William Dalrymple – From the Holy Mountain: A Journey in the Shadow of Byzantium (страница 18)
In Edessa Badger visited the fishponds. Dismissing Muslim superstition he commented that: ‘the Christians often partake of the forbidden dainty, the fish being easily secured in the streams which flow from the pond through the gardens. They generally cook them with a wine sauce,’ notes Badger approvingly, ‘and declare them excellent.’
I climbed to the citadel and looked down over Urfa. On every side the hills were brown and parched. It was nearly noon, and beyond the town’s limits nothing moved except the shimmering heatwaves and, in the distance, a single spiral of wheeling vultures. But the town itself was a riot of greens, reds and oranges: trees and gardens backing onto flat-topped Turkish houses, with the whole vista broken by the vertical punctuation of a hundred minarets. Some of these were the conventional Turkish pencil-shape, others were more unusual: the Ulu Jami retained its Byzantine octagon, while a square campanile rising above the fishponds with four double-arched horseshoe openings may once also have been the bell-tower of an early medieval church.
But there are no functioning churches in Edessa any more. Although legend has it that Edessa was the first town outside Palestine to accept Christianity – according to Eusebius, its King Abgar heard about Jesus from the Edessan Jews and corresponded with Him, accepting the new religion a year before Christ’s Passion – there has been no Christian community here since the First World War. For in 1915 the governor began ‘deporting’ the Armenians: rounding them up in groups, marching them out of town with a ‘bodyguard’ of Ottoman irregulars, then murdering them in the discreet emptiness of the desert. Fearing this treatment would be extended to the rest of the Christian community, the two thousand remaining Christian families in the town barricaded themselves into their quarter and successfully defended themselves for several weeks. But eventually the Ottoman troops broke through the makeshift defences. Some Christians escaped; a few were spared. More were massacred.
On my way back to the hotel I passed the old Armenian cathedral. Between 1915 and last year it was a fire station; now, as I discovered, it is being converted into a mosque. The altar has been dismantled, leaving the apse empty. A
‘No,’ one of the workmen shouted down. ‘It’s a church.’
‘Greek?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘Armenian.’
‘Are there any Armenians left in Urfa?’
‘No,’ he said, smiling broadly and laughing. His friend made a throat-cutting gesture with his trowel.
‘They’ve all gone,’ said the first man, smiling.
‘Where to?’
The two looked at each other: ‘Israel,’ said the first man, after a pause. He was grinning from ear to ear.
‘I thought Israel was for Jews,’ I said.
‘Jews, Armenians,’ he replied, shrugging his shoulders. ‘Same thing.’
The two men went back to work, cackling with laughter as they did so.
HOTEL KARAVANSARAY, DIYARBAKIR, 16 AUGUST
A bleak journey: mile after mile of blinding white heat and arid, barren grasslands, blasted flat and colourless by the incessant sun. Occasionally a small stone village clustered on top of a tell. Otherwise the plains were completely uninhabited.
Diyarbakir, a once-famous Silk Route city on the banks of the River Tigris, was announced by nothing more exotic than a ring of belching smokestacks. The old town lies to one side, on a steep hill above the Tigris. It is still ringed by the original Byzantine fortifications built by Julian the Apostate in the austere local black basalt, and their sombre, somehow unnatural darkness gives them a grim and almost diabolic air.
The Byzantines knew Diyarbakir as ‘the Black’, and it has a history worthy of its sinister fortifications. Between the fourth and seventh centuries it passed back and forth between Byzantine, Persian and Arab armies. Each time it changed hands its inhabitants were massacred or deported. In 502 A.D. it fell to the Persians after the Zoroastrian troops found a group of monks drunk at their posts on the walls; after the subsequent massacre, no fewer than eight thousand dead bodies had to be carried out of the gates.
Today the city retains its bloody reputation. It is now the centre of the Turkish government’s ruthless attempt to crush the current Kurdish insurgency, and indeed anyone who speaks out, however moderately, for Kurdish rights. In Istanbul journalists had told me that Diyarbakir crawled with Turkish secret police; apparently in the last four years there have been more than five hundred unsolved murders and ‘disappearances’ in the town. One correspondent said that shortly after his last visit, the editor of a Diyarbakir newspaper who had given him a slightly outspoken interview had an ‘accident’, tumbling to his death from the top floor of his newspaper offices; after this the political atmosphere became so tense that local newspapers could only be bought from police stations. No one, said the journalist, dared to speak to him, other than one shopkeeper who whispered the old Turkish proverb: ‘May the snake that does not bite me live for a thousand years.’
As we drove, I wondered if my taxi driver would prove equally tongue-tied, so I asked him if things were still as bad as they had been. ‘There is no problem,’ he replied automatically. ‘In Turkey everything is very peaceful.’
As we passed along the black city walls, I noticed a crowd gathering on the other side of the crash-barrier. Armed policemen in flak jackets and sunglasses were jumping out of jeeps and patrol cars and running towards the crowd. I asked the driver what was happening. He pulled in and asked a passer-by, an old Kurd in a dusty pinstripe jacket. The two exchanged anxious words in Kurdish, then he drove on.
‘What did he say?’
‘Don’t worry,’ said the driver. ‘It’s nothing.’
‘Something must have happened.’
We pulled up in front of a huge green armoured car that was parked immediately in front of my hotel; from the top of its glossy metallic carapace protruded the proboscis of a heavy machine gun.
‘It’s nothing,’ repeated the driver. ‘The police have just shot somebody. Everyone is calm. There is no problem.’
That evening I found my way through back alleys to Diyarbakir’s last remaining Armenian church.
In the mid-nineteenth century the town had had one of the largest Armenian communities in Anatolia. Like the Jews of Eastern Europe, the Armenians ran the businesses, stocked the shops and lent the money. Like the East European Jews, their prominence led to resentment and, eventually, to a horrific backlash.
In 1895, during the first round of massacres, 2,500 Armenians were clubbed to death, shut up in their quarter like rabbits in a sealed burrow. When the English clergyman the Rev. W.A. Wigram visited the town in 1913 he reported seeing ‘the doors still splintered and patched in the houses which were stormed by the rioters … and the ghastly bald patch in the midst of the city where the Armenian quarter was razed to the ground and has never been re-erected to this day’. He warned that further massacres were an ever-present danger; and his prophecy was proved horribly accurate only two years later. During the First World War the sadistic Ottoman Governor of Diyarbakir, Dr Reşid Bey, was responsible for some of the very worst atrocities against Christians – both Armenian and Syrian Orthodox – to take place anywhere in the entire Ottoman Empire: men had horse-shoes nailed to their feet; women were gang-raped. One Arab source close to those who carried out the 1915 massacres in Diyarbakir Province estimated the number of murdered Christians across the governorate as 570,000: a high, but not entirely unbelievable, estimate.
Yet despite all this, a handful of Armenians were said still to cling on in the city, and my architectural gazetteer, written in 1987, said that one Armenian church was still functioning. I found the compound easily enough, and was astonished by the size and magnificence of the church: it was inlaid with fine sculptural panels and looked large enough to contain maybe a thousand people. It was only when I looked through the grilles on the window that I realised the church was now a ruin. Holy pictures still decorated the walls; a gilt iconostasis still separated nave from sanctuary; a book stand still rested on the high altar. All that was missing was the roof.
I found a family of Kurdish refugees huddled in the lee of the west porch, cooking a cauldron of soup on an open fire. I asked if they knew what had happened, but they shook their heads and explained that they had only been sheltering there for a few days. They directed me to the door of a house at the back of the compound.