From The Holy Mountain (31 page)

Aleppo,
9
September

This morning, my last in Aleppo, I stumbled by accident upon the most unexpected survival from Byzantium that I have yet come across on this trip. Hidden away in a church in the grimy backstreets of the city, like a rare fossil secreted in some obscure quarry-face, there survives, apparently unpolluted by changes in fashion, an ancient form of plainsong that appears to be the direct ancestor of Gregorian chant. If so, extraordinary as it seems, it may represent one of the principal roots of the entire Western tradition of sacred music.

It was Metropolitan Mar Gregorios who first put me onto the trail. During our meeting he had mentioned in passing that among the different groups that had taken shelter in the winding bazaars of Aleppo were the Urfalees: the descendants of the Syrian Christians of Urfa, ancient Edessa. In what I had read of Urfa's recent history, and from what I had picked up when I visited the town last month, I had understood that the town's Syrian Orthodox community had suffered the same fate as its unfortunate Armenians. But apparently this was not the case. Although a great many of the Urfa Suriani were indeed massacred during the First World War, there were still enough left in 1924, when Ataturk retook the town from the French, to make the Turkish leader worried about Urfa's ethnic purity. He therefore ordered the immediate expulsion of all those Christians who had so far failed to succumb to the Ottomans' bayonets.

The Urfalees had left Edessa in a succession of great wagon-caravans, and somewhat to their own surprise, made it safely across the Syrian border. There they were escorted by the French Mandate officials to a field full of tents on the outskirts of Aleppo. They are there still, although as with the refugee camps of the Palestinians constructed twenty-three years later, the tents have given way to a jumble of ragged concrete buildings. Mar Gregorios had told me that one last survivor of the original exodus was still alive, and he arranged a meeting.

I found Malfono Namek's flat up a steep staircase off the narrow, grubby lanes that now make up the Hayy el-Surian, the Quarter of the Syrian Orthodox. Malfono [Teacher] Namek had a thin, ascetic face, a small toothbrush moustache and an alert owl-like expression. He wore a 1930s pinstripe suit, like those worn by bootleggers in Al Capone films. After we had drunk tea, I asked Malfono Namek whether - as he must have been very young at the time - he could remember anything of the Urfa he had left in 1924.

'Anything?' said Malfono Namek. 'I can remember everything! I even remember what we were reading in school the day the order to leave came through from Istanbul. If I went back to Urfa today I would know my quarter, my street, my house! It is still my town, even though I have been in Syria for seventy years now.'

The old man thumped the table: 'I would go back tomorrow,' he said. 'But of course the opportunity has never come.'

'How old were you when you had to move?'

'I was twelve. We were each allowed to take one suit of clothes, a couple of blankets and food for one week. Everything else -churches, convents, lands, schools, possessions, money - it all had to be left behind. I remember well: it was wintertime so I wore
shalwar
and a thick jacket. I remember saying goodbye to our Turkish friends and leaving the house and . . .'

He frowned: 'When I think of this I feel so angry
...
It was the Turkish government's fault. Many of our Turkish neighbours were very sad to see us go. They were very sorry for us. You know I still have one friend left alive in Urfa? We write to each other. It is seventy years since we last saw each other, but still we correspond. It was the Turkish government: they called us
gavour
[infidels] and said we had to go. It was they who hated the Christians, not the people of Urfa.'

I asked if, at the time, he had realised what was happening.

'No, not at all!' said Malfono Namek. To my astonishment he threw back his head and laughed. 'At the time I was far too excited. We left in wagons for Ain al-Arab, where we were to catch a train. I was very happy: I had never seen a train. And when we arrived I was very pleased. I had never even imagined such a big and magnificent town existed anywhere on earth. Aleppo was much bigger than Urfa. It had such splendid buildings, and gas street-lighting at night. I saw carriages for the first time, and automobiles: at that time there were maybe ten or fifteen cars in the streets of Aleppo, while none had ever been seen in Urfa. Instead of streetlights, we had been used to carrying paraffin lamps from house to house. For a boy of twelve it was very exciting.'

The old man shook his head. 'The disillusion came later, when we found there was nothing for us except tents. It was February and very cold and there was nothing to eat. I was unhappy in our tent. There was no money, no light, no water. I could not understand the language. All of a sudden we felt strangers
...
It took many years for us to feel at home here. In fact it was only recently that we Urfalees finally got a proper church of our own.'

'You don't pray with the other Suriani?'

'No, no,' said Malfono Namek. 'We have to have our own church as we have our own liturgical practices, and because our chant is very different from - and much older than - the music of the other Sudani.'

When I questioned him further, he said that the people of Urfa had scrupulously preserved the traditional chants of ancient Edessa, and in particular the hymns composed by St Ephrem the Syrian, the greatest of the town's saints. An Italian musicologist was currently in Aleppo, he said, studying the Urfalees' chants; if I accompanied him to vespers in the Urfalees' church, Gianmaria

Malacrida would probably be there and I could talk to him afterwards.

The old man put on a Homburg hat and, reaching for his stick, led me slowly down the stairs. Together we walked through the lanes of Aleppo, Malfono Namek chivalrously tipping the brim of his Homburg whenever we passed one of his friends. The streets were narrow and medieval-looking which, when we came to it, made the brash new Urfalee church of St George look more surprising still. It stood out like an office block in a Georgian crescent, all pre-stressed concrete and gleaming modernity, as different from the austere classical chapels of the Tur Abdin as could be imagined. Inside it was worse still: jarring Technicolor icons hung from the brightly-lit walls; at the back of the altar, behind the priest, a barrage of fairy lights winked like a neon advertisement in Piccadilly Circus.

But for all the flash modernity of the setting, the singing was still astounding. A cortege of elderly priests conducted the service, accompanied by a string of echoing laments of almost unearthly beauty, sinuous alleluias which floated with the gentle indecision of falling feathers down arpeggios of dying cadences before losing themselves in a soft black hole of basso profundo. At the elevation, the altar boys rattled
flabellae,
ecclesiastical fans which are often depicted on Pictish and Irish cross-slabs, but which died out in the West before the Norman Conquest, and have survived in use only in the Eastern Churches.

When the service had drawn to a close, the congregation -pious ladies with rigid perms and lacy white veils, old men in light tropical suits - poured outside. On the steps Malfono Namek introduced me to Gianmaria Malacrida. Malfono explained that I had recently been in Urfa, and I said I was interested in the Italian's theory that the Urfalees had managed to preserve the chants of late antique Edessa.

'It's a very difficult subject,' said Gianmaria, offering me a cigarette and lighting up himself. 'I've been working on the music of Urfa for seven years now, and it may take that long again before I manage to prove anything conclusively.'

The three of us walked round the corner to Gianmaria's flat.

It was bare and almost empty of furniture, but its shelves groaned with weighty reference books, stacks of notebooks and lines of neatly catalogued cassette tapes.

"What I don't understand,' I said, 'is how you can ever know that what we heard tonight is unchanged since the Byzantine period.'

"We don't know for sure,' replied Gianmaria. 'Up to now there have been no specialised studies of the Urfalees' music, and before my coming here the music was never written down. But it does appear to be a very early and very conservative tradition. There is no hard evidence, but it is difficult to believe that the form of this music has been substantially changed over the ages: sacred traditions change very, very slowly, if at all, over the centuries. Yesterday I was listening to the tapes I made seven years ago when I first started working on this. Although nothing is written down, since then there has not been one change - not one note has been added or omitted.'

'And if there have been no changes made to this music, what does that mean?'

'In manuscripts of the hymns of St Ephrem of Edessa - some of the very first Christian hymns ever composed - Ephrem writes in about 370
a.d
. that he took his melodies and rhythms from Gnostic songs composed by the Edessan heretic Bardaisan. He says that their 'sweet rhythms still beguiled the hearts of men' -in other words that they were still popular and everyone in Edessa knew the tunes. Ephrem merely added new words - and orthodox sentiments - of his own. So if there has been no change to those melodies over the centuries, they should, in principle, be those composed by Bardaisan.'

'In the third century
a.d.?'

'Bardaisan died in 220, so they could be earlier still, late second century.'

'And how does this compare with the oldest texts of Western music?'

'There is no agreement on which is the oldest Western text. There are four contenders, all of them very early forms of Gregorian chant. The most likely is Ambrosian, the chant of Milan; but there's also Romano Antiquo, the chant of Rome; Mozarabic, that of Spain; and Gallican, early French plainchant. They all represent very ancient forms of music, almost certainly dating back to the fifth century in the case of Ambrosian, but we have no musical notation written down for any of them before the tenth century

a.d.'

'But their melodies could be as old as those of Urfa?' 'In principle,' said Gianmaria. 'But in practice that is extremely unlikely.' 'Why?'

'Because the earliest forms of Western plainchant all have markedly Eastern characteristics.'

'In other words they look like imports?'

'Exactly. And there is firm documentary evidence, in the church of Milan at least, that this new Western chant was deliberately modelled on older Syrian practice: St Ambrose's biographer writes that the hymns and psalms of the church of Milan "should be sung in the Syrian manner" because it was so popular.'

All this fitted in very well with what I knew from my own reading. Certainly there was no doubt that Syrian music was regarded with reverence throughout the Byzantine world. There are references in the sources to bands of Syrian monks bursting into song in Haghia Sophia, astounding the Sunday congregation with their strange litanies to the crucified Christ. Moreover the greatest of all Byzantine composers, St Romanos the Melodist, was a Syrian from Emesa (modern Horns), just to the south of Aleppo. His hymns and antiphons took Justinian's Constantinople by storm, but they have been shown to be heavily indebted to those of St Ephrem of Edessa. Furthermore, St Hilary of Poitiers, who first introduced the hymn to Europe - and likewise drew heavily on St Ephrem's Edessan hymns for his models - seems to have first heard the new form when he was exiled from Gaul to Asia Minor by the Emperor Constantius.

'So is it possible that what we heard tonight may be the most ancient form of Christian music still being sung anywhere in the world?'