From The Holy Mountain (56 page)
There, waiting patiently by the door of the Church of St George, were two Muslim women in white headscarves. One was holding a fine damask veil, the other a small rectangular prayer mat. To one side stood three unshaven Palestinian labourers, each grasping a lead. On the end of each lead was a small, bow-legged, rather scraggy-looking sheep. Fr. Methodius took the gifts from the women with a peremptory nod, and handed the sheep over to the doorkeeper - an ancient hunchbacked Arab in a dirty
keffiyeh -
who led them away to a shed by the monastery gate.
'I'm afraid I won't have time to sacrifice these sheep until Monday,' said Fr. Methodius to the labourers, a little curtly. 'Come back at four if you want to collect the blood.'
The labourers shuffled off backwards towards the road, bowing gratefully, like schoolboys thankful to be dismissed from the headmaster's study. Methodius signalled to me to follow him into the church, and pointedly closed the door behind us.
'Look at this!' he said, holding the prayer mat at arm's length, as if it might somehow infect him. 'It's got a picture of Mecca embroidered on it! You tell me: what can we do with it? And this veil? What's the price of this? Ten shekels? Never mind. Those sheep: that's something.'
'Do you get many Muslims coming here?' I asked.
'Many? We get hundreds! Almost as many as the Christian pilgrims. Often when I come in here I find Muslims all over the floor, in the aisles, up and down' - he made a rocking gesture with his hand - 'bottoms in the air, prayer mats on the floor: yes - in an Orthodox church!'
He snorted into his beard. 'You see, like us they believe this church marks the site of St George's birthplace. And St George is a great saint for them also.'
'And Jews?' I asked. 'Do they come and pray here too?'
'In the old days the Palestinian Jews would come,' replied Fr. Methodius. 'But modern Israelis would never come to such a shrine.'
He led me up to an icon hanging from a pillar in the nave. Beneath the sepia smudge of smoke stains and the clustering silver-work I could just make out the familiar classical face: the young Byzantine cavalryman with his golden breastplate and spear, mounted high upon a white charger.
'All the Arabs - Christian and Muslim alike - call him "Khidr" - the Green One. The Palestinians think St George can help give women babies or bring good crops to their fields or healthy lambs to their sheep. And if they get what they want, then they all come back again and give me these
...'
he stuttered as he searched for the word:
'...
these
...
these
...
rugs.'
'Or a sheep.'
'Yes; that's better. But of course I get to keep only a very small portion. The rest goes to the poor, while the donor takes the blood and smears it on his doorpost. That's the tradition.'
'It sounds very pagan.'
'It may well be,' said Fr. Methodius, his face puckering into a frown.
It was all very curious: Orthodox priests merrily slaughtering sheep, and doing so in homage to St George. Not the way, perhaps, that the Knights of the Garter might expect their patron saint to be venerated. After all, the English have always liked to believe that they have something of a monopoly on St George. If the Victorians had no qualms about proclaiming that God was an Englishman, then few had any doubts at all about claiming for England the country's own patron saint. What English schoolboy did not know the battlecry 'God for Harry, England, and St George'? Did the saint's body not lie in Windsor Castle? Was not his flag the national banner, the linchpin of the Union Jack?
However, no one can travel for very long around the Middle East, particularly among the Christian Arabs, without quickly realising that the English are not the only people to claim St George as their own. The English may fondly believe that they have got their patron saint safely stashed away in St George's Chapel in Windsor, but this will come as news to the nine monasteries on Mount Athos, the thirty-five other churches in Greece, the twenty-four churches and monasteries on Crete and the Greek islands, the six churches on Cyprus, the fifteen churches in Egypt, the five churches in Israel and the West Bank, the citadel in Aleppo and the two monasteries in northern Iraq which also claim the honour of possessing part or all of the ubiquitous and clearly many-boned St George.
In fact the veneration of St George originated in the Byzantine Levant and did not become popular in England until returning Crusaders brought the saint's cult back with them. In 1348 Edward III made St George the patron of the Knights of the Garter, and it was around this time that George seems to have replaced Edward the Confessor as England's national saint.
Although most scholars now tend to accept that St George probably
was
a historical figure, solid facts about England's patron saint are hard to come by. He appears to have been a Christian legionary from Palestine who was martyred for refusing to worship the old pagan gods, probably during the reign of Diocletian (284-305
a.d
.). He may or may not have been the unnamed martyr mentioned as suffering a particularly horrible death in the eighth book of Eusebius's
Ecclesiastical History,
but what
is
clear is that his cult was a very early one, and that it originated in Lydda, now the Tel Aviv suburb of Lod, the Heathrow of the Holy Land, directly under the flightpath of jets heading into Ben Gurion Airport. Nothing else can be said with certainty; already in the sixth century St George was referred to as 'that Good Man whose deeds are known to God alone'.
But lack of facts never stopped medieval hagiographers from assembling impressively detailed saints' Lives, and the cult of St George spread with astonishing speed, gathering odd stories and enveloping pagan legends as it went. By the time of Jacobus da Voragine's
The Golden Legend,
written in Genoa around 1260, St George's life-story had become one of the longest epics in medieval hagiography, revolving around the dragon whose breath could 'poison everyone who came within reach'.
What is intriguing about the cult of St George as it is practised today in Beit Jala is the extraordinary degree to which it still resembles the form the cult took
before
it came to acquire all the late medieval accretions that fill out the pages of
The Golden Legend.
On the one hand, then as now, St George is seen as a fertility symbol, a sort of baptised Green Man; on the other he is the Soldier Saint, the combater of demons and the divine champion against the power of evil.
The myths of St George-Khidr have spread across the width of Asia, and from Persia eastwards their links to Christianity have been long forgotten: outside Delhi I _was once taken to a cave where Muslim Sufis would go to fast for forty days in order to summon up Khidr, the Green Sufi. Yet it seems that there is nowhere in the East where it is quite as easy to summon up Khidr as in his birthplace at Beit Jala.
'Ask anyone,' said Fr. Methodius when I questioned him on the matter. 'Stop anyone in the street outside and ask if they have seen St George. They will all have stories. Don't take my word for it: go out and see for yourself
We left the church and I did as he suggested. The first person we came across was an elderly Muslim gentleman named Mansour Ali. I asked him whether he had ever seen St George.
'Of course,' he said. 'I live just around the corner, so I see him frequently - he is always coming and going on his horse.'
'You see this in dreams?'
'No, when I am awake, in daylight. Khidr is not dead. Whenever we have problems he comes and helps us.' 'In what way?'
'Well, last year I asked him to find work for my children. Within two weeks both my sons had good jobs.'
'For other people he has worked bigger miracles,' said the old doorkeeper, who had shuffled up and begun eavesdropping on the conversation. 'Last month there was a big man from Ramallah. He was very sick: he'd had a stroke and couldn't speak. Half his body had stopped. Well, he came here and took some of the oil from the lamp which burns in front of the icon of St George. Two weeks later he came back with a pair of sheep, completely cured. In fact he wouldn't stop chattering until we locked him out of the church.'
Later, back in the monastery courtyard, I asked Methodius: 'Do you really believe all this talk of miracles?'
He stroked his beard. 'It is according to your faith,' he said after a while. 'If you don't have faith in St George, nothing will happen. If you really believe, then maybe you will be healed.'
'And do you believe?' I asked.
'Well, I'll tell you the greatest miracle,' said Methodius. 'I live here alone: there are no other monks here, and there are no other Christians in the village round about. That doorkeeper - he's a Muslim. So is my sacristan. There are mosques all around: listen - can you hear? That's the call to evening prayer. '
Methodius pulled out his bleeper and unlocked the car. 'There are plenty of Hamas people in Beit Jala,' he said, opening the door of the Subaru. 'And however well Christians and Muslims used to get on, since the rise of Hamas in the last couple of years things have become a little strained. But I'm quite safe, and so is the whole monastery. I sleep easy at night. Now, there aren't many places you could say that of in Israel or the West Bank these days, are there?'
That night, in my rooms in Jerusalem, I thought back to my first stay on the West Bank in the summer of 1990, when I had heard a story that illustrated as well as any the tensions in the occupied region. The story had been told to me in the village of Biddya, and concerned Abu-Zeid, the corrupt village
mukhtar
(mayor) installed by the Israeli military authorities to rule the village for them.
Seven times the villagers had attempted to rid themselves of the hated collaborator, and the story of his eventual demise had rapidly turned into something of a folk tale across the West Bank. I had been wanting to get to Biddya to try to seek out a relatively trustworthy account of the story ever since I had first started hearing heavily elaborated versions of it in the coffee houses of Ramallah, but it was not easy. The village was nearly always under curfew, most recently as punishment for a Molotov cocktail lobbed at a passing Israeli patrol. But at six one morning I had been rung up by my contact in the village, a Palestinian landowner named Usamah, and told that the curfew had been lifted until noon. He said I should get ready; he would pick me up at seven.
We drove out of Ramallah, past an avenue of Israeli army checkpoints - little birds' nests of Uzis and razor wire - and out into the West Bank countryside: low, dry, rolling slopes; silvery olive groves; villages of old stone houses sheltering under the lee of the steeper hills. Only a mile before Biddya did the scene change. Turning the bend of a dry
wadi,
we saw Setdement Ariel ahead of us: a modern Western town with shopping arcades, sports centres and supermarkets. No Palestinian, either Christian or Muslim, ever needed to bother applying to live in Ariel: its houses were available only to Jewish settlers. When local Palestinian labourers at the settlement were forced to wear large badges reading 'Foreign Worker', some liberal Israeli commentators went as far as drawing comparisons with the race laws of Nazi Germany. The badges were later removed.
'That was my grandfather's land,' said Usamah as we passed beneath the settlement. 'It has belonged to this village since the time of the Canaanites. But the Israelis took it in 1977. We've never received any compensation.'
