William Dalrymple - From the Holy Mountain - A Journey in the Shadow of Byzantium

‘We should be thankful,’ he said. ‘Here they’ve only burned the trees. Further east, towards Hakkari, they’ve been clearing all the villages too: seven or eight this year alone. Since the trouble with the PKK began ten years ago they have cleared many Muslim villages, and nearly twenty-five Christian ones.’

Afrem said that a refugee from one of the destroyed Christian villages, a priest, Fr. Tomas Bektaş, was being sheltered by the monastery until he found somewhere to live. He said I should talk to him, and promised to introduce me after dinner.

Afrem kept his promise. After we had all eaten in the monastic refectory – the normal bracing Suriani dinner, a haunch of boiled goat with salty porridge and sticky rice, followed by pekmez , a thick slurry of pressed grapes considered the greatest of delicacies in polite Suriani society – the monks withdrew as usual to take coffee on the roof terrace. Fr. Tomas was sitting a little to the side. He was an unremarkable-looking man with a small toothbrush moustache and a nervous tick which made him wink his right eye every few seconds. Afrem had warned me that the clearance of his village had led to Fr. Tomas having a major nervous breakdown from which he had yet to fully recover, and that the priest might not want to talk about what had happened to his village: ‘He will get nightmares again,’ said Afrem.

In the event, however, Fr. Tomas poured out his heart without hesitation. I sat back on my stool, and the priest talked. ‘It was the middle of winter,’ he said. ‘One day an army officer in a Land-Rover dug his way through the snowdrifts. We gave him tea and then he simply told us that we had twenty days to leave. At first we did not understand what he meant. He said we had all been helping the PKK, that we had been supporting them with food and giving them guns. It was all nonsense, of course: what business do we have with the Kurds?

‘The next day I went to the sub-governor in Silopi and pleaded for Hassana, but he would not receive me. His assistant said, “He does not want to speak.” So I had to return to my village and tell my people that we had to leave, that there was no choice.

‘We all left on the last day, all two hundred of us: thirty-two families in all. My family was the last. I was the priest: I had to make sure they all left safely.

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