 Maaloula
By Carol
Miller*
"To Keep a Man Honest, Never Call him a
Liar"
Confucius
Miracles, martyrdom and a magical setting, of small houses -the
roof of one giving access to the terrace of the next-- that rise in
layers like a birthday cake of pastel blue, lilac and yellow against
the rocky halo of a sheer mountain backdrop, all combine to make a
fairy-tale of Maaloula, that unfolds "once upon a time".
Maaloula, in Aramaic, means "entrance". The portal in
question refers to a legend involving Saint (Mar) Tekla, whose
sanctuary nestles in a damp cave, in one of the cliffs that embrace
the town. As the story goes, the weary young girl, around the year
45 A.D., journeyed here from near Antioch where her faith,
encouraged in the teachings of the itinerant St. Paul, had saved her
from a cruel martyrdom; she was to have been burned alive in the
town square. And while her own dear lord God had sent a downpour to
douse the flames, she was now disheartened and travel-worn, her way
blocked by a mountain. As she kneeled in dismay, God again came to
her rescue and, says the tale, split the mountain, opening a
passageway in the cleft, with a soothing stream at the girl's feet.
Though Maaloula can also be entered along a modern paved road,
through an enchanted valley, with orchards of apricots and figs,
fields of grapes and stands of poplar, that spread across the
pockets in the Kalamun Mountains of the Anti-Lebanon range, more
evocative, breathtaking in fact, is the way through the gorge
-narrow, stony, uneven, traversed by a stream, the passage often
shared with a bearded old man on his donkey - and watched over by
caves and passageways in the rocky walls that date from the
Cro-Magnon wanderers, who first occupied the site 30,000 years ago,
and who used the grottoes, like the saints of the first Christian
millennium, for refuge, retreat and tombs.
Maaloula, and the neighboring towns of Jaba'din and Naj'a, are
the last three Aramaic-speaking strongholds in an area once
completely dominated by a language so common it was freely spoken in
Assyrian and Persian courts, Babylonian councils, Hebrew temples, by
seamen and shepherds, prophets as they preached and merchants at
their trade.
Yet while the Arameans seem to have clarified communication, and
in fact employed a written alphabet, they were the disruptive force
that contributed to the collapse of one after another of the Near
Eastern empires. The general description "Arameans" or
"Aramaeans", according to Amélie Kuhrt (The Ancient Near
East, c. 3000-330 B.C., London, Routledge, 1995) "masks the
fact that they are not a unified group, except in terms of their
language", yet they persisted as a significant, identifiable
political and cultural factor in the history of the region from the
ninth century B.C. on, despite their elusive origins (ostensibly as
Aryans from the Transcaspian, or perhaps the Indus Valley) and their
inexplicable appearance, all across the Fertile Crescent.
Before 1500 B.C. the Arameans had been described as "roving,
hostile bands of marauders, sometimes agricultural workers, often
simple pastoralists", yet after a lapse of some three hundred
years, during which information became vague and scarce, the record
attests to their reappearance as settled groups in a wide range of
political entities, throughout the region from the Tigris to the
Levant.
The earliest indisputable evidence for the Arameans dates
from the reign of the Assyrian king Tiglath-pileser I (1114-1076
B.C.), during which at least fourteen annual policing actions were
required against a people called the Ablame-Armaya in the area of
the middle and upper Euphrates. The Assyrians, in fact, deported
them whenever possible. The Babylonians, without success, built
walls to keep them out. In the Levant, already badly affected by the
collapse of the imperial superstructures, the small city-states were
much more vulnerable, giving the Arameans the opportunity not just
of harassing, or raiding, or even settling, but of seizing political
control as well. Nonetheless, according to scholars a number of
questions about these people remain unanswerable, or the versions
collide, and ultimately provide only a limited and distorted
picture.
The facts do, however, coincide in the troublesome presence of a
people, or a number of peoples, "who sow chaos and unrest
wherever they appear", and leave "want, hunger, and famine
in their wake". The Aramean states, among themselves, in any
case never joined forces. Despite their unhappy reputation, their
disassociated hegemonies were inexplicably left in place as long as
their loyalties to the predominant authority remained intact, while
meantime, according to their own sources, and "in the most
innocent fashion", they raised their cattle and sheep and grew
their crops, and decorated their royal palaces with exquisite stone
carvings, elaborate wooden furniture, and bronze bowls with verbose
Aramaic inscriptions.
Though their settlement was piecemeal, often as a result of their
own migrations or perhaps Assyrian deportations, or the joining of
their ranks by dissatisfied peasants all across the region, their
presence spread so quickly and thoroughly that their language,
written in their own form of an alphabet, spread with them.
This West Semitic idiom engendered, in effect, Arabic, Hebrew and
Syriac, and since it preserved more phonemes than the Canaanite or
Phoenician alphabets, it provided more variations in suffixes and
prefixes, among other linguistic idiosyncrasies, so lent itself to a
greater precision of expression. And since it was already evident
and commonplace long before the Persian campaign, it was adopted by
the new conquerors as the most widely applicable administrative and
imperial language, for while the Achaemenid kings used local
languages for their decrees, they came to employ Aramaic as a kind
of lingua franca, and thus contributed to the further spread of its
use throughout the imperial territories. Aramaic, therefore, came to
be employed in parallel fashion to local dialects or languages, and
predominated in royal and satrapal directives. Evidence confirms its
use in Persepolis, Babylonia, Egypt, the Levant and Asia Minor, and
even the Parthians used Aramaic script to write their contemporary
Middle Iranian languages.
And while the Arameans adopted the deities of the places they
occupied they ultimately converted them into their own proper gods,
as with Hadad in Aram-Damascus or Be'el Shamen (perhaps equated with
El, the supreme deity) throughout the region; yet their rites
remain, to this day, a mystery.
Aramaic takes its name from Aram, the fifth son of Shem (Sam or
Cham), the first-born son of Noah (Genesis 10:22), whose name in
turn provides the root of the word "Semitic". The
descendents of Aram, according to the Old Testament, dwelt in the
fertile valley of Padan-aram, also known as Beth (House) Nahreen.
With the defeat of the Persians by Alexander in 330 B.C., Greek
displaced Aramaic as the official language of the Achaemenid
territories. The Romans required the use of Latin. Both Latin and
Greek persisted under the Byzantine Empire, but much of this was
swept away in the Arab expansion of the seventh century, which
carried nearly everything along in its path. So while Byzantium
endured until the onslaught of the advancing Ottomans, who by the
fourteenth century had overrun most of the Balkan Peninsula as a
prelude to the conquest of Constantinople, the lingua franca became,
for ordinary- civil, judicial, mercantile-purposes, Arabic, and for
the intelligentsia, Persian, considered the language of poetry.
Of the approximately 15,000-18,000 people left in the world today
who still speak Aramaic approximately 2000 live in the Syrian
Christian town of Maaloula. And while even there the language is on
the wane -- victim of satellite television or young people who
depart their homes in search of employment in nearby Damascus, some
fifty kilometers distant -- the appeal of Aramaic is on the rise
among the survivors of the Diasporas in Great Britain or the United
States, where it enjoys the mystique of having served as "the
language of Christ".
Maaloula might nevertheless have passed into oblivion had it not
been for the Edict of Milan of 313 A.D., issued by Constantine the
Great, granting Christians the freedom to worship and express their
religion according to their personal conviction. The First Council
of Nicea in 325 A.D. further regulated the basic elements of
Christian worship, thus permitting the building of a church and
monastery in the name of Sergius and Sarkis, two soldiers from the
army of Roman emperor Maximian, martyred in 297 A.D. because,
according to the record, "they refused to worship Rome's pagan
gods." Though beatified and buried in Justinian's one-time
stronghold at Rasafa (Resafa), in northeastern Syria, now a
beautiful ruin abandoned to the desert, the church in Maaloula keeps
their memory, and so has won its fame as "the oldest church in
the world still in use".
Temple ruins of an earlier cult still survive under the church's
foundations, though most of the stone blocks, and the Ionic capitals
from the ancient columns, were incorporated in the construction. A
semi-circular stone altar at the far end of the sanctuary, the
iconostasis, the cool and sober white limestone interior, and walls
and gate confected of the wood from Lebanon's precious cedars, all
predate the Nicean ruling on the use of platform altars, thus
testifying to the structure's antiquity. The most valued and unusual
icon in the collection, at least four hundred years old, depicts
both the Last Supper and the Crucifixion. Though stolen a few years
ago, according to Father Tawfiq, overseer of both the church and the
monastery from his Holy Savior order in Sidon, in southern Lebanon,
the Syrian security police, as well as St. Sergius himself, assured
its return.
The Greek Catholic (Melikite) Church has been in full union with
Rome since 1724 and recognizes the Pope as its head. With churches
as well in Damascus and Aleppo, among other Syrian cities, this
singular Christian denomination claims about 300,000 adepts within
Syria alone.
Yet it was the "once upon a time" cave of Saint Tekla,
where she prayed and fasted, preached and baptized, healed the
ailing and comforted the forgotten, that became the soul of Maaloula
and the heart of its pilgrimage and passion. After passing through
the gap in the mountain, living on fresh grasses and water from the
stream, the virgin girl -- who had survived her trials in a fire
doused by the rain, wild animals tamed by light, a pit of vipers
turned away by prayer, and the order to behead her countermanded by
the Governor's pity -- was eventually placed in the sepulcher named
for "The Mother of the Sick People" (maaloulin in Arabic).
She is still called Brikhta, or "blessed" in Aramaic,
"for she bestows her blessings on the pilgrims who visit this
grotto, and drink of the water that drips through the walls, and
pray at her tomb, even after her death." An enormous grapevine,
nourished by the ever-dripping spring, has grown inside the cave. It
has covered the entire grotto, until it reaches with its tendrils
toward the light, through the mouth of the cave, that faces the
terraced town rising along the opposite cliff face. For many, it is
the essence of the compassionate young girl, her living memory, her
struggle and her consecration.
Saint Tekla was called the "first martyr" because she
was the "first Christian woman subject to torture and
persecution in the name of Christ" and was considered to be a
messenger of the Church, akin to an Apostle, so she was termed
"Mar", an Aramaic word applied to those who baptize. With
this, Maaloula became an Archbishopric (Archdiocese) in the fourth
century and so it continued until the eighteenth century.
The twenty-fourth of September is the Day of Saint Tekla, whose
name was given to the Nunnery just below the grotto, sacred to
pilgrims of many sects, both Christian and Muslim. A visit here is
considered a prior requisite to the trip to the Holy Sepulchre in
Jerusalem or the Al-Aqsa Mosque, in its day the holiest site in
Islam. Under the patronage of the parent institution in Damascus,
the nuns devote themselves to prayer and worship but also to
attending visitors to the sanctuary, caring for the small on-site
historical museum, and preparing the Raising of the Cross, an annual
event celebrated each fourteenth of September.
The most colorful tradition, however, is the "festival of
the fires", still lit on the peak behind the town in
commemoration of the mountaintop fires that lighted the way between
Jerusalem and Constantinople, "the route of saints, the caves
of hermits, the tombs of St. Elias the Zealous, Saint Barbara, Saint
Lavenduis, Saint Georgious, Mar Touma."
And so the fairy-tale of Maaloula continues, and "they all
lived happily ever after".
Carol Miller,
a regular contributor to www.syriagate.com
and an assiduous traveler in Syria, is a sculptress, journalist,
author and translator, and a long-time resident of Mexico City. She
is known for her research in cultural convergence, comparative
mythology, archaeology and history, as well as general travel. Her
other books, "The Winged Prophet, from Hermes to Quetzalcoatl"
with Guadalupe Rivera Marin (Amazon.com or BarnesandNoble.com); and
"Travels in the Maya World", "The Other Side of
Yesterday, the China-Maya Connection" and "Training Juan
Domingo: Mexico and Me", can be reviewed, with bio and
excerpts, at http://www.xlibris.com/CarolMiller.html |
|
