KEEPING THE FAITH IN A SYRIAN TOWN: WHERE THE LANGUAGE OF JESUS LIVES ON

The Washington Post
December 20, 2009 Sunday

We were standing in the courtyard of St. Sergius, a Greek Catholic
monastery in the Syrian hill town of Maaloula, about an hour northeast
of Damascus. It was a hot day in late summer, and the strong sun
bounced off the light-colored limestone walls. My wife, Cokie, and
I sought the shade of a portico as our guide, Hana, explained the
history surrounding us.

The original church, he said, dated from the 4th century but was
built on top of a pagan sanctuary, and some of the wooden beams,
made of Lebanese cedar, were more than 2,000 years old. Also known
as Mar Sarkis, the monastery was named for a Roman officer, a secret
Christian whose faith was unmasked when he refused to participate in
a sacrifice to Zeus. Sergius and his friend Bacchus, a fellow officer
and co-religionist, were tortured and executed in the Syrian city of
Resafa, and many churches in this country bear their names.

Maaloula is Hana’s home village, and on the drive from the capital he
had told us proudly that this is one of the few places where Aramaic,
the language of Jesus, is still spoken. Now he asked whether we’d
like to hear the Lord’s Prayer in his mother tongue, and of course
we said yes.

Hana held out his arms and intoned the familiar words in a strange
language that to me sounded a bit like Hebrew. We savored the moment
as the prayer echoed off the ancient stones.

Then a door opened, and in walked about 30 well-dressed people who
clearly were not tourists. (No one wears heels that high to clamber
around a steep, stony village.)

We followed the party into the monastery church, and Hana recognized
one of the women as his wife’s school friend. They were there for a
baptism, she told him, and as we waited for the ceremony to begin,
he gave us a quick tour. A stone altar, dating from the church’s
earliest days, had no rim or drain spout, a sign that it had never
been used for blood sacrifices. The icons on the walls included one
of John the Baptist, particularly appropriate given the ceremony we
were about to witness.

Then the priest arrived, and we stood quietly to the side as the
prayers were said and the baby anointed. Here, for this brief moment,
Aramaic was not a dead relic but a living thing, a flower bursting
through a crack in the stones, greeting a child into a community of
Christians that refuses to be swallowed up by the Muslim world at
its doorstep.

Syria is known in the West for its combustible politics: an adversary
committed to the destruction of Israel; a supporter of radical
Islamic organizations such as Hezbollah in Lebanon; a sanctuary
for terrorists operating across the border in Iraq. Many friends
who heard that we were vacationing in Syria thought we were daft,
but few realized that the country’s extensive Christian heritage —
St. Paul was converted on the road to Damascus, after all — is still
here to be seen and heard and felt.

As a Jew, I never felt unsafe or unwelcome in Syria, but the country’s
once vibrant Jewish population has been driven away, and the grand
synagogue of Aleppo lies decaying and desecrated behind iron gates.

Syria has taken a different view of its Christian population, which
remains at about 10 percent, 14 centuries after the region’s conquest
by Arabic-speaking Muslims. The Baath Party, which has ruled since
1963, is decidedly secular. But one of its founders, Michel Aflaq,
was Greek Orthodox. Christians have traditionally served in high
government posts, and Christian practices and monuments are widely
respected. In the bazaars of Aleppo, the names on the gold and jewelry
stores are still mainly Armenian, reflecting the influx of Armenians
who fled Turkey during World War I. The town has the second-largest
Christian population in the Middle East, after Beirut.

Not far from Maaloula sits the Krak des Chevaliers, a mountain fortress
built by Crusaders in the 12th and 13th centuries. In the old city of
Damascus, a chapel marks the spot where Paul was nursed and taught
by a local Christian, St. Ananias, after his vision. Several of
the country’s bewildering array of Christian sects — from Armenian
Orthodox to Syrian Catholic — maintain headquarters in Damascus,
and we were surprised to see crosses, outlined in vivid bluish-white
neon, shimmering in the evening sky.

As soon as you enter Maaloula, its religious heritage is evident. A
large statue of the Virgin Mary dominates one hillside; many houses
are painted in a pale blue wash, a gesture of respect to the mother
of Jesus. Hana pointed out the mountaintops where every year fires are
lighted to celebrate the Festival of the Holy Cross. (Legend says that
after Helena, mother of Constantine, the first Christian Roman emperor,
found the relics of Jesus’s cross in Jerusalem in 325, she ordered
her servants to light a series of fires that eventually carried word
of her discovery back to the Byzantine capital of Constantinople.)

We went first to St. Sergius, the highest point in town, and though
not every traveler gets to see a baptism in Aramaic, there are usually
guides or schoolgirls present to recite the Lord’s Prayer in the
language. These guides report that visitors often burst into tears
while they are chanting. Before leaving, we stopped at the souvenir
shop, which dispenses local wine, honey and crafts. My wife, who is
Catholic, bought a pair of fish-shaped lace antimacassars that now
adorn a chair in our bedroom.

We had lunch at a restaurant named for St. Thekla, the patron saint
of Maaloula, where we were shown to a pleasant terrace surrounded by
leafy trees. There we talked about the town’s linguistic heritage.

Aramaic actually is not one language but a variety of local dialects,
shaped by time and place, and the one spoken in Maaloula is officially
Western Neo-Aramaic. Large portions of the Talmud, a compilation of
Jewish teachings and commentaries, were written in Aramaic; so were
the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Biblical books of Ezra and Daniel.

Gradually Greek and then Arabic replaced Aramaic across the Levant, but
remote mountain villages such as Maaloula, untouched and unoccupied,
were able to retain their traditions. That started changing in the
1920s, when French colonials built a road through the mountains. Bus
service to Damascus, radio and television, and the lure of better
work in bigger cities drained the pool of Aramaic speakers.

It is a common story: The language seemed old-fashioned, even
embarrassing, and younger people disdained it.

Then, about 20 years ago, a group of German scholars came to Maaloula
to study Aramaic, and villagers started realizing that their precious
heritage was worth preserving. In 2000, the iron-fisted ruler of
Syria, Hafez al-Assad, was replaced by his son Bashar, a slightly
more progressive leader. Under Bashar’s patronage, the University of
Damascus opened an institute in Maaloula teaching Aramaic, where Hana’s
two daughters studied last summer. One of the teachers, Imad Rihan,
told the Catholic News Service: "Twenty years ago people started giving
up on Aramaic. Then 10 years ago, they realized how important it was,
so they started teaching it in church. The Germans opened our eyes
and showed us we had something special."

The language got another boost in 2004 when Mel Gibson’s movie "The
Passion of the Christ" depicted Jesus speaking Aramaic, providing
English subtitles. But few villagers could follow the dialogue. A
shepherd told a visiting filmmaker from London that the movie language
sounded "broken" to his ear. Maaloula’s vernacular is "faster and
stronger," he said.

Faster and stronger applies to St. Thekla as well. Born in what’s now
the Turkish city of Konya at the time of Christ, she was forbidden to
hear St. Paul when he came to preach the gospel. Sitting at her open
window, she miraculously heard his voice and was instantly converted.

After she broke her engagement and vowed to remain a "bride of Christ,"
she was sentenced to death by fire. But a sudden storm doused the
flames. When she spurned the advances of a nobleman in the city of
Antioch, she was thrown into a pit with wild beasts, which refused to
attack her. Eventually, Paul blessed her decision to live as an ascetic
virgin here in the hills of Maaloula, but she faced one more trial:
A local peasant vowed to plunder her virtue. She fled his advances,
and the mountain opened before her, offering a narrow path of escape.

That path exists today, and after lunch we followed the footsteps of
St. Thekla through the cleft in the rock for perhaps a half-mile. Many
caves pocked the cliffs above us, some used for tombs in antiquity,
others for dwellings. The walk was a bit treacherous, and I was
starting to worry about turning an ankle when we suddenly found
ourselves at a monastery dedicated to St. Thekla. The sanctuary is
built on the spot where she lived in a cave until her death at age 90.

A series of steps mounts the hill to her tomb, separated by pleasing
terraces with bubbling fountains, Syria’s all-purpose climate-control
system. I did not make it to the top, but Cokie, always eager to
recognize uppity women, did. The climb reaches a cool, calming
place where pilgrims rest and pray. Many have left tokens of their
petitions: holy cards, medals, small gifts of thanks for healed limbs
and spirits. I can only imagine what women pray for at the shrine of
St. Thekla, but I’m pretty sure it is not the gift of obedience.

That is the spirit of Maaloula. It is not a walled city or a garrison
town, but it is fighting a battle today, a culture war to preserve
its language, its religion, its history. Perhaps the child we saw
baptized was one of St. Thekla’s miracles.

Roberts teaches journalism and politics at George Washington
University and is the author of the recently published "From Every
End of This Earth."