The Crossing Place: A Journey among the Armenians. Philip Marsden
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he explained, had its own mystic – the Magus of Strovolos; not his favourite, by any means, but worth a hearing. That week he was giving a series of lectures. We drove through Nicosia to Strovolus, known to be the city’s dullest suburb. The day’s lecture was in a large shed in a leafy garden. A group of Germans filled the room and hung through the open window to catch the Magus’s words. He started by talking about psychotherapy. Literally the word meant ‘healing the soul’. A misnomer, explained the Magus, for the soul is the one part of us that is never sick. It is the other things, the worldly things like doubt and desire heaped around the soul that make us sick.
The ‘Magus’ took his title from the priestly caste of Zoroastrians and displayed in his teaching some of the dualism that they had taught. Dualism was outlawed by the early Church, like so much else that was good, but it survived in Armenia. It found its way eventually into Western Europe to become the basis for the great medieval heresies, the Albigensians and Cathars. It was Armenian exiles – ever the carriers of Oriental ideas – who are believed to have introduced it.
The Magus sat on his stool in a grey, button-up cardigan, spreading his appealing heresies in mellifluous tones, speaking of the powers of auto-therapy, of modern evils, of peace. And it was all grist to the mill for the gentle Germans who sat with eyes closed, palms upturned. His American supporters, wary of the war, were not so loyal. They had stayed at home and sent as proxy a set of small tape recorders which whirred and clicked at the Magus’s feet.
For fifteen hundred years Armenians had been fleeing to Cyprus – heretics, subversives, exiled princes and kings, poets, monks, pogrom survivors and orphans. Once there, things have become little easier. They watched the island shift from one power to the next – from Abbasid to Byzantine, Byzantine to Knights Templar, to French Crusader, to Venetian, to Ottoman, to British, and from British into civil war. Looking at the island on the map, it appears somehow anvil-shaped, and there’s never been a shortage of people to wield the hammer.
The Nalchadjians had been particularly unlucky. On a hot June afternoon in 1963 the Nalchadjians were married at Nicosia’s Armenian church. It was a glamorous occasion. The Nalchadjian factories in Famagusta and Kyrenia were large and prosperous, and the couple stepped from the church into a cheering bay of Armenian well-wishers, who had gathered beneath the cypresses.
Mrs Nalchadjian had kept something of her dark, Armenian beauty, but the factories had all gone. I went to see her in a small, third-floor flat in Greek Nicosia, which had the advantage of being close to the new Armenian church.
‘Yes, it was a wonderful service,’ she sighed, turning the page of her photograph album. ‘The shooting didn’t start until the reception.’
When he heard the shots the vartabed left the party and hurried through the deserted streets to lock up the church. It was never used again.
Mrs Nalchadjian turned the album’s last page, which was empty. ‘For our daughter’s wedding. She’s engaged to an Armenian doctor, a lovely man. But he lives in Beirut and things are still a bit difficult there.’
‘The church,’ I said. ‘What has happened to the old church?’
‘I don’t know. Some say it’s a café, others that it’s destroyed. No one’s been back.’
At the Greek checkpoint, I signed some papers and they let me through. I walked on past the UN checkpoint, through no man’s land, to the Turkish checkpoint. There, I signed more papers and pledged I’d be back before the border closed at dusk.
While Greek Cyprus has grown fat since the occupation, and its roads purr now with German cars, the Turkish side has become something of a backwater. It is like a sleepy Anatolian town, with peasant families living in the wrecks of old Ottoman villas, grazing sheep and moustachioed cloth merchants with rolls of suiting tucked under their arms. All that still lives of a non-Turkish past are the rusting hulls of Morrises and Hillmans.
The church was hard to find. Victoria street had looked easy on the map, but it was a Greek map and all the names had been changed. Asking for an Armenian church was even less tactful here than in Anatolia. So I idled past the fruit stalls and abandoned hans, the foundries and workshops, followed the zig-zag of the Green Line until, not far in from the western wall, I spied the telling pinnacle of a church tower.
The high gate was padlocked. Its wrought-iron whorls were trussed with barbed wire. A board had been crudely tied to the gate: a victory targe with a soldier bursting from the red and crescent moon of the Turkish flag. Behind it the courtyard appeared untouched from the day of the Nalchadjian wedding. The cypresses were gone and the flagstones bordered with weeds, but it had about it the air of neglect rather than destruction.
Nor was the church a café. That too was abandoned and tufts of grass billowed from its walls. Another Armenian church in ruins. I tried to get in but on the other side was a military assault course, all raked dirt and poles and rope-nets and pits. When I went a little later to Famagusta to see what had become of the fourteenth-century church there, I found it also adjacent to an assault course. There were the poles and rope-nets and pits. I began to wonder whether Armenian churches might form some essential part of Turkish military training.
The following day I left Nicosia to catch the boat to Beirut. In Larnaca a warm wind blew off the sea. The gulls spun in idle circles above the empty hotels. Pinned to the menu-board of one, coyly avoiding any mention of the Gulf War, was a letter from the Cyprus Tourism Organization: ‘We regret the decision of certain tour operators to repatriate their clients from Cyprus. It is as calm and safe as it used to be, and as beautiful for holidays.’
That evening on the docks, waiting for the French to load their military supplies, a Lebanese came up to me. He had a three-inch scar on his jaw.
‘You going to Lebanon?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why do you go to Lebanon? Lebanon is not a good country.’
‘I’ve heard it’s a beautiful country.’
‘You have friends in Beirut?’
‘Yes,’ I lied.
‘Good, but don’t go to West Beirut. If you go to West Beirut, you know what will happen.’
I could guess.
‘They will take you away.’
The exile understands death and solitude in a sense to which an Englishman is deaf.
Storm Jameson
The sun rose behind a bank of dark clouds, spreading shafts of light into the pale sky above. It gave the impression of some vast Georgian fanlight and I stood at the ship’s rail, watching its reflection in the still water, watching the bow-wave as it flopped over and shattered the water. It was just before seven.
The clouds grew larger and turned out not to be clouds at all, but the mountains of Lebanon. They ran up and down the coast, sheer and very dark. Ten miles to the south they fell to a strip of flat land which stuck out to sea like a tongue. From it rose the square blocks of Beirut. Looking at the distant, sun-lit profile I felt as though I was seeing for the first time some notorious celebrity, a mass-killer, a rampant dictator, there in the flesh. Since the Syrians had mopped up the last of General Aoun’s forces a few months before, there had been peace, but it was an uneasy peace. Much of the city remained in the hands of the militias, and almost all of the land outside. Beirut at that time was still the most lawless city on earth.
But for me, it was indispensable. Beirut had long been Armenia’s unofficial capital-in-exile. In the good years the Armenians had operated like a semi-autonomous republic; more than a quarter of a million of them had lived here, with powerful links all over the world. They controlled a great deal of Beirut’s trade and much of its industry. Although half of them had emigrated, the community had survived. The Armenians