From The Holy Mountain (22 page)

'Yes, there is a problem,' said Mas'ud.

'What do you mean?'

'I don't think you understand the situation here,' he said, barely suppressing his anger. 'Last spring I got a call at home. The man on the phone did not say who he was. He just warned me not to take journalists around. Soon after that I lent my car to another driver who wanted to take a foreign correspondent to Hakkari. He left the journalist there. On the way back someone shot the driver and stole my car.'

'The security police?'

Mas'ud shrugged and raised his open palms.

'I'm sorry,' I said lamely, feeling at once guilty and alarmingly out of my depth. 'I should have told you I had a press card. I had no idea you were in that position.'

'I always thought you were a journalist,' said Mas'ud.

'What can I say? I didn't realise your situation. I'm very sorry.'

'Don't be sorry. It's my job. But know you are playing a dangerous game,' he said. 'You don't understand the police here. You think they are like the English policemen we see on the television, the fat man with the blue hat, the little stick in his hand and the old bicycle. They are not like that, not at all like that. If you took my advice you would leave as soon as you can. It's too late to try and cross into Syria today. But tomorrow you must leave. Then I can go back home to my family in Diyarbakir.'

Before I left the Tur Abdin I still wanted to try to interview the old priest from Ein Wardo. An hour later, after Mas'ud had recovered his usual poise, we drove in to Midyat with Brother Yacoub, who had agreed to come and interpret.

We drove in silence through the burned-out landscape, the security I had felt inside the high walls of Mar Gabriel now thoroughly breached by what Mas'ud had said.

'The Archbishop used to make this journey every day,' said Yacoub at one point. 'His office was at the Bishop's House in Midyat. But since the troubles he stays in Mar Gabriel. Now the only people to make this journey are the children. By Turkish law they are obliged to come into the government school during term-time. Of course you know what happened to the truck on the road to Gungoren? With the landmine?'

We neared the outskirts of the town and slowly crossed through the checkpoints, then past the sinister plainclothes police manning the crossroads at its centre. They all wore the same regulation dark sunglasses, with M-16 carbines strapped over their shoulders. Following Yacoub's instructions, we drove into the heart of the Midyat bazaar, and finally drew to a halt outside a shabby jeweller's shop.

'This business belongs to the old monk's family,' explained

Yacoub. 'They can tell us whether it would be possible to talk to him.'

Yacoub and I went into the shop; Mas'ud chose to stay outside and guard his car. The owner offered us seats and sent off his two grandsons, one to find out the whereabouts of the old monk, the other for bottles of Pepsi. Then he returned to serving his customers, a pair of elderly ladies upholstered, despite the heat, in velvet dresses with thick white scarves over their heads.

'Can you tell on sight who is Muslim and who is Christian?' I asked Yacoub.

'Only with the old people,' he replied. 'The old Christian ladies wear smaller headscarves which they tie in a particular way. Also they never wear green, the Muslim colour.'

One of the boys came back with the drinks. When Yacoub had taken a gulp, he continued: 'Years ago they say you used to be able to tell what religion someone was just by looking at what they wore: the Christians always had new clothes, while the Kurds had old broken ones.'

'Why was that?'

'In the villages the Christians had the best land; now the Kurdish
agahs
- the tribal chieftains - have just walked in and taken it from them, to distribute among their own people. They steal the crops of the Suriani from under their noses. There is nothing we can do. The government needs the support of the
agahs
if they are to win their fight with the PKK, so they never interfere.'

Yacoub finished his Pepsi and handed the can back to the boy. 'In the towns,' he continued, 'the Christians used to have all the jewellery shops; they were the tailors, shoemakers, leatherworkers. In the old days no Christian craftsman would employ a Muslim. But in the eighties, when most of the young Christians had already emigrated, the shop owners were forced to take on Muslim apprentices. Now those apprentices have opened their own shops. When I was at school fifteen years ago, perhaps 80 per cent of the shops were owned by the Suriani. Now it's less than 20 per cent. We still dominate the jewellery trade, but we are certainly not richer than the Kurds any more. If anything it's the reverse.'

Before long the door of the shop opened, and the second grandson walked in leading a doddering old man in baggy pantaloons. Yacoub greeted him and asked him some questions in Turoyo.

'Is this the old priest?' I asked.

'No,' replied Yacoub. 'This is Bedros, his son.'

'The old man must be pretty ancient.'

'He is. Bedros says his father is very deaf, and quite blind too, but we can certainly try to talk to him.'

We levered the old man into Mas'ud's car and drove through the labyrinth of Midyat's narrow bazaar alleys. Once we were out onto a rubble track in the outskirts, Bedros pointed out the silhouette of a monastery on the skyline, atop a hill overlooking the town.

'He says that this is where he lives,' translated Yacoub. 'It used to be the Monastery of Mar Obil and Mar Abrohom, but now that there are no monks his family looks after the buildings and tries to stop them falling down.'

We drove into the old monastery cloister. Chickens and ducks pecked about the yard; piled up in front of the sculpted doorway leading into one of the two churches was a great mountain of straw. A family of long-haired Angora goats drank water from a disused fountain lying against the nave wall. The monastery had become a farmyard.

Bedros led the way into the house he had built amid what had once been the monastery kitchens. At the back of the living room, fast asleep under a gaudy poster of the Last Supper sat an ancient figure in a black cassock. He was slumped in a wooden chair, his head tilted forward, and over his face was lowered a wide-brimmed Homburg hat. As we walked in, the old man stirred and opened first one eye, then the other. The second eye was clouded blue.

Bedros walked up to the old priest, cupped his hands and bellowed into his father's ear. The old man bellowed back.

'What's he saying?' I asked Yacoub.

Yacoub smiled: 'Abouna Shabo says, "If they are not Christian I will not talk to them." '

Bedros reassured him, and explained what we had come for. An extremely loud Turoyo conversation ensued. Father and son were joined by Bedros's wife, who appeared from the kitchen and joined in the shouting match. At one point the old man lifted his shoe and pointed out to me a hole in its bottom, apparently to indicate that his daughter-in-law was not looking after him to his full satisfaction. But eventually he began to talk of the siege, and as he did so, Yacoub translated.

'It was Mar Hadbashabo who saved us!' shouted the old priest. 'The saint was wearing white clothes and attacking at the front of the Christians, throwing the Muslims back from the barricades of Ein Wardo. At evening time he stood on the church tower. We all saw him, even the Muslims, those sons of unmarried mothers! At first they tried to shoot him, thinking he was a priest, but the bullets went straight through him. Then they thought he was a
djinn
.
Only towards the end of the siege, only after three years, did they realise he was a saint.'

'Let's go back to the beginning,' I said. 'What were relations with the Muslims like before the war?'

'They were not good,' said the old man. 'But before the war nobody was ever killed. In those days the Kurds were in the hills and the Christians were near the towns. We lived separately. But we were always fearful of what might happen, so as the war approached we began to sell our animals and buy guns. We had more than three thousand. They were old-fashioned matchlocks, ones that you had to light with a fuse, but they did the job. We melted down all our copper pots to make shot; the monks melted down their plate. We collected together a good stock of wheat. When the war broke out, and the Turks told the Kurds to go and massacre all the Christians, we were ready. By night all the Christian villagers came to Ein Wardo. They came from Midyat, Kefr Salah, Arnas, Bote, Kefr Zeh, Zaz Mzizah, Basa Brin. In the village there were about 160 houses. By the time everyone had gathered there were at least twenty families in every house.'

The old man broke off, turned to his son and began to berate him again.

'What's he saying now?' I asked.

'He's crying "Grapes, grapes," ' said Yacoub, grinning. 'He wants his son to bring him some fruit.'

Bedros's wife was sent off, scowling, to the kitchen. She returned with a huge bunch of ripe grapes. The old man lowered it into his toothless mouth and tore off the bottom three or four. He munched them noisily, and a broad smile spread across his face. When he had finished I asked about the siege.

'We built walls between the houses so that the village looked like a fort,' he continued. 'Then we dug tunnels so that we could, go from house to house without getting shot by the Muslims. The strongpoint was the church, and on the roof we had a cannon that we had captured from the Turks in Midyat.

'They came after fourteen days: around twelve thousand Ottoman troops and perhaps thirteen thousand Kurds - irregulars who just wanted to join in the plunder. Any Christian left outside Ein Wardo was killed. Many were too slow and did not make it. In Arnas the Kurds captured thirty-five pretty girls. They locked them into the church, hoping to take them out and rape them one by one. But there was a deep well in the courtyard. All the girls chose to jump in rather than lose their virginity to the Muslims.'

'Did your supplies last for the whole siege?'

'The first summer we were not hungry. But by the middle of the winter things began to be difficult. We ran out of salt and people became ill for the lack of it. One group of about a hundred people tried to escape at night to get some salt from Midyat and Enhil. They were ambushed. Most of them got back, but fifteen people, including one of my brothers, never came back. That winter I lost my sister too. She went outside the barricades to fetch wood. The Muslims were hiding behind rocks. They captured her and cut her throat. That night I found her. Her head was separated from her body. I was twelve years old then.'

The old man's head dropped, and I thought for a minute that he, like Fr. Tomas the previous evening, was going to burst into tears. But after a minute's silence he recovered himself, and I asked if he had fought in the defence of Ein Wardo himself.

'They thought I was too young to hold a gun, but they let me collect stones to drop down the mountain slopes. I did my bit. There was plenty of opportunity. The first year the attack was very strong. Once I remember it was so strong that people ran away from the walls and began to retreat to the church, which was built with four very strong towers that could be held if everything else fell. But the monks, our leaders, threatened to shoot anyone who ran away, and in the end the defences held.