Tribes with Flags: Adventure and Kidnap in Greater Syria. Charles Glass
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scarves, opened their doors to sweep house-dust out into the street or to call their children inside. Waifs, some barely dressed, ran up and down the steep streets shouting and playing, while men in old woollen trousers and heavy jackets trudged solemnly by. Near the top of the hill, the Rich Quarter gave way to a wide, shabby avenue. There I found the old house of the Azar family, prominent Christians who, when the Rich Quarter became poor, sold their house to the Catholic Church and moved to the suburbs.
The front door led through a short, dark vault to an open stone courtyard, surrounded on three sides by the house itself and on the fourth by the stone wall of the adjoining house. Each room opened onto the enclosure, which was shaded by fruit trees and had a gurgling fountain in its centre. At the far end was a kitchen, and on the sides the sleeping rooms and a bathroom. The chapel with home-made altar and several rows of pews was in what had been a modest sitting-room. This was the parish church and rectory of Father Roberto Ferrari, the only Catholic priest in Antioch.
“We had a real church in another area of Antioch,” Father Ferrari said. His English was fluent, spoken with a delightful Italian accent. “Many years ago, a French Franciscan decided to use the Melkite church.” The Melkites were the Greek rite of the Roman Catholic Church, one of many eastern rites in communion with Rome, like the Maronite, Assyrian, Armenian and Coptic Catholics. Each had its own liturgy, and most permitted married men to become priests. In Jerusalem, each sect guarded its territory and independence. In remote outposts like Antioch, where there were too few Catholics to matter, Latins and Melkites worshipped together.
“After we had been in the Melkite church for twenty-four years,” Father Ferrari complained, “the Turkish governor here said, ‘This church is not for the Latins. Please leave this area. If not, we will put your things in the street.’ I delayed for ten years, but the Papal Nuncio in Ankara asked me not to make trouble.”
Father Ferrari, who came from Perugia, belonged to the Capuchin order, a strict branch of the Franciscans. Sixty years old, he had been in Turkey since 1955, serving first at Trabzon on the Black Sea, and in 1973 came to Antioch. His whole body and face were thin, no spare flesh anywhere, a man whose life of denial had left a good nature and a sense of humour as its only extravagances. His thick white hair stuck straight up out of his head. He worea V-neck jersey over a plaid wool shirt, old trousers, St Francis’s sandals and thick spectacles. “There are one hundred Catholics here,” he said. “No. I just baptised three babies, so there are 103.” He laughed and invited me to have a cup of tea. He went to the kitchen to make the tea himself. I could see why.
While we were talking, I had noticed that a white-haired old woman in a black widow’s dress with a brown cardigan was walking in and out of the various rooms, cleaning and carrying laundry. This was Nasra, whose name in Arabic meant “Nazarene.” She looked disapprovingly at everything and everyone. For a few minutes, she fiddled with the curtains in one of the bedrooms, opening and closing them several times, looking unhappy whether they were drawn or not. She finally left them half-open and walked back into the courtyard. She swept insouciantly, casting occasional glances in our direction as if to say, why are those two sitting there? I would not have dared to ask her to make tea either.
When he sat down and poured me a glass of tea, I asked him, “Do you have many problems with the governor?”
“Sometimes,” he said, smiling as though at a private joke. “Every time, questions, questions. One month ago, though, he gave us permission to say Mass at St Peter’s on Christmas Day.”
“The governor told me St Peter’s was a museum.”
“For almost two thousand years, it has been a church,” he said. “It was a church until twenty-five years ago when the Turkish police took it.” He sipped his tea and said, “Museum,” shaking his head at the thought.
He told me Antioch had no Catholic school, so he taught catechism on Saturdays. Remembering Yalgin Kavak and the young man in the photocopy shop in Alexandretta, I asked him, “Do you have any converts?”
“Here it’s a little difficult, because it is prohibited. We don’t try to convert anyone. In Alexandretta, there are three young people who want to become Christians, but this is a problem for their families.”
“Are there others?”
“Some years ago, a major in the army converted in secret.”
“Why in secret?”
“He would have lost his job. There would have been problems with his family, and he would have lost his red, official passport.”
He did not know of any Catholics in his parish who had become Muslims, though centuries ago most of them had.
A tall young woman with long brown hair walked into the courtyard. She was not pretty in a conventional sense, and the long sweater she wore did not conceal the fact she was overweight, like a jolly friar. There was however something distracted in her manner, an inner peace to her warm, German face, which made you want to be near her. Before the door from the alley slammed shut behind her, two small children ran in squealing and laughing. They tugged at her sweater, and she bent down to speak to them in Turkish. They nodded as she spoke, and one of them kissed her cheek. Then they walked meekly out of the door, like young lions tamed by Daniel.
At the age of eighteen, this young woman, Barbara Kallasch, had travelled by bicycle from her home in Wiesbaden to Israel, where she worked in a hospital and contracted hepatitis. She went to Jordan on what she had intended as a trip by land to India. Failing to obtain an Iraqi visa there, she went north to Syria and then to Antioch, where she planned to remain a year. She took a job in the Melkite church, helping by her presence there to keep it open and assisting pilgrims on their way south. She was now thirty-one years old and was organising local women to weave carpets. “Do you,” I asked her, “have a vocation?”
“Yes, yes,” Father Ferrari answered for her. “Like Mother Theresa.”
“The Franciscans adopted me,” she said. “I’m in the third order of St Francis.”
“They call her Sister Barbara,” Father Ferrari said.
“But you are not a nun?”
“The first time I came here for St Peter’s Feast, a man took my picture and wrote in the newspaper that a nun from Germany was visiting. Since then, they have called me Sister Barbara.”
“You have been here eleven years. Are you going to stay?”
“I always thought that if someone were here to take my place, I would leave. If you get to know the people here, they are very nice. It is also for the church I stay. My family want me back in Germany. My sisters came to visit. So has my parish priest.”
“How do you spend your time?”
“Translations,” she said. She spoke five languages, German, English, French, Italian and Turkish. “Also weaving. Helping people. Helping the church.”
“What about the future? Would you like to get married?”
“You don’t think about marriage when you work like this.”
A Greek Orthodox priest walked into the courtyard. Dressed in black, with his black hat and beard, the Abuna Boulos, Arabic for “Father Paul,” had come to offer his Holy Thursday greetings to Father Ferrari. As the two clerics shook hands and sat down for a cup of tea, I reflected that eight centuries had passed since the Great Schism between Rome and Orthodoxy. During that time, the Greek and Latin Churches had persecuted each other’s adherents over obscure differences of doctrine and liturgy. The Catholic and Orthodox Patriarchs of Antioch had fled south to Syria and Lebanon, taking only their ancient title, “Patriarch of Antioch and the East,” with them. They had left behind barely a thousand Christians with only two priests who could at last afford to practise ecumenical fraternity on the Feast of the Last Supper.
Just over the bridge in the new city was the repository of artefacts of the vibrant religion which predated both Christianity and Islam in Antioch. The Hatay Museum, built by the French in their final year of occupation, housed perhaps