IV Epiphanes (175–163 BC) the town was struck by plague. A soothsayer by the name of Leios told Antiochus to construct an image of Charon, the boatman who carried souls into the underworld. A smaller draped figure standing to the right of this may represent the Syrian goddess of Hierapolis, a figure connected to the underworld. The unfinished state of the carvings suggests that when the plague stopped, the sculptors, seeing little need to continue, downed their tools. The presence, at such close quarters, of pagan and Christian antiquities revived in me certain old dichotomies.
That evening the moon was full.
I went to a restaurant where, to my dismay, a television set dominated the dining space. When the news came on, almost all of its thirty minutes were devoted to further developments on Zeki’s death. The waiters stood about in silence. There was ample footage of Zeki’s last public appearance only minutes before he died. The camera kept zooming in on Zeki’s right hand. Was there something going on here, which nobody had noticed before? Were these, the commentator asked, the early signs of Zeki’s demise? The camera invited the audience to look again. Yes, there did appear to be a slight tremble. The woman presenting Zeki with the gift of his old microphone had a plunging neckline. I, too, might have trembled. I wanted a glass of Cappadocian wine. The waiters continued to stand in silence. I signalled as though into a terrible void or as a ghost might to a passing cab. If earth and moon were about to collide, no matter, Zeki would still be the big news, perhaps bigger than he ever was in life, for many days to come.
Padre Domenico, a Capuchin priest from Modena, Italy, has lived in Turkey for twenty-five years, the last eight of which have been spent in Antakya. When I asked him if he was ever homesick for Italy he nodded at the bags of Lavazza coffee. After making espresso for me, he proudly took me on a tour of the church and the surrounding premises. Some years before, he took over one of the crumbling Ottoman houses, and, employing the services of a local architect, Selahattin Altinöz, produced a model of what, given the right resources, can be done with these dilapidated buildings. The Catholic church stands only a few yards away from a synagogue, backs on to a mosque, and is quite close to the Orthodox church. A tourist brochure describes this as an ‘ecumenical triangle’. Was there some irony in the phrase?
Padre Domenico is a popular figure. Throughout our conversation people kept coming and going and there was, in the manner in which they greeted him, both much affection and respect. Although there are few Catholic families in Antakya, probably not more than a dozen, the congregation includes a large number of Orthodox Christian worshippers who follow the Syriac rite and whose bishops and patriarchs are still titled ‘of Antioch’, although they are now based in Damascus. The following week a group of Protestants from America were coming to borrow the premises.
‘Perhaps they’ll think better of Rome.’
‘I hope so,’ he smiled.
A man not to be pushed to profundity he answered my questions with only the most perfunctory sentences, ‘Yes, I like Antakya’, and again, when asked if he could supply any anecdotes about the place, ‘I’m afraid not much happens here.’ I noticed Padre Domenico moved nervously from chair to chair, as though not wishing to be trapped by any one of them.
Chrysostom?
‘Ah yes, Chrysostom,’ he murmured, as though dimly recalling an old schoolmate.
‘What of the first Capuchin priest who came here?’
‘Basilio Galli! I remember!’
The Latin rite was brought back, on the authorisation of Pius IX, to Antioch in 1846, after an absence of several centuries. Padre Basilio was the good messenger. Some months later, I stumbled upon a small portrait of him in F.A. Neale’s memoir, EightYearsinSyria,Palestine,andAsiaMinor,from1842to1850. Neale, who was attached to the consular service in Syria, resided at Antioch for eight months in 1847, and together with Basilio (‘Père Bazelio’) and an unnamed Italian doctor formed the European society of Antioch. The society of three soon became two. The doctor would never go to Mass on Sunday and consequently, Neale relates, this ‘irreclaimably lost sheep’ found himself exiled from Basilio’s affections. An elderly but indefatigable figure, Basilio won the respect of the whole town; he established a school and a chapel, although the congregation never amounted to more than a dozen people.
Basilio’s great passion was antiquities.
With his staff in one hand, and a morsel of bread in the other, he toiled up mountains and down ravines in search of mouldering ruins and rusty antiques, appeasing his appetite from his scanty wallet, and quenching his thirst from one of the many streams that so plentifully abound round Antioch.
Nothing delighted Basilio more than the discovery of an old coin or a stone with some inscription, which was only barely visible. Whenever they met on neutral ground the doctor from Rome would quarrel with Basilio, saying that it was humbug to suppose anything had survived the many earthquakes. Basilio held his ground, no matter how shaky it was. The arguments would rapidly escalate ‘with as much gesticulation and noise, as ever two Roman senators could have used in debating the most weighty affairs of the State’, and such was the heat between the two Latins the townspeople feared there would be violence. One may suppose their quarrels constituted a deeper friendship. What Neale did not know, when his book was published in 1852, was that some months earlier, on 12 May 1851, Basilio’s throat had been cut by unknown figures.
‘Muslims killed him?’
‘Yes, I believe so,’ said Padre Domenico.
‘Why?’
‘Jealousy maybe.’
‘What about the relationship between Muslims and Christians now?’
‘Good.’
‘Will it remain so?’
‘Yes, why not?’
As of late, the Turks have not been noted for their religious tolerance, but several people I spoke to in Antakya suggested that the local situation was otherwise. Muslims and Christians got on well, I was told, things were different here. Padre Domenico showed me an old photograph of a Roman stone bridge spanning a turbulent Orontes.
‘They destroyed this bridge in order to make way for a new one.’
‘The people here have no sense of their own history?’
‘Yes, it’s most upsetting to observe.’
The doubting ghost of the Italian doctor must have got into me.
‘Do you believe the Grotto’s where St Peter preached?’
‘There can be no positive “yes” or “no” to that question, but I feel that it probably is.’
Padre Domenico supported my earlier notion, that the presence of mosaics from an age predating that of the Crusades, even if it proves little, points to there already having been a strong tradition of worship in that spot. As we spoke, he leaned closer to me.
‘This simple cave is very important to me,’ he continued. ‘Unlike the Vatican, which reflects the strength of man, this place is informed by the power of the Holy Spirit.’
The morning newspaper was filled with further revelations about Zeki. Whether scandals or miracles, these the Turkish language concealed from me. A television blasted pop videos over the breakfast tables. There could be no escaping junk culture, yet the moon above Antakya is the same as that which hung above Antioch. One may still glean from the surrounding stone something of permanence. I was just about to get onto a bus for Aleppo when Ibrāhīm arrived, saddened that I could not accept an invitation to his mother’s house. We spoke unconvincingly of future dates. The demon that seemed to have possessed him a couple of days before had gone.
The Romans in this part of the world are said to have used turtles as walking candleholders. I enter into a debate with myself as to whether this was cruel, immensely cruel that is. Would the turtle have felt through its thick shell the dripping wax, and, if so, would it have accelerated? At what speed would a turtle have to move in order to extinguish the flame? Was the fate of a walking candle not preferable to that of turtle consommé? Of what do turtles dream?
TWO
To Aleppo Gone
Her husband’s to Aleppo gone, master of the Tiger.
Macbeth, I. iii
A butcher came up to me near the Bāb Anṭaki (Antioch Gate), one of the main entrances to the main souq of Aleppo, and pressed his hand sticky with blood into mine. A couple of goat’s heads lay on the ground by his feet. A quick death had frozen their professorial smiles. With his other hand the man, who might have been mad, friendly or hostile, grabbed my wrist, grinning foolishly all the while. I pulled myself free, and, with the goat’s blood congealing between my fingers, I sped through the covered streets, looking for somewhere to wash.
‘Hello, mister, welcome!’
A merchant pushed artificial silk scarves at me.
‘Français?’
The voices seemed to come from all directions at once.
‘English? Hello, Manchester United!’
I pressed myself against the wall, attempting to squeeze past a couple of small vehicles belching fumes, their drivers leaning on their horns at some boys perched on braying mules that kept going round in circles. The boys with their soprano voices slapped the arses of the mules. The poor creatures became even more confused, their eyes glassy with unintelligence. A small crowd of people who were the secondary cause of the obstruction gathered to watch the primary cause, an argument between two men who were eyeing each other with murderous rage. There was much shouting and waving of arms between them and several shoves but no determining punches. Almost five minutes of all show and no action passed before the men skulked off in opposite directions, the crowd dispersed, the boys stopped slapping the mules, the mules quit braying, the drivers let up beeping their horns and I was free to move.
‘Deutsch?’
‘Come inside just one minute. No need to buy anything. Just look. You like to drink some tea with me?’
The merchant’s offer of brew and conversation is almost always perfectly genuine. The Syrian merchant will say there is more to life than making money and although he will demonstrate the truth of this one suspects that he is, in comparison to his Turkish counterpart whose prime objective is making a quick sale, the more skilful of the two salesmen. I accepted his offer for reasons other than conversation.
‘May I wash my hands here?’
According to legend, the prophet Abraham, on his journey south to the land of Canaan, stopped and milked his cows on the mound where the citadel of Aleppo now stands. Alexander Russell, in his TheNaturalHistoryofAleppo (1794), which, despite its occasional lapses into prejudice, remains the finest book on Aleppo in the English language, refers to a manuscript in his possession, entitled TareehHaleb (The History of Aleppo). According to its author the Patriarch used daily to distribute milk to the poor of a neighbouring village, who at certain hours, in expectation of his bounty, assembled at the bottom of the hill, and by frequently repeating ‘Ibrāhīmhaleb’ (‘Abraham has milked’) gave occasion to the name Haleb being conferred on the town. Haleb is still the Arabic name for the town. As for the epithet Shahbā’ that is frequently given to the city, Russell’s manuscript contains a further variation on the Abraham legend. In the Patriarch’s herd there was a singular cow, remarkable for its variegated colour and distinctive moo. Shahbā’ denotes streaks of grey and white. When she was milked, the populace waiting below, upon hearing her moo, would remark to one another, ‘Ibrāhīmhalebal-Shahbā’!’ (Abraham has milked the pied cow!) On the other hand, the town’s epithet may be derived from the colour of the soil and buildings. If we find the legend of Abraham doubtful, it was not so in 1167 when Nūr al-Dīn built a mosque on the mound in the Patriarch’s honour, preserving there the stone upon which he is supposed to have sat. According to Hittite records there was a settlement here between 2000 and 1400 BC. There have been settlements here going back to the eighth millennium and it seems likely that the hill was fortified long before Abraham’s time and may not therefore have allowed for such a pastoral scene. That the story should survive at all, however, suggests a core of truth at its centre.
The Aleppo souq, the finest in the Middle East, is a marvel of covered passages. A foreigner should go invisibly there, so as not to precipitate too much change. Although there is a tourist trade, unlike the Grand Bazaar in Istanbul, which is almost wholly given over to that purpose, the Aleppo souq for the most part still serves the needs of the local populace. Authenticity, which usually means the cosmetic has been more smoothly applied than elsewhere, is uncalculated here. The concerns are what they always were, the buying and selling of gold continues as an insurance against hard times, the barrels of dried henna which when boiled up into a paste still decorate the palms of Bedouin women, the dried flowers which when brewed provide a cure for stomach troubles, the rope – why, with the nomadic life on the wane, so much rope? Although some areas of the souq are no longer given over to just one trade, meat is still to be found in one place, sheep carcasses hanging from the doorways, and elsewhere one finds specific areas for nuts, vegetables, cotton, textiles, tent trappings, sheepskins, confectionery, perfumes, leather, gold and silver jewellery, copper, brass and metal utensils, the spice market with its smells of nutmeg, coriander, cumin, saffron, cinnamon, pepper, cardamom and cloves and aloes. A foreigner will not go unnoticed, of course. Young boys rush through the streets keeping track of each person who goes there and will try to entice his prey back to the shop of an older brother, father or uncle.
This massive labyrinth, largely unchanged since the sixteenth century and in parts dating back to the thirteenth, covers seven kilometres. The vaulted stone ceilings, dusty shafts of light penetrating the gloom every so often, keep the area cool in summer and dry during the winter rains. It is a world of many contrasts – subterranean in feel yet above ground, timeless yet operating always in the present tense, orderly and chaotic. Aleppo, almost midway between where desert ends and sea begins, is also where East meets West and where, for centuries, European mercantile interests were also Oriental ones. If Shakespeare thought he could sail to Aleppo then either the doomed Tiger was dragged overland by a thousand camels or the coastline has greatly altered. Aleppo is seventy miles away from the sea and is further separated from Antakya by a mountain range. Or perhaps he did not blunder at all and was only speaking in the figurative sense. Alexandretta, on the Hatay coast, used to be considered Aleppo’s port in the same way Seleucia was regarded Antioch’s. Aleppo was certainly known in Shakespeare’s day – the English Levant Company had a factory here and the town was a vital stage in the overland route for commerce with the East. Along the paths in the souq one can see what were once the magnificent courtyards of the khans or caravanserais where foreign merchants took up residence.
There is much here to make the heart sink, however, and in fact any journey to the Orient is in part a struggle to unscramble surfaces. The ugly and the beautiful dwell not side by side, but rather they occupy the same plane. A sweet rose contends with stinking garbage. So much magnificence runs to waste and indeed many of the old khans now serve as storage spaces. I noticed a particularly lovely minaret with three fluorescent tubes attached near the top, an illustration of just how much has gone wrong with the Arabic culture, in particular the distortion of its beautiful line. The Arabs themselves have imported the straight line. They must be held accountable. Everywhere one looks there are electrical cables, makeshift repairs, advertising posters and fluorescent tubes. Who first brought in the fluorescent tube? Where’s the punishment to fit the crime? One finds everywhere, even in the most beautiful mosques, the violence this harsh light has done. This imported identity is completely out of keeping with the gracefulness of Arabic architecture. The pollution in Aleppo is some of the worst I have ever experienced. The situation is, if anything, even worse in the souq where, with nowhere for the fumes to escape, one experiences a continual burning in the throat and eyes. The civil authorities seem unable, at present, to protect what they have. This is a problem that greatly exercises Ahmad Mallāḥ, a tour guide whose knowledge of the souq and its hidden treasures is perhaps unrivalled. Ahmad who picks up his clientele at the corner of the Souq al-Atarin and the street running south towards the Māristān Arghūn is informed by something more important than the need of an income – a genuine love of the place.
‘Although the responsibility for the preservation of the souq falls ultimately to the wealthier people,’ he complains, ‘who among them will open their purses?’
Although less drastic than in Antakya the scenario is much the same, with the wealthy having abandoned the traditional houses for the modern quarters while the poor migrants who cannot afford the upkeep of the old houses came in droves. The population of Aleppo, over a million, has more than doubled since the 1960s.
‘You must understand many of these people have come from the poorest villages. This to them is a kind of paradise. If I say to them, “You are destroying paradise”, they’ll think I am insane.’
Aḥmad stood, appropriately enough, in one of the courtyards of the Māristān Arghūn al-Kamilī, a hospital for the insane, constructed in 1354 by a wealthy Mamlūk governor who gave the place his name. The year before, on my first visit to Aleppo, a boy of angelic beauty kept trying to bring me here. Whywillyounotcomewithmetoseethemadhouse? There was a terrible disturbance in his eyes and, a couple of days later, when he whispered to me that he did not believe in God the gravity of what he was telling me shook his slight frame. Youwillnottellanyone,please,mylifewouldbemadeimpossible. The boy never smiled once, and I wondered how at the age of fourteen or fifteen despair had so completely possessed him. After a while I took pains to avoid him, but he would always find me. Willyoucomewithmenowtothemadhouse?
Aḥmad pointed out the architectural wonders of the place.
‘I must speak quickly because you see there are many less knowledgeable guides about and what they do is listen to me, gathering any information which they can use.’
A man stood nearby, a possible spy in the house of madness.
‘Natural light and gentle sounds, the sound of fountains, were used in the treatment of the insane. Flowers were planted along the walls and around the pools so the mad could smell their perfume.’
At one end of the courtyard was an īwān where hired musicians played soft music and passages from the Qur’ān were read aloud. According to one medieval writer, Ibn Abī Uṣabi‘a, the first doctors were the inventors of the reed pipe, who healed with their playing. Most Islamic medical writers recommended music as a cure for melancholia. The notion that music expressed the harmony of the heavenly spheres and directly influenced the soul was inherited from the Greeks. The Arabs were careful to distinguish between the various forms of madness – ‘madness is of many kinds’ – between the imbecile (ahmaq), the possessed (majnūn), and ‘the fool for God’s sake’ (majdhūb) to name but three. The late Michael W. Dols, in his monumental study, Majnūn:TheMadmaninMedievalSociety, asking the meaning of madness in Islamic society, answers his own question:
Conversely, what was sanity? In the medieval scheme of things, the human being was the microcosm of the universe, sharing with the plants and animals the qualities of growth and sensation but also sharing with the angels and heavenly beings the qualities of reason and the desire for beatitude. Reason was pivotal – it was the link between the visible and the invisible, the body and the soul, and the individual and society. Reason was the prerequisite for a Muslim’s full participation in his community. Yet, paradoxically, the madman was accommodated by society, so that he was not a pariah, an outcast, or a scapegoat.
Aḥmad spoke of the importance of natural light but deeper inside the hospital, where in the twelve cells surrounding an octagonal courtyard the most dangerously insane were kept in chains, there was only darkness. Here, the worst cases were kept in chains and regularly beaten. It seemed extraordinary that one should find beneath one roof both enlightenment and sheer brutality. I asked Aḥmad what the present attitude to madness was.
‘We try to cure them.’
‘Yes, but how?’
Aḥmad seemed to want to evade my question, speaking instead of the need for spiritual balance, although he did say that life here was not without its attendant cruelties and also how easily one could be made to feel alone. The past may have been for him a safer country. Alexander Russell, who was a physician and would have paid close attention not only to the disorders of the body but to those of the mind, presumably was thinking of this place when he wrote:
