Free From The Holy Mountain by William Dalrymple

plump, suspicious men, grown prematurely old in their confectionery shops, moustaches bristling in late Ottoman indignation; pairs of old ladies shrouded in funereal black, plain and bitter, all widows' weeds and pious scowls.
    Walking up the hill, among the ebb and flow of pilgrims, I marvelled at what I took to be thick white hibiscus blossom on the bushes near the summit. Only when I reached the top did I see what it really was: on every bush the pilgrims had tied strips of cloth, primitive fertility charms, to the branches. Some were quite elaborate: small cloth hammocks supporting stones or pebbles or small pinches of pine needles. Others were tangled cat's-cradles of threads wrapped right around the bushes, as if packaged for the post.
    Inside the shrine it was just as bizarre. At some stage a fire had half-gutted the building, leaving charred rafters and singed window frames standing in the open air. But the rooms, though half exposed and quite unrestored, were filled by a continuous trickle of supplicants. The two nationalities were praying side by side; but they were not praying together. The Greeks stood in front of the icon of the mounted saint, hands cupped in prayer. The Turks put prayer carpets on the floor and bent forward in the direction of Mecca. One veiled Muslim lady scraped with long nails at a tattered nineteenth-century fresco of the saint, then with her fingertip touched a fragment of the paintwork to her tongue.
    'The Muslims also believe in St George,' explained a young Greek student I met waiting by the jetty half an hour later. 'They hear St George is working miracles so they come here and ask him for babies. Maybe they don't know he is Greek.'
'They probably think he is Turkish,' said her friend.
    'Probably,' said the first girl. 'They think everything is Turkish. I've heard boys say Haghia Sophia and the Hippodrome were built by the Seljuk Turks.'
    'They don't know history,' agreed the second girl. 'One day some boy asked my sister, "Why did you Greeks come here? All you do is make trouble." She said, "We didn't come: you did.'"
    'They even think Homer was one of them,' sighed the first girl. 'They say he was a Turk and that his real name was Omar.'
     
     
     
     
    I stanbul , i A ugust
    11 p.m.: I have just returned from supper with Hugh Pope, Turkey correspondent of the Independent. We ate in a fish restaurant at Bebek, five miles up the Bosphorus, overlooking Asia. Talk soon turned to the Kurdish war currently raging in the southeast.
    'At least fifty people are being killed every day,' he said. 'Unless at least two hundred are gunned down, I don't even bother calling the Foreign Desk.'
    Hugh told me that the previous December, when the Independent sent him to Diyarbakir, he managed to get through to the largest of the surviving Syrian Orthodox monasteries in the southeast, Mar Gabriel. The day before he arrived, a lorry had hit an anti-tank mine two hundred metres from the monastery's front gate. As he drove up, the charred corpse of the driver was still sitting in the burned-out skeleton of the truck, hands welded to the wheel. The mine had apparently been placed by the PKK, the Revolutionary Kurdistan Workers' Party, and was thought to have been aimed at village guards - in the eyes of the PKK, collaborators with the Turkish government - passing on their way to the neighbouring village of Gungoren. Although the mine's target did not seem to have been the monastery, it dramatically brought home to the monks how vulnerable they were to being caught in the crossfire between the PKK and the government.
    According to Hugh, the Kurdish guerrillas dislike the Suriani Christians as much as the local government does, accusing them of being informers, just as the authorities accuse them of being PKK sympathisers. Moreover, the Kurds have much to gain by driving the Suriani out: they can then occupy their land and farm it themselves.
    Yet the problems faced by the Christians and the Kurds have similar