The travel log and commentary, From the Holy Mountain, was published in 1997 (UK) from notes made during William Dalrymple’s 1994 journey through modern Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, and Egypt. His purpose was to follow the decades-long path of John Moschos and fellow monk Sophronius taken in the late sixth to early seventh centuries.
That Late Antique tale is told in Moschos’s extant work, The Spiritual Meadow, which I read many years ago at the beginning of my research for Farewell, O Syria. Its anecdotes, hagiographies, and sayings of the Desert Fathers provide a rare look at life and worldview from the region and narrate the monks’ firsthand experience of the Persian invasion of Anatolia, the Levant, and Egypt just before the Islamic Conquest.
Moschos’s travel partner, Sophronius, gets several mentions in my novel as his long life overlapped not only the Persian conquest but also the eventual surrender of Jerusalem to the Arabs in AD 637, by which time he was the patriarch of the Holy City.
To Dalrymple’s 1990s observations, we can now add the lens of thirty additional years. Things had changed not only between Moschos’s and Dalrymple’s nearly 1400-year gap, but again between Dalrymple’s journey and today.
Now, a few thoughts on the book’s patchwork of content:
I found the first five of six parts mostly dispiriting and sometimes maddening, reminded of the horrors of the 20th century in the region: the march of Armenians into the desert, the expulsions of Greeks from the lands they’d inhabited for over 3,000 years, the mass emigrations of Christians from the Levant, and the constant upheaval of the ancient realm of the Church. Add the challenges of the Kurds, the Yezidis, Israel, Lebanon, Iraq, Iran…on it goes. This is the familiar and recent layer Dalrymple must navigate in order to search out the scattered remnants of Moschos’s world—fortified monasteries occupied by the last aging monks of so many centuries.
Mile by mile, we accompany Dalrymple on risky drives through Anatolia—where the Turkish government and the Kurdish PKK rebels destroy fields and orchards to deny each other power in the region—past pockmarked villages and roadblocks, on clandestine visits to threatened and nearly abandoned churches, and then shake our heads at his relief in arriving safely across the border into Syria. Imagine Syria—the refuge.
In Northern Syria we visit the land of the stylites, where each outdid the other in extreme exposure and deprivation, where vast complexes grew around their pillared perches, now rubble like ancient and mysterious standing stones, a landscape trekked by my main character in AD 636.
Farther south, after time spent in Beirut and Baalbek—also locations in my story—Dalrymple ventures to the Monastery of Mar Saba, north of the Dead Sea, where the grandson of one of my historical characters wrote his theological works. St. John of Damascus (AD 675–749–ish) retired there after serving the new Islamic rulers. His writings included the Fount of Knowledge and others that have become foundational to the Church both East and West.
In many ways, Dalrymple’s scratching below the sandy surface of present-day debris is a reminder of how shallow we Westerners are in our comprehension of history. One laugh-out-loud passage from a site overlooking the Valley of Kedron reads as follows:
As we sank deeper underground, masonry gave way to the living rock of a cave wall, and we entered a wide, echoing underground cavern. A pair of recesses at the far side of the cave were illuminated by the dim, flickering light of a cluster of lamps placed in front of two gilt icons, each depicting a heavily bearded Byzantine saint. Another group of lamps flickered at the bottom of the stairs, under an ancient icon of the Magi. To one side of it stood a huge pile of skulls.
‘This was the cave where the three wise men hid from King Herod,’ whispered the nun, holding the storm lantern aloft. ‘St Theodosius saw the cave in a vision and founded his monastery in this place to honour the Magi.’
‘And the skulls?’
‘They belong to the monks that were slaughtered by the Persians when they burned the abbey.’
‘When did that happen?’
‘Not so long ago,’ she said. ‘Around 614 A.D.’1
After an extended visit in and around Jerusalem and over to Alexandria, we reach the southernmost boundary of the Byzantine Empire: the Monastery of St. Antony, deep in the desert three hundred miles southeast of Cairo. Here Dalrymple finally slows long enough to provide a more considered experience than the mad rush of the previous chapters. Here he finds a lively community of monks, including young, enthusiastic novices rather than the dismal, dying days of his prior stops along the way. It is fascinating that this desert refuge, where monasticism began, seems the rare place in the East where Dalrymple found it still thriving.
Overall, the text is engaging, especially to my keen interest in the history of these same communities, but less probing than I’d hoped. Dalrymple certainly has many conversations discussing how his interviewees saw themselves in their immediate contexts and that of their people’s ancient historical timelines—how they managed to persevere in spite of the unrelenting pressures, what would become of them once the last elderly holdout passed on—but with few exceptions, he did not linger any one place or with any individual long enough to examine these questions in depth.
Having finished Farewell, O Syria, where I sought to uncover the Christian community’s understanding and navigation of the Islamic Conquest as it unfolded, I am now moving forward in time to the next story, hoping to explore how the conquered population understood and responded to the consequences, the gradual change of status, and their relationships to each other and their new rulers. As such, I had hoped to come away from Dalrymple’s work with a clearer picture of the worldview that has either sustained or failed them. However, From the Holy Mountain is more of an informational, empathetic reportage, told with witty relief, and moments of the absurd and the wonderful. It includes an extensive bibliography, an index, and black-and-white images, which contribute to the sense of loss the book portrays.
There are, however, flickers of hope. While composing this article, the following appeared in my inbox:
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This post originally appeared in my newsletter: Long Ago & Far Away