MA'ALULA

MA’ALULA


As Friday is the Moslem day of rest, this is the day we have decided to take advantage of each week to make a trip to some place of interest which can be visited comfortably in a day. The British embassy has a folder compiled by Colonel Jeremy Dumas, the defence Attaché at the embassy from 1991-1993, which gives good instructions for getting to places. My first excursion was to Ma’alula, a small hill village about 50Kms. north-east of Damascus on the Homs road.  Being Friday, the roads are relatively quiet which makes for easier orienteering.

The countryside outside the city is bare and arid but the road to Ma’alula, which branches off to the left from the main Homs road after a restored khan or caravanserai, passes through an area where vines, almond, apricot and poplar trees grow.  The village clings to the bare hillside and tumbles down like a blue ribbon,  most of the houses being painted blue.  There are  practically no streets as the houses above are accessed  by passageways and stairs running from one house to the next. At the top of the hill stands a modern hotel which is where we chose to park the car and have cup of coffee before starting our tour of the village.

Turning right at the hotel and going downwards, a gorge open up which can be followed right down into the village, and on Friday it was full of schoolchildren on excursions who were enjoying themselves thoroughly playing drums and other musical instruments to appreciate the reverberation of the sounds.  The ravine emerges at the monastery of Saint Taqla or Mar Taqla as she is known.

Apart from its rather spectacular position in this uncompromising landscape, Ma’alula has two main claims to fame.  The first is that it is a Christian village linked to the early spread of Christianity and St. Paul, and the other is that it is one of a small number of villages which have clung tenaciously to their ancient tongue, Aramaic, from which modern Arabic is derived, and so today the inhabitants of this small place still speak the language in which Christ spoke to his apostles and gave his talks and communicated generally.  As far as I was able to ascertain from my extremely limited knowlege of Arabic, the semitic roots are obviously the same but the intermedial vowels may differ and where Arabic has an “s”, Aramaic has “sh”.  So, for example, “ism” (name) in Arabic is “ushm” in Aramaic and so on.  The people working in the hotel took great pride in saying something to you in Aramaic so you could appreciate their tongue.

Perhaps because our scant knowledge of Aramaic is related to biblical associations, we may sometimes have the mistaken belief that Aramaic was a minority tongue in a sea of dominant Hebrew. Nothing could be farther from the truth.  The Aramaeans who probably had their origins in the Syrian desert, penetrated the area and spread over hundreds of years, finally occupying the power vacuum left with the decline of that great power of antiquity, the Hittites, and the Assyrians whose power can be traced back to the second millenium B.C. The most important Aramaean state was Damascus and their language, Aramaic, gradually became the lingua franca of the Near East spreading as far as Central Asia and India.  Aramaic was adopted by the Persians as the language of trade.

The monastery of Mar Taqla, which stands at the end of the ravine and the top of the village, is fairly large and modern and belongs to the Greek Orthodox branch of Christianity.  Inside the monastery is a grotto with a spring whose waters are said to be miraculous.

The story of the village’s links with early Christianity are interesting.  St. Taqla was born into a pagan family in  Egonia. In the year 45A.D., during his first proselytising journey, St. Paul arrived in Egonia where, among numerous statues dedicated to the god of beauty, the god of knowledge etc., he found another dedicated to the “Unknown God”.  Always with an eye on the main chance, Paul decided to cash in on this and began to tell the people that he could tell them all about the “Unknown God”, and he used this statue as his crutch to hang his teachings about Christianity on.


St. Taqla used to sit at the window of her house near where Paul preached and she was so affected by his words that she stopped eating and began to lose weight and generally deteriorate.  Her mother was worried and exhorted her father, who was the Governor of the town, to do something about it.  Taqla’s only response was to try and convert them to the new religion too.  So, her father ordered Paul to be lashed and his own daughter to be burned alive.  Making the sign of the cross, Taqla allowed herself to be led to the fire but, as she was about to be put to the flames, a dark cloud appeared and torrential rain began to fall which put out the fire.  Taqla then fled to the home of a Christian family while Paul set off for Antioch and Syria.  

A second time Taqla’s father tried to put an end to his daughter’s madness and ordered her to be fed to the wild beasts, but they turned docile and gentle and lay down at the feet of the Saint. She was then tied to the horns of some bulls and the idea was that they should trample her to death but a mysterious flame appeared and burned the rope. Seeing that no method was capable of putting an end to his daughter’s life, the Governor also converted to Christianity and ordered his daughter to be set free.

Taqla then set off for Syria to join Paul working miracles along the route which sometimes led to her being persecuted. During one of these persecutions, Taqla reached the slopes of Mount Ma’alula where her passage was barred by the high mountain.  She knelt down and begged God to allow her to cross this natural barrier.  This, according to the legend, is how the gorge was opened up allowing Taqla to pass and reach the grotto where she hid and then lived a life of prayer, living off the wild plants growing in the vicinity and the water which dripped through the rock and was collected in the basin which she herself fashioned in the rock  to collect it.  The name of the village derives from this event as ma’alula in Aramaic means “entrance”. There she cured the sick and baptised new converts until her death. Her remains still lie in the  cavern next to the sacred water source and are in the custody of the Greek Orthodox nuns who live there and run a small orphanage.

Taqla is known as the first woman Christian martyr and the female apostle because she was the first woman to be tortured for her adherence to the new emergent religion and  she carried out the same work of proselytisation and baptism as the apostles.  The title “Mar” is an Aramaic title given only to pious men but it was accorded to Taqla for her outstanding piety

The new Christians then built the first convent around the grotto and this has grown over the centuries. Ma’alula was regarded as one of the most important places of Christian pilgrimage after Jerusalem

Another smaller monastery stands at the top of the hill just behind the hotel.  This is the monastery dedicated to St. Sergius or Mar Sarkis and belongs to the Greek Catholic denomination.  The door to this monastery,  the origins of which probably go back to the Byzantine period, is so low that you have to bend almost double  to get inside where a patio opens up.  Here, of course, all prayers are said in Aramaic and, as in the Mar Taqla monastery, ancient icons are to be found.

In the hillside all around the village are caves of various sizes, and at least the ones in the vicinity of the Mar Sarkis monastery were probably originally tombs with a rectangular depression excavated in the ground  where the body was probably laid.  In later times they were inhabited, and some are still inhabited today with rough wooden ladders leading up to the ones higher up the rock face.  Some have now been abandoned by their human inhabitants but are still the domain of the donkey and the mule.  Looking inside these caves and the bare hillsides around the village, the story of the discovery of the Qumraan scrolls, which might seem remote and impossible to us as we sit in the comfort of our Western homes, here is nothing but totally natural.

On the top of the line of hills piles of motor-car tyres are to be seen.  Their presence there is no haphazard coincidence.  Throughout the year they are gathered on the hilltops to be set alight on the Day of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross.  When Saint Helena found the holy cross in Jerusalem in 325A.D. she had bonfires lit on the high points all the way from Jerusalem to Constantinople in order to inform King Constantine of the great news she had to tell.  Ma’alula was one of the places where a bonfire was lit and each year this event is repeated forming part of the tradition of the village.


When we had visited the monasteries, we then went to a little general store.  Robert, who had already made a short visit here, had made friends with the owner of the shop so we wanted to make some purchases as basics are cheaper in the villages than in Damascus.  One of the things which can only be purchased in Ma’alula is wine.  Being a Christian village, the ancient wine-making tradition of the pre-Islamic Middle East continues unbroken.  So we bought a couple of litres of dry red wine which is poured into any container which might come to hand - used arak bottles (which then, of course, add their flavour to the wine) a plastic bottle or anything else. Then bread, halwa (or sweet made from sesame seed and nuts of various kinds), pistachios, olive oil, tahina (sesame seed paste) and a number of other things.  While we made our purchases we were offered wine, both sweet and dry, to taste.  

As it was still early, instead of returning by the same route, we opted to take a circular route which would bring us to Saydnaya, another larger Christian village about 30Kms. from Damascus with a large convent dedicated to Our lady of Saydnaya which in Medieval times was one of the great centres of Christian pilgrimage. The name of the village itself means “Our Lady” coming from the Aramaic Sayda (Lady) Naya (Our).

The monastery dominates the village and stands at the highest point looking, from the distance, rather like a fortress.  The original monastery was founded in 547 A.D. but the latest modern conversions and additions date from 1972.  The original tiny chapel is inside the structure and the walls are covered with icons, one of which is said to have been painted by St. Luke the evangelist.  

The story goes that the Emperor Justinian, who was on his way to Jerusalem, stopped at the Saydnaya monastery to spend the night and, when she heard where he was headed, the mother superior asked him to bring back an icon.  In Jerusalem he acquired the famous icon which he carried back with him but, as the icon had saved him from disasters along the way, he was loathe to part with it so, on the return journey, when the mother superior inquired whether he had brought back an icon, he said no.  When it was time for him to leave, the gate through which he should pass shrank in size so that he could not leave the monastery.  This happened three times and then he understood that the Virgin did not wish to leave the monastery so he surrendered the icon which has remained there ever since.

At one of the exits from the town is a statue of a gazelle.  According to another story, Justinian was out hunting and he saw a gazelle.  However, when he took aim, the gazelle turned into Our Lady (when a Moslem tells this legend he will say that the gazelle turned into a bride).  Three times he tried to hunt down the gazelle and each time it turned into Our Lady and finally she told him that she wished to rest here.

As we walked up to the monastery it was interesting to see that many of the houses had been built using stones from old Roman and other ruins.  In particular I saw one house where the bottom step was a marvellous pillar complete with Corinthian capitel!

The road back to Damascus is lined with fairly large restaurants, some with a children’s playground incorporated, where the Damascenes come out for excursions on Fridays and in the summer-time.

March 13th 1998 (Full lunar eclipse)