"From the Holy Mountain" by William Dalrymple

 In the mid 1990s, Dalrymple sets off from Mount Athos, the autonomous theocratic collection of monasteries in Greece, to follow the route of John Moschos a Byzantine monk who, in 587, travelled through the Byzantine empire, through Anatolia and the Syrian-Lebanese-Palestinian coast into Egypt.

The modern journey, set before the more recent Syrian civil war, chronicles the plight of the Eastern Christians of a variety of persuasions (including Armenians, Maronites and Copts), a community with roots dating back to the Apostles, who are persecuted by the more recently introduced inhabitants of the various lands: the increasingly Islamist Turks, the non-Maronite communities following Lebanon's civil war, the Israeli government and the West Bank settlers, and the increasingly Islamist Egyptians. The complaint throughout is of neglect from governments and persecution from religious terrorists leading to mass emigration and dwindling communities facing extinction.

Clearly things have changed. Dalrymple's Lebanon is newly recovering from civil war, Syria, the country in which Dalrymple finds most harmony, has fallen in war and anarchy, in Egypt Mubarak has been toppled. Yet one suspects that the beleaguered communities, many of them making the point that they were inhabiting their villages before the arrival of the Ottomans, or the Moslems, or the Jews, are probably still persecuted. If they still exist.

He repeatedly makes the point that there was (usually) more tolerance in the past. In the monastery of Mar Gabriel, in Tur Abdin, a 1600-year-old Syriac monastery in Turkey close to its border with Syria, he witnesses Christians worshipping prostrate, as Moslems do now: "exactly the form of worship described by Moschos in The Spiritual Meadow ... the Muslims appear to have derived their techniques of worship from existing Christian practice." (2)

It is rather depressing. But the sadness is offset by some wonderful descriptions, some bizarre characters (especially many of the monks encountered) and by incisive observations. 

Many, many memorable moments:

• Descriptions:
• "I ate breakfast in a vast Viennese ballroom with a sprung wooden floor and dadoes dripping with recently applied gilt. The lift is a giant baroque birdcage, entered through a rainforest of potted palms." (2)
• "The yellow glow of the sulphurous streetlights silhouettes the city's skyline" (2)
• "When you think of the French Romanesque ... you are left with an impression of teeming life: biting beasts entwined around capitals; tympana crowded with the Twenty-Four Elders of the Apocalypse busily fiddling on their viols; angels blowing the Last Trump; the dead resurrecting, emerging like uncurling crustaceans from their sarcophagi." (3)
• "A cortege of elderly priests conducted the service, accompanied by a string of echoing laments of almost unearthly beauty, sinuous alleluias which floated with the gentle indecision of falling feathers down arpeggios of dying cadences before losing themselves in a soft black hole of basso profundo." (3)

• Observations:
• "As the Byzantine writer Cecaumenus put it: 'Houseparties are a mistake, for guests merely criticise your housekeeping and attempt to seduce your wife." (1)
• "What has most moved past generations can today sometimes only be tentatively glimpsed with the eye of faith." (2)
• "Those who are content to live in sin do not suffer from the temptations of the Devil so badly as those who try to live with God." (4)
• "Just as it is impossible to see your face in troubled water, so also the soul ... It is like two lovers. If they want to discuss their love they want to be alone." (4)
• "Being a hermit was like being a fire. At first it smokes and your eyes water, but ... after the smoke disperses, the light and the heat comes." (4)
• "I am the policeman of my soul. Demons are like criminals. Both are very stupid. Both are damned." (5)
• Others
• "Three years ago, in the middle of winter, some raiders turned up in motorboats ... They had Sten guns and were assisted by an ex-novice who had been thrown out by the Abbot." (1)
• "The hotel has a policy of naming its bedrooms after distinguished guests, which has unconsciously acted as a graph of its dramatic post-war decline: from before the war you cab choose to sleep in Ataturk, Mata Hari or King Zog of Albania; after it there is nothing more exciting on offer than Julio Iglesias." (2)
• "Relics were holes in the curtain wall separating the human from the divine." (2)
• "Gregory the Great always used to recommend making the sign of the cross over a lettuce in case you swallowed a demon that happened to be perched on its leaves." (2)
• "The dust from his clothes was more powerful than roasted crocodile, camel dung, or Bithnyian cheese mixed with wax - apparently the usual contents of a Byzantine doctor's medicine chest." (2)
• "Theodore, the seventh Archbishop of Canterbury, was a Byzantine from Tarsus who had studied at Antioch and visited Edessa; his surviving Biblical commentaries, written in England, show the extent to which he brought the teaching of the School of Antioch and an awareness of Syriac literature to the far shores of Anglo-Saxon Kent." (2)
• "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." (2)
• "It was from the Nestorian school of Nisibis - via Morrish Cordoba - that many of the works of Aristotle and Plato eventually reached the new universities of medieval Europe." (30
• "Yezidis ... and iraqi sect ... they're devil-propitiators ... They call Lucifer 'Malik Yawus', the Peacock Angel, and offer sacrifices to keep him happy. They believe Lucifer, the Devil, has been forgiven by God and reinstated as Chief Angel, supervising the day-to-day running of the world's affairs ... they get on with the Nestorians ... very well ... Some people believe that the Yezidis were originally a sort of strange Gnostic offshoot of the Nestorian church." (3)
• "The Fount of Knowledge [by John Damascene] contains an extremely precise and detailed critique of Islam, which, intriguingly, John regards as a form of Christian heresy closely related to Arianism (after all, like Islam, Arianism denied the divinity of Christ)." (5)
• "Sounding sincere in one's appreciation of the monks' culinary abilities was a task that needed advanced acting skills." (5)
• "In all the Byzantine sites excavated in Palestine and Jordan only two lavatories have ever been discovered, and one of those was located directly over a monastic kitchen." (5)
• "It was the custom in [early CE] Egypt to bury those who could afford it in mummy cases onto which were bound superb encaustic (hot wax) portraits of the disease ... the oldest icons in existence are to be found in St Catherine's Monastery in the Sinai ... they are painted in the same encaustic technique." (6)
• "There are an extraordinary number of otherwise inexplicable similarities between the Celtic and Coptic Churches which were shared by no other  Western Chruches. In both, the bishops wore crowns rather than miters and held T-shaped Tau crosses rather than crooks or croziers. In both the handbell played a very prominent part in ritual." (6)
• "Since the Second World War it has rained only once in Kharga, for ten minutes, in the winter of 1959." (6)

A wise and beautifully written travelogue.

This review was written by the author of Motherdarling  and The Kids of God

I have also read the following books by William Dalrymple:

• In Xanadu
• City of Djinns