At first glance, the countryside of Tur Abdin resembles the rolling fields of Tuscany adrift at the edge of a desert. There is a distinctly Mediterranean feel: olive, fig, walnut, and pistachio trees are scattered everywhere; women and men riding to market on donkeys, transporting grapes, watermelon, cucumbers, and olives, only add to this illusion. Nestled in the mountainous region of southeastern Turkey, Tur Abdin is one of the last places on earth where the Aramaic language is still in daily use. Signs of modern technology are rare. Houses are simple and most people still stable their livestock—sheep and goats—on the ground floor to heat the main upper rooms.
Little appears to have altered for centuries. The older women still have Orthodox crosses tattooed on their hands, and their clothing—Oriental-inspired veils and simple black shifts—is timeless. Many of the older men wear a silver cross pinned to their jackets. Yet, as in communities elsewhere, habits are gradually changing. The villages are predominantly inhabited by the very old and the very young; people of working age tend to emigrate and join relatives already established in the United States or Europe in search of a new life.
Historically, “the mountain [Tur] of God’s servants [Abdin]” designates a high plateau situated between the Turkish town of Mardin to the west and the Tigris River to the east. For two decades, political troubles curtailed access to the region: confrontations between the independence-minded Kurds and the Turkish army led to the destruction of hundreds of villages and the exile of tens of thousands of Kurdish peasants. Although the place was peaceful when we visited, the region remains unstable, especially given the political situation in Iraq, only 25 miles away. Despite the relative insecurity, Bishop Samuel Aktash of Tur Abdin has opened his monastery, Mar Gabriel, to foreigners seeking to visit the 2,000-year-old site and discover one of the most well-preserved monuments of ancient Christianity in the Middle East.
Our drive to Tur Abdin took us from Beirut through coastal Syria (including one of the oldest and most authentic cities in the Middle East, Aleppo, with its sprawling souk in the shadow of the Islamic citadel), across the Turkish border, and on to Midyat, the unofficial capital of the region: a trip of roughly 375 miles that took three days. The commercial billboards and frenetic pace of Beirut quickly give way to dusty, stark highways deserted except for a few vintage 1960s Cadillacs and the occasional Mercedes.
Sandwiched historically between Christian Armenia and Muslim Turkey, Tur Abdin has been contested for centuries. The Christians who live on the “Holy Mountain” are mostly Orthodox Syriacs, members of an Aramaic-language church created, like the Coptic Church in Egypt, in the fifth century in reaction to a theological dispute with Byzantium. At its peak, the Syriac Church comprised 103 dioceses and extended as far east as Afghanistan and India. But the Mongol invasions under Tamerlane in the late fourteenth century marked the beginning of a long decline. Another terrible blow occurred during World War I, when Christian minorities were massacred. The community’s members have been migrating ever since. Before the First World War, some 250,000 Syriacs lived in Tur Abdin; today, scarcely more than 1,500 remain.
In Midyat, a young Syriac priest named Ezekiel, whom we met by chance on the steps of the main church, offered to give us a tour. “Welcome to Midyat,” he joked, “where there are more church bells than minarets.” He had just finished giving an afternoon class in written Aramaic to the local Christian children, who are required to attend Turkish public school in the morning. “I like to tell them that if Jesus comes back to earth, we would be the only ones to understand him,” he said with a touch of hyperbole.
Tur Abdin was part of the ancient Roman province of Antioch. It was here that Jesus’s disciples were first called “Christians.” Yet until the first half of the nineteenth century, the region remained a mystery to Western explorers and missionaries—so much so that the earliest of these visitors believed they had stumbled upon the lost tribes of Israel.
We stayed in what is perhaps the most important Christian edifice in Tur Abdin. The large complex of Mar [Saint] Gabriel, honoring the archangel, is one of the oldest surviving monasteries in the region, built in 512 C.E. by the Byzantine emperor Anastasius. Erected as a kind of hilltop citadel, Mar Gabriel quickly became a religious hub with more than 400 monks, scribes, and priests. It doubled as a holy center and a major bulwark against Muslim and Mongol invasions.
The Greco-Roman edifice includes a remarkably sophisticated ceiling mosaic for an austere region located at the eastern extremity of the Byzantine empire. Many grapes tumble out of amphoras around the large golden cross at the mosaic’s center, a reference to the former vineyards of the region. The monks claim to continue the tradition, but now produce wine only in very small quantities for ceremonial purposes, so as not to offend their Muslim neighbors.
Our rooms at the monastery were simple whitewashed monks’ cells with wooden beds; there were common showers down the hall. We shared our hosts’ simple Lenten meal of tomatoes, olives, cucumbers, goat’s cheese, and a monastery loaf.
Today one of the monastery’s main functions is educational: it serves as a sort of Aramaic language center catering to the Syriac Christian diaspora’s children. According to the Syriac Church website, approximately 90,000 Syriac Christians live in Europe and 120,000 in the United States, predominantly in New Jersey and Chicago. Recent emigrants make every effort to return to Tur Abdin for church ceremonies. The services are characterized by a biblical atmosphere engulfed in incense, song, and long liturgies following the Oriental Orthodox tradition.
Roughly 19 miles north of Mar Gabriel is the Church of Hah (“Mother of God”). According to legend, it was built by one of the Magi, probably Balthazar, who on his return from Bethlehem is said to have seen the Virgin Mary in a dream. The story goes that the church was built on the spot where he fell asleep. The eighth-century dome of limestone and brick, decorated with friezes and sculptures including ornate acanthus-leaf motifs, is one of the most elaborate and sophisticated Christian monuments of the Middle East.
The church is an important center in the village of Hah, serving 40 Syriac families, the largest parish in the area. Attracted by chanting, we joined a handful of parishioners late one afternoon. Without artificial lights, microphones, or prayer books, the service seemed somehow closer to those of the early Christian communities. A monk with a long grey beard, wearing a blood-red chasuble and a black hood embroidered with white crosses, reminded us of a patriarch from the Old Testament. Absorbed in deep prayer, he was surrounded by a cloud of incense; the slow rhythm of the liturgy seemed to take possession of him and transport him elsewhere. He read entirely from an Aramaic Bible and sang in a deep, melodious voice while his congregation, men on one side of the aisle, women on the other, alternated in their response to the refrains. The Syriac ritual in Tur Abdin is unique; during prayer, believers prostate themselves like Muslims.
Before our departure from this sacred mountain, Father Ezekiel invited us to his native village—Ain Wardo, the village of “the source of the roses”—now almost bereft of Christian inhabitants. Its desolate village landscape reminded us that these ancient people are a fragile living memory of the early Christian world. Tur Abdin is one of the world’s last holy and enchanted mountains.
Paris-based journalist Carole Corm did graduate work at Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies. Sébastien de Courtois, who earned his Ph.D. on the Syriac diaspora at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris, is the author of The Forgotten Genocide: Eastern Christians, the Last Arameans (Gorgias Press, 2004).
