Читать книгу Tribes with Flags: Adventure and Kidnap in Greater Syria - Charles Glass, Charles Glass - Страница 12
ОглавлениеAyfer Ozmen confessed she was not a professional interpreter, merely one of those called in by the governor’s office for the rare English-speaking visitor. She had been a tourist guide and knew most of the sights in and around Antioch, so she compensated by kindly driving me to see St Peter’s Church on Mount Silpius. We drove through Sanay, the industrial outskirts of Antioch, to the cultivated fields of the river plain and up the slopes of the mountain.
Scores of farmers in small trucks were blocking the road, unloading tobacco to sell at the government tobacco depot. The brown leaves had been cured, pressed and wrapped in burlap, ready at the roadside for government inspectors to value. Some of the farmers sat on top of their bundles, as expectant as actors waiting for applause at the conclusion of a performance. The fresh tobacco filled the air with a delicious, savoury aroma, and it was not unpleasant to enjoy the smell while we waited for the tobacco trucks to clear the road. When we finally passed the tobacco market, “Moonlight” Ozmen drove up the hill and turned into the small drive of St Peter’s Church/Museum.
We walked up a steep flight of steps to a terrace. The gatekeeper waived the entry fee for Miss Ozmen, who was a sort of unofficial guide. I paid, and we stepped into the paved garden in front of St Peter’s. Successive generations of Christians had added carved doors and a grand façade, like that of a Romanesque cathedral, to the little cave where St Peter had waited with his flock outside the pagan city of Antioch. It was a lovely sight, and “Moonlight” and I were alone enjoying it. We went inside to find a huge natural grotto. On the wall, the English version of a framed notice in several languages read:
St. Peter’s Grotto
In the 29 to 40 AD period, after the death of Christ, when his Apostles went all over the world to teach his word, St Peter came to Antakya. The first meeting took place in this cave where you are standing. At that meeting, this group who then had no definite name received the name of “Christian”, meaning belonging to the faith of Christ. Since the first meeting was in this place, it is said to be the first Christian church. In the 12 or 13th century, with certain additions to the front part of the place, the cave was made into a church.
Water dripping from above had long ago destroyed the mosaics and frescoes that once decorated the church. There were ten old benches scattered about the grotto, which was nearly bare of ornament. An altar stood near one wall, something which had surely not been there in St Peter’s time. Nearby, however, was a feature which had. “You see,” Miss Ozmen said, “there was a stone here over the entrance of this place, and this was the tunnel. Since they were not powerful enough to fight the other people, they were prepared to escape this way.” I tried to climb up the tunnel, bending low and crawling up steps cut by hand into the rock, but the passage soon narrowed so that not even a child could have gone further. When I backed outside, Miss Ozmen was waiting. “The tunnel was destroyed,” she said. “We have a lot of earthquakes.”
Another framed notice, now superseded by the governor’s order, announced that the Roman Catholics said Mass there on the first Sunday of every month at three o’clock. The governor had since reduced this monthly dispensation to once a year. I supposed Antioch’s Christians were not powerful enough to resume weekly services any more than the Emperor Julian, with the might of his legions, was able in the fourth century to restore the old Roman gods to an Antioch which was the capital of Syria and the third greatest city in his empire. By Julian the Apostate’s time, Christianity had taken too strong a hold. By ours, Islam was firmly entrenched. If the Turkish state ever succeeded in supplanting Islam with its national secularism, the mosques might well follow St Peter’s in becoming museums.
Stepping outside to admire the view of Antioch and the plain, I asked Miss Ozmen the name of the district just below us.
“This part is called Habib an-Najjar, because the mountain is called Mount Habib an-Najjar. We have a church, excuse me, a mosque that is called Habib an-Najjar too. It is the name of one of the persons who is regarded as a holy one, according to Muslims. It is a mythological story. They killed Habib an-Najjar on this mountain. The body stayed here, and the head rolled down the mountain.”
“Where to? Can I see it from here?”
“No. It is impossible.”
“Why?”
“It is eight kilometres far.”
If eight kilometres seemed a long way for a head to roll, it was no less fantastic than the account of the Muslim chronicler Dimashki in which Habib an-Najjar walked for three days through Antioch with his head in his right hand proclaiming his love of God. Miss Ozmen took me down to the mosque of Habib an-Najjar in a crowded part of the old city. It was a lovely building of light polished stone, above a crypt which she said held the remains, head and all, of Habib an-Najjar. Outside in the courtyard, she asked a caretaker if we could see the crypt.
The caretaker pointed to his head and said something to Miss Ozmen. “Oh,” she said. “I cannot go. I am a woman, and I have nothing to cover my head. You go.”
The old man led me down stone steps which curved round and round a central column, like the stairs in a tower, until we neared the bottom. There he motioned me to stop. The basement was a foot deep in water. We had to stand on a plank above the water to look at the tomb. It was a small room, without inscriptions or symbols, only the plain stone sarcophagus. There was really nothing to see, but disappointment may well be the only consistent feature of sight-seeing.
When we arrived back upstairs, Miss Ozmen was talking to two old blind men. She introduced me to one of them, a man with a wispy beard and blank eyes. “Here is the muezzin,” she said. “We call him muezzin, because he announces the prayer five times a day, according to the Muslims.”
Recalling that some of Beirut’s mosques played old records or cassettes of the muezzin’s call, I asked, “Does he do all the singing himself or does he play a recording?”
“He does it very well. He doesn’t live here. He has got a family, and he gets his salary from the government.”
“From the government?” I asked, surprised that Atatürk’s secular state subsidised the mosque.
“Of course.”
“What time is the first prayer?”
Without asking the old man, she answered, “Ten minutes to five in the morning.”
I asked, again hoping to start a conversation with the muezzin, who stood silently at her side, “He comes here that early every day?”
“No,” she said, ignoring the old man. “He climbs the minaret five times a day. And we can watch from our windows to make sure he is doing his job.”
I could not help but sympathise with the muezzin, standing here idly wondering what we were talking about, and climbing to the top of the minaret five times a day while Miss Ozmen watched from her window.
The muezzin said I could look inside the mosque. I took off my shoes and stepped inside, walking over the thick Persian carpets, trying not to disturb the men inside who prayed silent and prostrate facing the mithrab, a small niche in one wall indicating the direction for correct devotion. The minbar, a platform raised above the mosque like a pulpit from which the Friday sermon was delivered, was empty. In a far corner, near a long window, a small group of men sat talking quietly. The mosque had been not only a place of prayer, but of religious teaching and discussion, from Islam’s earliest days. The only decorations, in keeping with the Prophet’s prohibitions against representation of the human form, were the geometric patterns and calligraphy carved into the stonework.
“Do you come to the mosque?” I asked Miss Ozmen, when I had put my shoes back on in the courtyard.
“Usually, only the gentlemen come to the mosque. Ladies stay at home. On special occasions, we come to the mosque, but we pray in special places, specially behind gentlemen.” The other, older blind man began to speak to her in Turkish. He was stooped over a long walking stick and wore the traditional sharwal and white skull cap of the religious man. “He is asking if you would like to see the tomb of Yahya,” she explained.
“Yahya?”
“Yes,” she said. “A follower of Issa, of Jesus.”
The blind man led us to a small room. “I cannot go in without a headscarf,” she said. “You can go in.”
The bare room was only a few feet square, and I could see all of it from the courtyard outside. “This is a tomb of a follower of Jesus?” I asked.
“Of course.”
While she was driving me to my hotel, Miss Ozmen lamented the decline of the tourist trade. “I used to guide many Americans here,” she said, “but they are not coming any more.”
“Why not?”
“Because of the Middle East situation.”
“But Turkey is not affected by the Arab–Israeli war.”
“They don’t just come to see Turkey,” she went on. “I used to receive tourists every day. In the seventies, we had seven cars together, sometimes ten cars, sometimes twenty-five cars, filled with tourists.”
“I suppose,” I said, “you might attract more tourists if you had a good hotel.”
“Yes, Atahan Hotel is the best here.”
“The Atahan is not very good.”
She turned and looked at me. I feared a car accident or worse. “Not good, Atahan? Why don’t you like it?” she asked, bitterness creeping into her high-pitched voice.
“I don’t mind it, but it’s just not a very good hotel.”
“You’ve been to better hotels?”
The Greek Orthodox Church of Sts Peter and Paul lay at the end of a covered archway in the heart of the impoverished Rich Quarter. If a small piazza in front of the church had not set it apart, it would have been impossible to see its lovely columns and basilica, to know that in the midst of all the houses, winding alleys and courtyards, there was such a beautiful old church. The piazza was already empty; the people had gone home without the long chats common in other cities. Only two old men in dark suits remained on the porch, saying farewell in Arabic. One of them put on his hat and walked away, and the other went back into the church. I followed him inside.
In Arabic, he asked me, “Where are you from?”
“From America.”
“From America!” he said, delighted. “Where did you learn Arabic?”
“I studied in Beirut.”
“American? In Beirut?” he asked. Grabbing my ear and pulling hard, he added, “They will take you away. All the Americans in Beirut are taken away.”
“It’s a problem.”
I said I had been to the church-turned-mosque and seen the tomb of Yahya.
“What Yahya?” he asked. “That is St John.”
We walked around the church looking at the ikons. He said some were three or four hundred years old. All of them had the beauty of an older, simpler faith. “Many ikons are stolen,” he said, holding up a large key. “I lock the church every day.” He limped as he walked from ikon to ikon, and he realised I was looking at his left leg, which was badly twisted.
“Korea,” he said. “I was shot in both legs.”
I said, “Haram,” the universal Arabic statement of sympathy, which literally means “forbidden,” but implied pity.
“No,” he laughed. “It was war.”
“But it is haram that you went all the way from Antioch to a war in Korea with the Turkish army.”
“It was for America,” he explained, strangely proud. “Turkey was with America.”
It seemed odd that a Syrian Christian would go from the far west to the far east of Asia to an American war, but his life was of a piece with that of his forefathers. Turkey had for centuries fought alongside other countries, invariably Christian, using non-Turkish levies. She had fought with the British in the Crimea in 1856 against the Russian Empire and, at the cost of her own empire, with the Germans against the British in 1917.
The Roman Catholic chapel of Saints Paul and Peter, though a short walk away, was nothing like the grand Orthodox Church of Saints Peter and Paul. The Orthodox worshipped in a vestige of Byzantium, when Christians ruled the city. The Catholics made do with a room reminiscent of the days when the Christian community was underground, as Saints Peter and Paul might have known it. I came to it, like a knight errant in quest of a myth, having heard from Christians in Alexandretta of its Italian pastor and a “holy woman” named Sister Barbara.
I walked there in the shade of the narrow alleys, uphill and past turquoise talismans, protection against the evil eye, hanging over closed doors. Women, heads covered in scarves, opened their doors to sweep house-dust out into the street or to call their children inside. Waifs, some barely dressed, ran up and down the steep streets shouting and playing, while men in old woollen trousers and heavy jackets trudged solemnly by. Near the top of the hill, the Rich Quarter gave way to a wide, shabby avenue. There I found the old house of the Azar family, prominent Christians who, when the Rich Quarter became poor, sold their house to the Catholic Church and moved to the suburbs.
The front door led through a short, dark vault to an open stone courtyard, surrounded on three sides by the house itself and on the fourth by the stone wall of the adjoining house. Each room opened onto the enclosure, which was shaded by fruit trees and had a gurgling fountain in its centre. At the far end was a kitchen, and on the sides the sleeping rooms and a bathroom. The chapel with home-made altar and several rows of pews was in what had been a modest sitting-room. This was the parish church and rectory of Father Roberto Ferrari, the only Catholic priest in Antioch.
“We had a real church in another area of Antioch,” Father Ferrari said. His English was fluent, spoken with a delightful Italian accent. “Many years ago, a French Franciscan decided to use the Melkite church.” The Melkites were the Greek rite of the Roman Catholic Church, one of many eastern rites in communion with Rome, like the Maronite, Assyrian, Armenian and Coptic Catholics. Each had its own liturgy, and most permitted married men to become priests. In Jerusalem, each sect guarded its territory and independence. In remote outposts like Antioch, where there were too few Catholics to matter, Latins and Melkites worshipped together.
“After we had been in the Melkite church for twenty-four years,” Father Ferrari complained, “the Turkish governor here said, ‘This church is not for the Latins. Please leave this area. If not, we will put your things in the street.’ I delayed for ten years, but the Papal Nuncio in Ankara asked me not to make trouble.”
Father Ferrari, who came from Perugia, belonged to the Capuchin order, a strict branch of the Franciscans. Sixty years old, he had been in Turkey since 1955, serving first at Trabzon on the Black Sea, and in 1973 came to Antioch. His whole body and face were thin, no spare flesh anywhere, a man whose life of denial had left a good nature and a sense of humour as its only extravagances. His thick white hair stuck straight up out of his head. He worea V-neck jersey over a plaid wool shirt, old trousers, St Francis’s sandals and thick spectacles. “There are one hundred Catholics here,” he said. “No. I just baptised three babies, so there are 103.” He laughed and invited me to have a cup of tea. He went to the kitchen to make the tea himself. I could see why.
While we were talking, I had noticed that a white-haired old woman in a black widow’s dress with a brown cardigan was walking in and out of the various rooms, cleaning and carrying laundry. This was Nasra, whose name in Arabic meant “Nazarene.” She looked disapprovingly at everything and everyone. For a few minutes, she fiddled with the curtains in one of the bedrooms, opening and closing them several times, looking unhappy whether they were drawn or not. She finally left them half-open and walked back into the courtyard. She swept insouciantly, casting occasional glances in our direction as if to say, why are those two sitting there? I would not have dared to ask her to make tea either.
When he sat down and poured me a glass of tea, I asked him, “Do you have many problems with the governor?”
“Sometimes,” he said, smiling as though at a private joke. “Every time, questions, questions. One month ago, though, he gave us permission to say Mass at St Peter’s on Christmas Day.”
“The governor told me St Peter’s was a museum.”
“For almost two thousand years, it has been a church,” he said. “It was a church until twenty-five years ago when the Turkish police took it.” He sipped his tea and said, “Museum,” shaking his head at the thought.
He told me Antioch had no Catholic school, so he taught catechism on Saturdays. Remembering Yalgin Kavak and the young man in the photocopy shop in Alexandretta, I asked him, “Do you have any converts?”
“Here it’s a little difficult, because it is prohibited. We don’t try to convert anyone. In Alexandretta, there are three young people who want to become Christians, but this is a problem for their families.”
“Are there others?”
“Some years ago, a major in the army converted in secret.”
“Why in secret?”
“He would have lost his job. There would have been problems with his family, and he would have lost his red, official passport.”
He did not know of any Catholics in his parish who had become Muslims, though centuries ago most of them had.
A tall young woman with long brown hair walked into the courtyard. She was not pretty in a conventional sense, and the long sweater she wore did not conceal the fact she was overweight, like a jolly friar. There was however something distracted in her manner, an inner peace to her warm, German face, which made you want to be near her. Before the door from the alley slammed shut behind her, two small children ran in squealing and laughing. They tugged at her sweater, and she bent down to speak to them in Turkish. They nodded as she spoke, and one of them kissed her cheek. Then they walked meekly out of the door, like young lions tamed by Daniel.
At the age of eighteen, this young woman, Barbara Kallasch, had travelled by bicycle from her home in Wiesbaden to Israel, where she worked in a hospital and contracted hepatitis. She went to Jordan on what she had intended as a trip by land to India. Failing to obtain an Iraqi visa there, she went north to Syria and then to Antioch, where she planned to remain a year. She took a job in the Melkite church, helping by her presence there to keep it open and assisting pilgrims on their way south. She was now thirty-one years old and was organising local women to weave carpets. “Do you,” I asked her, “have a vocation?”
“Yes, yes,” Father Ferrari answered for her. “Like Mother Theresa.”
“The Franciscans adopted me,” she said. “I’m in the third order of St Francis.”
“They call her Sister Barbara,” Father Ferrari said.
“But you are not a nun?”
“The first time I came here for St Peter’s Feast, a man took my picture and wrote in the newspaper that a nun from Germany was visiting. Since then, they have called me Sister Barbara.”
“You have been here eleven years. Are you going to stay?”
“I always thought that if someone were here to take my place, I would leave. If you get to know the people here, they are very nice. It is also for the church I stay. My family want me back in Germany. My sisters came to visit. So has my parish priest.”
“How do you spend your time?”
“Translations,” she said. She spoke five languages, German, English, French, Italian and Turkish. “Also weaving. Helping people. Helping the church.”
“What about the future? Would you like to get married?”
“You don’t think about marriage when you work like this.”
A Greek Orthodox priest walked into the courtyard. Dressed in black, with his black hat and beard, the Abuna Boulos, Arabic for “Father Paul,” had come to offer his Holy Thursday greetings to Father Ferrari. As the two clerics shook hands and sat down for a cup of tea, I reflected that eight centuries had passed since the Great Schism between Rome and Orthodoxy. During that time, the Greek and Latin Churches had persecuted each other’s adherents over obscure differences of doctrine and liturgy. The Catholic and Orthodox Patriarchs of Antioch had fled south to Syria and Lebanon, taking only their ancient title, “Patriarch of Antioch and the East,” with them. They had left behind barely a thousand Christians with only two priests who could at last afford to practise ecumenical fraternity on the Feast of the Last Supper.
Just over the bridge in the new city was the repository of artefacts of the vibrant religion which predated both Christianity and Islam in Antioch. The Hatay Museum, built by the French in their final year of occupation, housed perhaps the best collection of Roman mosaics in the world. In spare, modern rooms and in a garden overlooking the River Orontes were hundreds of beautiful mosaics and statues. The colourful stone, whether carved into statues or broken into pieces for the mosaics, depicted a joyous, rapturous existence of gods, goddesses, heroes and nymphs in a lush, fertile land, the religion of the Hellenes taken over by the Roman conquerors. On wall after wall were depictions of Dionysus, in a chariot drawn triumphantly by two lions, drunkenly supporting himself on the shoulder of a handsome boy, even more drunkenly asleep or at the height of his powers chasing the luscious Ariadne. There were pictures of Zeus threatening with his axe in one hand and his lightning-bolts in the other, Zeus the eagle carrying off the beautiful Ganymede as his mother and father watched helplessly, Zeus the father of all. Perseus was freeing Andromeda, Echo was in love with Narcissus, who preferred his own reflection, and Apollo was seeking the ingenuous wood-nymph Daphne. Most of the mosaics came from the woodland retreat named for Daphne at Harbiye, a few miles outside Antioch. It was in Harbiye that Daphne was metamorphosed into a laurel tree while on her flight from Apollo’s attentions. The mosaics had come to the museum, but the laurels grew there still.
In one room of the museum, where Agamemnon was sacrificing his daughter Iphigenia to Artemis and satyrs were struggling with hermaphrodites, a class of ten-year-old children listened attentively to their teacher, taking notes as she spoke in Turkish. The children wore black smocks, the boys’ down to their waists and the girls’ to the knees, over tattered jeans and cords. They were quiet when the teacher lectured, but, when she left them to inspect the works of art on their own, they frolicked playfully among the statuary of Greek heroes and the mosaics of forgotten deities.
Outside the museum, I heard the strains of a marching band similar to the triumphal music which had been playing outside the hotel on my first morning in Alexandretta. When I went out to look, the steps of the museum were crowded with people, as were the other corners of the square in front of the post office, the cinema and the grand Ottoman municipality building. The whole square was “stuffed” with people, as though it were one great outdoor dolma. Of Antioch’s total population of 100,000, less than its number in antiquity, at least ten per cent were there in the heat of the afternoon sun, talking, laughing or humming along with the music. At a command, everyone in the crowd suddenly stopped and stood to attention. After a few seconds’ quiet, the orchestra began to play the national anthem. It was a solemn moment, thousands of people standing motionless and silent. The anthem ended, and they began talking and relaxing again.
In the centre of the square, next to the large statue of Atatürk astride a horse, its forelegs high in the air as the father of the nation galloped into their lives, a platform had been erected. Both platform and statue were decorated with wreaths and flags. A nine-year-old boy ascended the dais and, to the applause of the crowd, recited a poem. He was followed by another young boy, who delivered a fiery speech. The only words I could understand in his soliloquy, which sounded at least as portentous as Mark Antony’s funeral oration for Julius Caesar, were place names – Türkiye, Antakya, Alanya. It was stirring stuff, and from the appreciation of the crowd it was clear that rhetoric had not died in the city where rival sophists of the fourth century had perfected the art of argument. The boy’s seemed to be the words which made men march to war.
Pressed against the door of the museum by the crowd, I asked a woman what was happening. She looked at me dismissively and said, “Turizm Bayram.” So, Tourism Week had begun. How were the thousands of Turks gathered at the feet of Atatürk to know I was the only tourist in their midst? Did it matter?
AD MEMORIAM “II” BASILII NOVARIENSIS ORD. MINOR CAP. MISSIONARII APOSTOLICI/Ob Zelum Dilatande Fidei ANTIOCHIAE Missionem Fundavit ANNO MDCCCXLVI/Ideoque Ibidem In Odium Fidei Catholicae Maridie Cultura Jugulutus est Anno Dni MDCCLI–IV Idus Maii AEtatis suae XLVII/Prope ha Sanctuarium exuviae ejus sepultae sunt.
The marble tombstone lay for nearly a century over the grave of Father Basilio Novariensio, until the Christian cemetery had been destroyed. It had been moved from church to church, and its latest resting place was the wall in Father Ferrari’s kitchen. In the small vaulted room, with its old stove and chopping-block, Father Ferrari was preparing dinner. I leaned against a counter-top, hoping to be invited to eat, and read the inscription on the tombstone. I asked the priest what had happened to his 19th-century predecessor.
“Padre Novariensio received some Orthodox young men into the Catholic Church,” he said, chopping celery and onions as he spoke. “One night, some Turks came to the old church and found the sister in the kitchen. They asked her if they could see the church building. She found Padre Novariensio, who took them into the church.”
“And then?”
Father Ferrari began slicing tomatoes. “Then, when he was standing with his back to them, they took a knife and slit his throat.” He passed the knife across his own throat as he said it, then put the knife down next to the sliced tomatoes. “They left the knife on a window-ledge, and Padre Novariensio bled to death. When the nun found him, he was already dead.”
“Who killed him?”
“No one was ever caught,” he said. “It was believed at that time and now that the Orthodox families paid the murderers. Povero Padre Novariensio.”
Father Ferrari boiled water and began pouring the vegetables into the pot. “You like zuppa?” he asked.
Without my having noticed, Sister Barbara had come in and set an extra place at the table for me. Neither of them said anything about it. There was no sign of the old woman.
“Where is Nasra?” I asked.
“She has gone to the Orthodox church,” Father Ferrari said, smiling mischievously.
“Is that funny?” I asked him.
“She’s a Catholic. All the Catholics who think our church is too poor for them go to the Orthodox church. The new Christianity.”
“Do any of the more humble Orthodox come to you?”
“Some of the younger ones,” Barbara said. “The Orthodox say the Mass in Arabic, and many of the youngsters come here because they know only Turkish.”
Earlier in the evening I had attended Mass, which Father Ferrari said in Turkish for a tiny congregation. The words of his sermon were Turkish, but his gestures were unmistakably Italian.
He poured us glasses of red wine and took slices of prosciutto from the refrigerator. “Presents from Italy,” he explained. He laid the slices out on a plate, then prepared a salad and grilled pieces of chicken, all the while talking as though he were doing nothing at all. He clearly enjoyed cooking.
“Do you always cook?” I asked.
“No,” he said. “I’m not always here. My parish is very large, all over Hatay.”
“Usually, Nasra and I are alone,” Barbara said.
“Nasra is out tonight, and I like cooking. So, I cook.”
As we sat down to eat, the lights went out. The kitchen was suddenly dark, save for a hint of moonlight through the garden window. “Oh,” Barbara said, “the electricity has gone again.”
“Your electricity?”
“Antioch’s electricity,” she said. “It usually goes for only a few hours.”
She and Father Ferrari began searching for candles. “Good thing we’re in a church,” I said, when they returned with nearly a dozen long wax candles which they placed in different corners of the kitchen and at the centre of the table. When all the candles were lit, the room seemed almost magical. The faces of the old priest and the young novice were transformed, deep shadows emphasising every feature, their hairlines, their eye-sockets, their mouths and noses all in contrasting shadows and the rich oranges of the candle light. Father Ferrari allowed me the honour of saying grace.
“Bless us, O Lord,” I recited, “and these Thy gifts, which we are about to receive, from Thy bounty through Christ our Lord. Amen.”
“I brought some of the candles,” Barbara said, “from the front of the statues in the church. The little children in this quarter are afraid of the statues.”
“Why?”
“Because their mothers tell them that if they are not good, the statues will come out of the church and get them.”
We ate the prosciutto, and Father Ferrari ladled out his zuppa of pasta and assorted vegetables, which was delicious. We had begun eating the grilled chicken when Nasra returned from Mass. She sat down to eat, and Father Ferrari began to tease her in Turkish. Barbara gave me an instant translation.
“So, how was the Orthodox Mass?”
“It was fine,” the old woman whispered, dipping into her soup.
“More people than at our Mass, I suppose?”
She nodded.
“It must have been wonderful for you,” he said, a grin coming to his pixie’s face in the candle light. “I suppose that all that power you had in the Orthodox church must have put our electricity out here.”
Nasra ignored him, broke some bread and finished her zuppa in silence. Father Ferrari could not resist continuing. “Nice music, eh, in the Orthodox church?”
She poured herself a glass of water, sniffed at me as I listened to Barbara’s translation and drank.
“Lots of candles, incense and ikons?”
She turned to him and stared. That ended the conversation.
After dinner, Father Ferrari gave us some oranges and made espresso. When he sat down to drink his coffee, he asked me, “I don’t understand how you Americans can drink American coffee.”
“You get used to it.”
“I remember during the war, when the GIs brought their coffee to Italy. I couldn’t believe it. They gave me some, light brown and watery in a big cup, and I just stared at it. ‘Is this coffee,’ I said, ‘or acqua spoca?’”
I was pleased to be spending the feast of the Last Supper in good company with a meal cooked at home by an Italian priest. It was preferable to eating alone in a restaurant, the usual fate of the modern traveller.
In an earlier age, when hospitality was a normal part of life, most of my meals in the Levant would have been in rectories, monasteries or private houses. When hotels were rare or non-existent, the roads were perilous and travellers had yet to become tourists, hospitality was not a luxury. It was a necessity to be reciprocated. When the English traveller Robert Curzon toured the Levant in the 1833 and 1834, later producing a classic work of travel, Visits to Monasteries in the Levant, he often stayed in monasteries or at the houses of English consuls. Other foreign visitors stayed with local dignitaries or the nomadic tribes of the desert. It was over a breach of hospitality, when Paris stole the wife of his host Menelaus, that the Trojan War had been fought just north of here.
I walked home in the dark, through the narrow alleyways, down to my hotel. Through a gap in the rooftops, I caught sight of the moon. The electricity had just returned, but the pretty houses of the poor population of the Rich Quarter were dark. It was late, and I imagined all the little children afraid in their beds that the church statues would find them if they misbehaved. I reached the bottom of the Quarter at the Turkish bath and the closed butcher’s shop, and turned into the dimly lit main street, where a few places were open selling grilled meat or coffee, and found my shabby hotel.
So much had happened between the time of the worship of Zeus, Hera and Dionysus, as preserved in the Hatay Museum, and the national secularism of Pölis Bayram and Turizm Bayram – the rise of Christianity and Islam, the rule of Byzantium, of Arabs, of Crusaders, of Mongols and of Ottomans; and the recurring nightmares of religion put to the use of the new conqueror, of religion dividing society and of religion as casus belli. The temples had become churches, the churches had become mosques or museums. Little islands of ancient hospitality, of true Christianity and of devout Islam remained, like strong trees after a storm, to shelter the weary traveller. So much had happened. Nothing had changed.
