Читать книгу The Journey: How an obscure Byzantine Saint became our Santa Claus - David Price Williams - Страница 25

work had become wealthy. Yes, by any standards of the market place he was a successful businessman.

It hadn’t always been like that. He had been born into relative poverty in a small hamlet outside Patara where his parents, my grandparents, had been basket-makers. They used the willow wands from the trees growing in the marshlands down by the river to make hampers and carriers for the commercial markets in the city. I never knew them; they died relatively young, having not really advanced. But through contacts, my father was apprenticed to a family of perfume makers who lived in the upper city. He was given all the menial jobs, like spending hours and hours on end picking rock-roses on the mountainside, or filling sacks with wild jasmine which could be boiled to extract the essence to make scent.

And that’s how he got into the incense business. At first it was restricted to bleeding the terabinth trees which grew on the slopes above the river which he did for himself while he was collecting the flowers his employers wanted. He had to slash the bark with a sharp knife, a difficult task as the bark was hard and rough. He then had to wait a few days for the tiny beads of resin to ooze out of the cut and dry into hard little droplets, at which point he prised them off the tree into a waiting bowl. It was really back-breaking work, up early each morning and out on the hillsides finding the right trees to cut. He would spend every evening gathering his meagre harvest and sorting

DAVID PRICE WILLIAMS