From 200,000 in the last century, the size of the community fell to around seventy thousand by 1920. By 1990 there were barely four thousand Suriani left in the whole region; now there are around nine hundred, plus about a dozen monks and nuns, spread over the five extant monasteries. One village with an astonishing seventeen churches now only has one inhabitant, its elderly priest. In Deir el-Zaferan two monks rattle around in the echoing expanse of sixth-century buildings, more caretakers of a religious relic than fragments of a living monastic community.
Nineteenth-century travellers who visited Deir el-Zaferan often thought it looked more like a fortress than a monastery, and they had a point. Standing under the great ochre battlements, I hammered on the thick, heavily reinforced beaten-metal gate while Mas’ud locked the car. After a few minutes a young monk’s bearded face peered suspiciously at us through an arrow-slit. Soon afterwards there was a rattling of bolts and chains and the gate swung open. Abouna Symeon stared at us with amazement.
‘You had no trouble getting here?’ he said in English.
I described our journey.
‘Things are very bad at the moment,’ he said. ‘We have not had any visitors for many months. No one will come. There is no security in these mountains.’
Abouna Symeon led us up a dark gallery which opened into a wide and shady cloister. In the bright light of the cloister-garth a flat-capped (but barefoot) gardener was watering pots full of geraniums and anemones. To his side rose an astonishing arcaded portico, supported on two deeply cut pilasters rising to a pair of elaborate Corinthian capitals. It was late Roman, yet, astonishingly, it was still employed for its original purpose, and was inhabited by the direct spiritual descendants of the original builders. Here bands of classical acanthus decoration, of a quality equal to the finest Byzantine sculpture surviving in Istanbul, covered sanctuaries in which the Aramaic liturgy was still chanted, unchanged from the day they were built. It was odd to think that these barren and remote hills, now terrorised by troops and guerrillas, and home only to poor and illiterate peasant farmers, were once places of considerable sophistication.
‘It is beautiful,’ said Abouna Symeon, coming up behind me. ‘But for how much longer? Maybe the next time you come sheep will be grazing here.’
‘Is that likely?’
‘All our people are leaving. One by one our monasteries and our Christian villages are emptying. In the last five years – what? – twenty villages around here have been deserted. Perhaps nine are left; maybe ten. None has more than twenty houses. If the door were open – if the rest of our people could get visas for the West – they would all go tomorrow. No one wants to bring up their children in this atmosphere. They want to go to Holland, Sweden, Belgium, France. Not many years are left for us here.’
We walked through the cloister. At one end sat another monk, a much older man, wearing the characteristic Syrian Orthodox black hood embroidered with thirteen white crosses representing Jesus and his apostles. He was bent over a desk, peering shortsightedly at the page in front of him, and in his hand he held a pen. As we drew near I saw that he was writing in Aramaic with a thick, broad-nibbed pen. I was just about to introduce myself when he looked up.
‘You are Mr William?’
‘Yes …’
‘And this is Mr Mas’ud?’
‘Yes. How … ?’
‘The police telephoned from Mardin five minutes ago to see if you had arrived. They said we should phone them when you got here.’
‘They followed us from the first checkpoint as far as Mardin,’ said Mas’ud. ‘Another white car.’
‘We were being followed again? Why didn’t you tell me?’
Mas’ud shrugged: ‘Always they do this.’
As we were speaking the telephone rang again. Symeon went to answer it. Mas’ud and I looked at each other.
‘That was the police again,’ said Symeon on his return. ‘They told us to find out where you are going and to tell them when you leave.’
‘You must see the monastery and leave quickly,’ said the old monk. ‘We don’t want the police in here.’
‘Anyway, you haven’t got much time if you are to get to Mar Gabriel by nightfall,’ said Symeon. ‘For your own sake you must hurry.’
We left the old monk at his writing desk and Symeon took us down some stairs into the darkness of a vaulted undercroft. It was built of huge quoins with a stone roof, and constructed without mortar. Inside it was hot and damp. We stood in silence, waiting for our eyes to adjust to the semi-darkness.
‘This was built about 1,000 B.C.,’ said Symeon. ‘There was a pagan sun temple here before the monastery. Then when Christianity …’ He broke off suddenly. ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘That banging. Can you hear?’
In the dark of the crypt we listened to a distant clash of metal against metal.
‘It’s the front gate again,’ said Symeon. ‘But who can it be?’
We climbed the stairs and Symeon sent the gardener off to see who had come. We were now standing next to a great Roman doorway, above which was sculpted an equal-armed Byzantine cross, set in a classical laurel wreath which in turn rested on a pair of confronted dolphins.
‘What’s this?’ I asked.
‘In the sixth century it used to be the medical school. It was famous even in Constantinople. Later it became a mortuary. We call it the House of Saints.’
He took us inside. In the middle of the room, a ribbed dome rose from a rectangle of squinches. The walls were lined with an arcade of blind arches, each niche forming a separate burial chamber.
‘All the Patriarchs and all our fathers are buried in here,’ said Symeon. ‘It is said the monastery contains the bones of seventeen thousand saints.’
He led us through a rectangular Roman doorway into the small, square monastery church. Every architectural element was decorated with an almost baroque richness of late antique sculpture: over the omega-shaped sanctuary arch, friezes of animals tumbled amid bucolic vine scrolls and palmettes; feathery volutes of windblown acanthus wound their way from the capitals to the voussoirs of the arches, and thence down exuberant and richly carved pilaster strips. The church was sixth-century, yet the architectural tradition from which it grew was far older: the same decorative vocabulary could be seen on Roman monuments two hundred years earlier at Ba’albek and Leptis Magna. At the time of its construction, this sculpture must have appeared not just astonishingly rich; it must also have seemed deliberately conservative, even nostalgic, a deliberate attempt at recalling the grand old Imperial traditions during a time of corruption and decline.
At this point the barefoot gardener reappeared with the new visitors. They were three men, all Turks, dressed in casual holiday clothes: T-shirts, slacks and trainers. They ignored us and began looking around the cloister, making a great show of examining the pot plants and the architecture. It was only when the back pockets of all three men simultaneously burst into crackles of static from hidden walkie-talkies that what was already obvious to Mas’ud and Abouna Symeon became clear to me: the men were plainclothes security police.
A few minutes later, I was still looking at the extraordinary sculpture in the church when the old monk, Abouna Abraham, appeared at the door. He seemed anxious and began nervously turning off the lights, indicating as politely as he could that my visit should be drawing to a close. Abouna Symeon, however, was determined not to be intimidated by this latest batch of uninvited visitors, and asked me upstairs to see the rooms of the old Patriarchs. I followed him up the steps onto the roof terrace.
‘Look!’ said Symeon. ‘On the top of the ridge. Do you see: the ruins of five more monasteries.’
I looked up to where he was pointing. On the rim of the crags high above