Tribes with Flags: Adventure and Kidnap in Greater Syria. Charles Glass
his head and said something to Miss Ozmen. “Oh,” she said. “I cannot go. I am a woman, and I have nothing to cover my head. You go.”
The old man led me down stone steps which curved round and round a central column, like the stairs in a tower, until we neared the bottom. There he motioned me to stop. The basement was a foot deep in water. We had to stand on a plank above the water to look at the tomb. It was a small room, without inscriptions or symbols, only the plain stone sarcophagus. There was really nothing to see, but disappointment may well be the only consistent feature of sight-seeing.
When we arrived back upstairs, Miss Ozmen was talking to two old blind men. She introduced me to one of them, a man with a wispy beard and blank eyes. “Here is the muezzin,” she said. “We call him muezzin, because he announces the prayer five times a day, according to the Muslims.”
Recalling that some of Beirut’s mosques played old records or cassettes of the muezzin’s call, I asked, “Does he do all the singing himself or does he play a recording?”
“He does it very well. He doesn’t live here. He has got a family, and he gets his salary from the government.”
“From the government?” I asked, surprised that Atatürk’s secular state subsidised the mosque.
“Of course.”
“What time is the first prayer?”
Without asking the old man, she answered, “Ten minutes to five in the morning.”
I asked, again hoping to start a conversation with the muezzin, who stood silently at her side, “He comes here that early every day?”
“No,” she said, ignoring the old man. “He climbs the minaret five times a day. And we can watch from our windows to make sure he is doing his job.”
I could not help but sympathise with the muezzin, standing here idly wondering what we were talking about, and climbing to the top of the minaret five times a day while Miss Ozmen watched from her window.
The muezzin said I could look inside the mosque. I took off my shoes and stepped inside, walking over the thick Persian carpets, trying not to disturb the men inside who prayed silent and prostrate facing the mithrab, a small niche in one wall indicating the direction for correct devotion. The minbar, a platform raised above the mosque like a pulpit from which the Friday sermon was delivered, was empty. In a far corner, near a long window, a small group of men sat talking quietly. The mosque had been not only a place of prayer, but of religious teaching and discussion, from Islam’s earliest days. The only decorations, in keeping with the Prophet’s prohibitions against representation of the human form, were the geometric patterns and calligraphy carved into the stonework.
“Do you come to the mosque?” I asked Miss Ozmen, when I had put my shoes back on in the courtyard.
“Usually, only the gentlemen come to the mosque. Ladies stay at home. On special occasions, we come to the mosque, but we pray in special places, specially behind gentlemen.” The other, older blind man began to speak to her in Turkish. He was stooped over a long walking stick and wore the traditional sharwal and white skull cap of the religious man. “He is asking if you would like to see the tomb of Yahya,” she explained.
“Yahya?”
“Yes,” she said. “A follower of Issa, of Jesus.”
The blind man led us to a small room. “I cannot go in without a headscarf,” she said. “You can go in.”
The bare room was only a few feet square, and I could see all of it from the courtyard outside. “This is a tomb of a follower of Jesus?” I asked.
“Of course.”
While she was driving me to my hotel, Miss Ozmen lamented the decline of the tourist trade. “I used to guide many Americans here,” she said, “but they are not coming any more.”
“Why not?”
“Because of the Middle East situation.”
“But Turkey is not affected by the Arab–Israeli war.”
“They don’t just come to see Turkey,” she went on. “I used to receive tourists every day. In the seventies, we had seven cars together, sometimes ten cars, sometimes twenty-five cars, filled with tourists.”
“I suppose,” I said, “you might attract more tourists if you had a good hotel.”
“Yes, Atahan Hotel is the best here.”
“The Atahan is not very good.”
She turned and looked at me. I feared a car accident or worse. “Not good, Atahan? Why don’t you like it?” she asked, bitterness creeping into her high-pitched voice.
“I don’t mind it, but it’s just not a very good hotel.”
“You’ve been to better hotels?”
The Greek Orthodox Church of Sts Peter and Paul lay at the end of a covered archway in the heart of the impoverished Rich Quarter. If a small piazza in front of the church had not set it apart, it would have been impossible to see its lovely columns and basilica, to know that in the midst of all the houses, winding alleys and courtyards, there was such a beautiful old church. The piazza was already empty; the people had gone home without the long chats common in other cities. Only two old men in dark suits remained on the porch, saying farewell in Arabic. One of them put on his hat and walked away, and the other went back into the church. I followed him inside.
In Arabic, he asked me, “Where are you from?”
“From America.”
“From America!” he said, delighted. “Where did you learn Arabic?”
“I studied in Beirut.”
“American? In Beirut?” he asked. Grabbing my ear and pulling hard, he added, “They will take you away. All the Americans in Beirut are taken away.”
“It’s a problem.”
I said I had been to the church-turned-mosque and seen the tomb of Yahya.
“What Yahya?” he asked. “That is St John.”
We walked around the church looking at the ikons. He said some were three or four hundred years old. All of them had the beauty of an older, simpler faith. “Many ikons are stolen,” he said, holding up a large key. “I lock the church every day.” He limped as he walked from ikon to ikon, and he realised I was looking at his left leg, which was badly twisted.
“Korea,” he said. “I was shot in both legs.”
I said, “Haram,” the universal Arabic statement of sympathy, which literally means “forbidden,” but implied pity.
“No,” he laughed. “It was war.”
“But it is haram that you went all the way from Antioch to a war in Korea with the Turkish army.”
“It was for America,” he explained, strangely proud. “Turkey was with America.”
It seemed odd that a Syrian Christian would go from the far west to the far east of Asia to an American war, but his life was of a piece with that of his forefathers. Turkey had for centuries fought alongside other countries, invariably Christian, using non-Turkish levies. She had fought with the British in the Crimea in 1856 against the Russian Empire and, at the cost of her own empire, with the Germans against the British in 1917.
The Roman Catholic chapel of Saints Paul and Peter, though a short walk away, was nothing like the grand Orthodox Church of Saints Peter and Paul. The Orthodox worshipped in a vestige of Byzantium, when Christians ruled the city. The Catholics made do with a room reminiscent of the days when the Christian community was underground, as Saints Peter and Paul might have known it. I came to it, like a knight errant in quest of a myth, having heard from Christians in Alexandretta of its Italian pastor and a “holy woman” named Sister Barbara.
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