Читать книгу The Journey: How an obscure Byzantine Saint became our Santa Claus - David Price Williams - Страница 15

CHAPTER ONE

IN THE BEGINNING

Even in those days long ago when I was young, Patara, the city of my birth, was such a bustling port, but then it was the centre of my boyhood universe. By that time it was already a thousand years old, built, so they said, by ancient Lycians to serve the great cities of the Xanthos Valley whose deep gorges stretched far back into the towering ranges of the Taurus Mountains. The river always ran a translucent jade and icy cold with the melting snows off the high peaks which shut our valley away from the interminable, high plains of Asia Minor.

Natives of the city often boasted that Alexander the Great had spent a few days here as he marched his army around the coast on his way to conquer the mighty Persian Empire some six hundred years ago. Certainly his Greek way of life has left its mark on our city. You only had to look at the magnificent colonnaded streets to see the Greek influence, their cool, pillared shade a real godsend on a hot summer’s afternoon. As a boy I used to run through them on my way to the harbour at the mouth of the river to look at all the ships moored by the quaysides. They came from all round our sea and beyond, those vessels. I found it so romantic, so exciting. I was not to know then that my own journeying was also to take me far from home to places of which I had never dreamt, in search

DAVID PRICE WILLIAMS