STRANGERS IN THE HOLY LAND

...Nevertheless, Dalrymple does not travel without a certain respect and even reverence...

...I prayed for the people who had helped me on the journey, the monks who had showed me the manuscript on Mount Athos, the frightened Suriani of Mar Gabriel, the Armenians of Aleppo and the Palestinian Christians in the camp at Mar Elias...

...While in eastern Turkey Dalrym-ple heard the first version of the dreary prophecy of Christians everywhere in their native lands: Their days are numbered...

...When the monk, Theophanes, opined that the pope was a Freemason and idolater, Dal-rymple gave him a graceful exit by admitting to being a Catholic...

...And amid the hills, scrub oaks, and rolling miles of empty land stands St...

...It is an awareness of the cost of such a loss that is missing from William Dalrymple's otherwise excellent travelogue, From the Hol^ Mountain: A Journey Among the Christians of the Middle East...

...A teacher in the school at Mar Gabriel once said something quite similar of the deserted land visible beyond the monastery's high walls...

...Dalrymple got stiffer treatment from a monk at Mar Sabas who has not given up conceptions of a final judgment rich with rough justice and cinematic detail...

...Moschos was not alone when he heard all these anecdotes and bits of treasured gossip...

...combers' treasures cast up after the waning tide of its Ottoman successor...

...Dalrymple has recorded their labors, and those of their brothers and sisters all the way south to Egypt...

...Dalrymple visited the monastery that bears St...

...The bloodbaths of the 1890s under the Red Sultan were the prologue to a century of ethnic cleansing in which the patchwork of Jewish, Christian, and Muslim communities has yielded to Muslim countries in which a few struggling Christian islands survive...

...With external pressures keenly felt, many Christians have understandably emigrated...

...Gabriel's...

...Anthony's name, though by the time he arrived in Egypt, Dalrymple was obviously travel-weary...

...John Moschos as well as finding rebuke among Moschos' Orthodox descendants...

...Nonetheless, Moschos' devotion to the pompous Sophronius echoes throughout the book, and the love of the two friends counterpoints their perils and observations in a society visibly unraveling...

...Almost as soon as the monastic movement gathered strength in the early fourth century, it gained chroniclers...

...Theodosius and, seeking a stricter and more solitary life, moved to the monastery of Pharan near the Jordan and finally to the New Laura of Mar Saba in the desert west of the Dead Sea...

...Pilgrimages have been made to this monastery since the fourth century, and down through the years, visitors have participated in the singing of all the 150 psalms that must be completed by each day's end...

...Theodosius' monastery— now inhabited by a single follower of the monastic life, a woman who had the grace to leave Dalrymple alone with the entombed body: Prompted by the example of the nun, . . . I began to pray there, and the prayers came with surprising ease...

...He begins his account at Mount Athos, the largely Greek Orthodox monastic republic that is the "Holy Mountain" of the book's title...

...Dalrymple is not privileged to possess the certainty of Theophanes, and this perhaps most of all sets him off from the author whose steps he dogs: Moschos, like Theophanes, believed in miracles and judgment...

...But Islamic militance is only the most recent threat to the Christian communities...

...The Christians of the West have never done anything for us," says one Syrian Christian...

...Gabriel's case is not unique...

...Theo-phanes was undeterred: "Then, unless you convert to Orthodoxy, you too will follow your pope down that valley, through the scorching fire...

...The love of place and love of God are the forces preserving the tenuous life of the Christian monasteries of the Near East...

...The political cataclysms beginning about a century ago have created a new world of nations where once there was a centrally administered Ottoman Empire, and, afterwards, semi-colonial states administered by the French in Syria and Lebanon, and the British in Egypt and Palestine...

...An icon in the hands of a lay woman solved the perennial problem of scarce water: After the failure of conventional methods of digging a well, she had an icon of St...

...Father Dioscurus told Dalrymple about the attraction of the monastic life: It is never easy, but with practice I find it less difficult...

...I feel it pulling me, and I could not leave...

...his pages are their witness...

...Before he was eighteen he enrolled in the monastery of St...

...In Turkey, the Syrian Orthodox cling to a few churches and proudly remember the three-year, armed resistance of the villagers of Ein War-do to the slaughter beginning in 1915...

...William Dalrymple, on the other hand, moved alone from monastery to monastery when he traveled in 1994 to find the remains of the Christian religious life in the area...

...He ends in Egypt, where there are martyrs created annually by the Islamic Brotherhood and the weak response of the government...

...Wisely setting sail for Rome with numerous Byzantine refugees, Moschos and Sophro-nius visited Cyprus and Samos along the way...

...Theodosius near Jerusalem...

...Every day if you are disciplined and make the effort you find you will rise up, understand a little better, find it a little easier to concentrate, find that your mind is wandering less and less...

...When you pray alone in your cell without distraction you feel as if you are in front of God, as if nothing is coming to you except from God...

...Gabriel's—a monastery where ±e visitor may still hear the predawn chants of monks and nuns and the lessons of students learning the Syriac language of their forefathers...

...Moschos copied their methods, providing portraits of virtuous and miracle-working monks and relating anecdotes that incidentally reveal the vagaries of life on the eastern border: advancing barbarians in Judaea, gang warfare in Emmaus, the hazards of shipping in the waters off Alexandria...

...It was political turmoil—and doubtless also their own wander-lust—that eventually drove Moschos and Sophronius on their monastic journey...

...When the monks' voices fall silent, that worship will cease, and their habitations will become museums, barns, or ruins...

...The year 614 was a turning point for Roman civilization in the eastern Mediterranean...

...We will watch you from this balcony," he added, "but of course it will then be too late to save you...

...With the exception of relief efforts after 1918, when thousands of Armenian and Syrian Christian orphans were sheltered by Americans and Europeans, he is largely correct...

...John Moschos was that forerunner, and the book he wrote to record his travels is the Pratum Spirituale, or Spiritual Meadow...

...and his attention oscillates between the politics of the region, which are observable by any journalist, and the boring persistence of monastic practices, which are hard to observe precisely because many of them are invisible and deliberately unchanging...

...John the Baptist...

...is uncertain: Perhaps it was Damascus, perhaps Isauria, a wild region on the north slope of the Taurus mountains in southwest Turkey...

...Sophronius was trained as a rhetorician and eventually became the last patriarch of Jerusalem before the Muslims captured the city in 637, but his own literary style—in his overgrown panegyric on the martyrs Cyrus and John, for instance, or his twenty-three anacreontic odes on Christian feasts—contrasts badly with that of the Spiritual Meadow...

...And then I did what I suppose I had come to do: I sought the blessing of John Moschos for the rest of the trip, and particularly asked for his protection in the badlands of Upper Egypt, the most dangerous part of the journey...

...Dalrymple visits Christian communities in Syria and Lebanon, where Maronite infighting contributed to the devastation of the civil war...

...In composing his book, Moschos followed a path well worn by previous monastic historians...

...He was, however, a Catholic, and he rediscovered intercessory prayer at the grave of St...

...The Turks help other Muslims if they are in trouble in Azerbaijan or in Bosnia, but the Christians of Europe have never shown any feelings for their brothers in the Tur Abdin...

...He goes to Israel, first to the north and then to the area south of Jerusalem, where Moschos and Sophronius met and conceived their journey...

...They are the last stations where Christian worship is still heard in the lands in which all three of the great Near Eastern, monotheistic religions were born...

...After returning to Jerusalem to help consecrate the patriarch Amos in 594, he traveled with Sophronius through Palestine, visiting Ascalon, Scythopolis, and Caesarea Maritima...

...But they have no illusions of international help...

...When you succeed—if you do manage to banish distractions and communicate directly with God— then the compensation outweighs any sufferings or hardships...

...Close to five-hundred pages long, with many maps and photographs, the book documents Dalrymple's recent tour of Eastern monasteries— from Mount Athos off the coast of Greece, down through Turkey, Lebanon, Syria, and across the desert to Deir ul-Muharraq in lower Egypt...

...Forbidden after the recent Kurdish conflicts in the Mardin province, pilgrimages no longer come to St...

...From 578 to 582, John went to the hermitages of the Thebaid in Egypt, the Great Oasis, and Sinai...

...Anthony, whose biography inspired many imitators in the early days of the monastic movement...

...Dalrymple is only the most recent in a long line of tourists visiting the Eastern Christian monks, but he is a beguiling storyteller who had an interesting idea: Instead of merely compiling a study, he would follow more or less the path of a much earlier traveler who chronicled the monasteries just as the eastern provinces of the Roman Empire were being conquered by Arab armies and subjected to Islam...

...Some of their victims' remains were discovered recently in a valley outside Jerusalem by developers building underground parking for a nearby condo...

...That was thirteen troubled years ago, and still the monks and nuns are rising before dawn to begin their psalms and continue the hard work of supporting a fortified monastery in a hostile land...

...Dalrymple heads almost directly for it from Istanbul, only to find a once-wealthy and flourishing establishment now under virtual siege...

...From Athos, Dalrymple began in earnest the journey that would take him over the territory traversed by Moschos and Sophronius, and indeed added to their itinerary by visiting the easternmost surviving Christian monasteries of Turkey: Deir el-Zeferan and Mar Gabriel on the plateau south of Diyarbakir...

...Here there is the life of my people for centuries, here are the places where we have lived, and here is where we have to be...

...Mar Gabriel is one such island...

...And with this latest quarantining of monks and nuns in the area known as Tur Abdin—the Mountain of God's Servants—a religious way of life that began well over a thousand years ago may at last come to an end...

...The story of the travels of a seventh-century monk so pervades the twentieth-century book that Dalrymple feels at last compelled to visit and venerate the grave of his forerunner in the monastery of St...

...The occasional small efforts of private citizens and religious groups do not weigh strongly against the bitter reality that Christians in the Middle East have been cast adrift by their coreligionists in the West...

...With the massacres of Armenians and Syrian Christians under the Turks, and the terrifying aftermath of Turkey's war with Greece, regions where the two faiths once lived as uneasy neighbors are populated now almost exclusively by Muslims, though certain Christian populations have stubbornly remained in lands that have been their home since the establishment of churches there in the first century...

...Although it was founded in 962, long after the original lands of Christianity were conquered by Islamic rulers, an ancient manuscript of the Pratum Spirituale is housed in the Iviron Monastery there, and so Dalrymple made it his jumping-off point, visiting the book first and Moschos' grave later...

...Theodo-sius lowered into the shaft, and water flowed instantly...

...He had to leave almost as quickly as he came, and return to the relative security of Aleppo in Syria...

...No longer can the monastery be a stop for visitors traveling along the old path that leads from monastery to monastery throughout the former Byzantine and, later, Ottoman world...

...The imperial armies of Persia plowed through Palestine and laid waste to its cities and monasteries...

...Nearly all monasteries in the Middle East are threatened with closure, and their loss will be immeasurable...

...Nonetheless, his book suffers from numerous inaccuracies, particularly where the ancient history of Christianity is recounted as background...

...The birthplace of John Moschos (550-634...

...For Dalrymple, the life of the last monks in the Middle East has poignancy, but not, it seems, truth...

...When Persian invasions appeared imminent in 602, the pair went to Syria and Cilicia, finding safety at last in Alexandria for twelve years, where they visited the monasteries of the Nile delta...

...He went not as a monk, but as a disciple of the historian Steven Runciman...

...Their lifelines are financial support sent back from families working abroad and spiritual support from the monasteries, where Christian life continues in the cycle of prayer and custom shaped much as it always was...

...The spiritual life is like a ladder...

...Unlike Moschos and Sophronius, Dalrymple was not initially inclined to believe stories of miracles and faith, nor was he a member of the Eastern Orthodox Church...

...The creation of the state of Israel and the inability to establish peace in the region is one contributor to Islamic resurgence...

...His companion...

...They are not merely the last outposts of the long-fallen Roman Empire, beachRobin Darling Young is associate professor of Greek patristic theology at the Catholic University of America...

...Those left are weakened and discouraged, and sometimes threatened and slain (particularly in Turkey and Egypt...

...He continued to listen, however, and recorded a valuable conversation with a priest in the Coptic monastery...

...His setting out from the Pera Palas in Istanbul—"Like stepping into a sensuous Orientalist fantasy by Delacroix," as he puts it—establishes another difference: Dalrymple is constantly fascinated by the contemporary political and cultural circumstances of the countries whose monasteries he visits, and he talks to as many of the remaining lay Christians as he does to the monks who live apart from them...

...Jews too lived in the nations Dal-rymple visits, but after the end of the British Mandate in Palestine, most moved to Israel, removing another distinct group...

...As he explains in the opening words of his book, he and his friend Sophronius discovered that coming upon the monasteries, filled with "the virtues of holy men," is like coming upon a spring meadow, filled with "the delight, the fragrance, and the benefit which it will afford those who come across it...

...You feel full of light and pleasure: It is like a blinding charge of electricity...

...Moschos was buried where he began his ascetic life, at St...

...Not only did monasticism begin in Egypt, but one of that country's first monks was also the most famous: St...

...So, for instance, the baptism of a lovely Persian woman was postponed until the distracted monastic priest became blind to her beauty thanks to the intercession of St...

...John Moschos died in exile in Rome and entrusted the Sp-ir-itual Meadow to Sophronius, who preserved and published it...

...Along with Moschos' simple and often naive accounts, we learn much in his pages about the perennial eccentricities of everyday Christian practice...

...The chaos, corruption, and terror of a fallen world does not surprise such men...

...But in Istanbul he notes, as he does in every location he visits, the perilous position of Christians who were formerly an accepted part of life in the Middle East...

...You feel as if something which was dim is suddenly lighted for you...