middle east

In 587 A.D., a Byzantine monk named John Moschos set off from Mount Athos in Greece, traveling around the eastern Mediterranean to Egypt, collecting anecdotes, aphorisms and legends of the desert monks, or, as he called it, "the wisdom of the desert fathers." The result was a book entitled The Spiritual Meadow, which is still in existence. Using Moschos' book as his guide, author William Dalrymple made the trip himself in 1994, to see what was left of the Christians of the Middle East. Of course, what he was really visiting were the last fading vestiges of Byzantium itself. This fascinating book is a combination of travelogue, history and muckraking journalism. The muckraking journalism part I did not care for (because I don't like feeling helpless), but the historical aspects of the book appealed to me greatly. I knew next to nothing about this region when I started reading this book. It was saddening to read of the slow but inevitable death of the Christian faith in the Middle East. Wars, persecutions, political power games and emigration have virtually assured its extinction, probably within the next 20 years. Most horrifying, to me, was the case of the Palestinian Christians in Israel. The book definitely gave me the impression that the state of Israel is not a benign force.

The real strength of the book is, in addition to his vivid prose, Dalrymple's sense of humor. I chuckled many times throughout the book. Especially amusing to me was the Coptic monks' obsession with poultry breeding. My favorite parts of the book were the historical background on the places he visited and the conclusions Dalrymple was able to draw using his prodigious knowledge of Christian art (he is an authority on Celtic illuminations). Parts of the book I found really thrilling, such as Dalrymple's near-epiphany when he recognizes an ancient picture found in Egypt as being identical to a page of Celtic illumination and is then able to build a case whereby a shipwrecked Coptic monk was the source of all Celtic illuminations. I also felt a chill when Dalrymple realized that the liturgical melody he was hearing was probably the oldest melody in existence.

I would not want to make this trip for myself, because unlike Dalrymple, I don't have a sense of adventure that is willing to deal with gun-toting religious zealots, paranoid citizens of repressive countries and insane local despots in third-world countries. But I suppose someone has to do it, and we are fortunate that that someone was Dalrymple. His literary and historical knowledge served him well on this trip. This is an odd book that caused me to think about a lot of things in a different way, and for that reason I would recommend it. It was an excellent follow-up to Julius Norwich's A Short History of Byzantium.

Not since Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance has a travelogue been so much more than a tale about a trip.

From the Holy Mountain is about a Scottish Roman Catholic who, in 1994, decided to retrace the steps taken and chronicled by Fr. John Moschos back in 587 A.D. Dalrymple visits Eastern Orthodox monasteries in the Middle East where, even as late as 1994, local Muslims came to worship, and brought animals to sacrifice to Christian saints whom they believed capable of divine intervention in their lives. The book is about Greece and Turkey and Syria and Lebanon and Israel and Egypt in 587 A.D., in 1994, and episodically in-between.

William Dalrymple is a skilled writer whose prose moves at a fast pace, without sacrificing the detail and anecdotes which lend humor and humanity to his story. Dalrymple has the gift of conversation. His interpersonal encounters keep the story alive.

Dalrymple has a prodigious vocabulary, and visits some obscure places, so the book is best read with a dictionary and a good atlas nearby.

For anyone with an interest in any of the countries mentioned above, an interest in the Byzantine or Ottoman Empires, an interest in early or modern Christianity, in early or modern Islam, or simply with a traveler's soul, From the Holy Mountain is a great book.

What an impressive travelogue this tome is. This young Catholic Briton went traveling around the eastern Mediterranean, following in the footsteps of a late-antiquity monk, John Moschos. He meets many elderly representatives of the declining Orthodox churches in their ramshackle abbeys and monasteries throughout the Near East. Dalrymple had an amazingly keen ear for recording (or reconstructing) conversation, and the humor, quaintness, poignancy, and sometimes grief he evokes sounds true. He listens with a straight face to monks discussing recent appearances of St. Stephen, listens to a broken old priest describing the forcible dispersal of his flock, even pays a visit to the tomb of John Moschos himself. The church that houses it was once a thriving community of faith, but at the time of Dalrymple's visit only one old nun was left.

Some of the humor is at his own expense. In Syria he tries to wrangle a visit to a remote community of archaic Christians, the Nestorians, or Assyrian Church. He is rebuffed, but a helpful local suggests that he contact an emigre community of these believers--back in his neighborhood of Ealing! "Such are the humiliations of the travel writer in the late twentieth
century: go to the ends of the earth to search for the most exotic heretics in the world, and you find they have cornered the kebab business at the end of your street in London."

The book is marred by some ugly anti-Zionism that he must have soaked up in Britain during his university years. He treats his escapades with the Turkish and Syrian authorities almost as comic opera, but unloads some real loathing on Israel. Typical background passages begin something like, "After the 1948 war, in violation of international law, Israel..." as if the 1948 war were Israel's idea, or as if the Arab goal of exterminating the Jews were in accordance with international law. Several of the accusations made by the Armenian priests in Israel cry out for fact-checking, but since this is a travel and not an investigative book, there is none.

Interposed through the text are excerpts and paraphrases from Moschos' book. From these we revisit the ancient stylites and dendrites, who inflicted physical mortification upon themselves in the belief that suffering in this life made for an easier time in the afterlife. Throughout, we also get a little archaeological background of different locations. They aren't all ancient: The Baron hotel in Damascus still has Lawrence of Arabia's unpaid bill framed behind the front desk, though the gardens and ponds outside have long since been replaced with urban seediness.

A mostly fine travel book with a great premise.