Charles Glass - The Tribes Triumphant - Return Journey to the Middle East

Benjamin Disraeli, who came to Jerusalem in 1830 and 1831, later compared its Jews and Armenians in his novel Tancred. Eva ‘the Jewess’ noted the similarities between her people and the Armenians:

Go to Armenia and you will not find an Armenian. They too are an expropriated nation, like the Hebrews. The Persians conquered their land, and drove out the people. The Armenian has a proverb: ‘In every city of the East I find a home.’ They are everywhere; the rivals of my people, for they are one of the great races and little degenerated; with all our industry, and much of our energy; I would say with all our human virtues, though it cannot be expected that they should possess our divine qualities; they have not produced Gods and prophets and are proud that they can trace up their faith to one of the obscurest of the Hebrew apostles [St Gregory the Illuminator] and who never knew his great master.

The resemblance turned to tragedy in the twentieth century when both peoples were subjected to genocide.

The Armenians of Jerusalem were cut into factions and sects and categories as if they had been a million. By faith, they were Gregorian (Orthodox), Catholic and Protestant. By Armenian politics, they were Hanshak or Tashnak, dating from the pro- and anti-communist fights of the Russian Revolution and its Soviet conquest of non-Turkish Armenia. They were also, like the Arabs of the West Bank and Gaza, either local families or descendants of refugees from massacres. Many were Palestinian nationalists while others just wanted to get by, no matter who governed Jerusalem. George was from a native Jerusalem family, a Gregorian and a Palestinian nationalist. His friend Albert Agazarian, he said, was a refugee from northern Syria, a Catholic and also a Palestinian nationalist. Neither he nor Albert had strong views on Armenian politics, having made their stand as Palestinians. Eight Armenians languished in Israeli prisons for resisting occupation, and one Armenian, Artin Gouzelian, had given his life for Palestine.

George said that an organization to which he belonged had sent 350 Bibles in Arabic to Christian political prisoners in Israeli custody. Christians, including the Armenians, were leaving the country. Muslims, particularly since the new intifadah began, were leaving as well. Christians went to the West, whose countries gave them visas. Muslims, more than 100,000 in the previous year, went over the bridge searching for work in Jordan. Natalie Zarour, one of the managers at the American Colony Hotel, was emigrating with her family to Canada in a few weeks. Christians from Bethlehem, the Zarours were tired of the violence, the restrictions, the settlers who treated Arabs as sub-humans. I had known Natalie for years and would miss her beautiful face behind the Colony’s reception desk.

George took me upstairs to the refectory of the Armenian Convent. Among long tables of stone and marble, under vaulted ceilings, I imagined the monks eating in silence and awaiting an unwelcome visit from the city’s Turkish governors. A bridge, under which I had often walked and driven, formed part of the refectory. George indicated a hidden door. ‘If the Turks came,’ he explained, ‘the monks would disappear through here.’ It was an Armenian Bridge of Sighs, along which the monks would, like Casanova, escape. It was built in AD 1370. Until 1830, he said, the Ottomans did not collect fixed taxes. Instead, they demanded money when they needed it. ‘The Turks raided the monasteries. They were a good source of income, because of the pilgrims.’ The monks would clamber through the priest’s hole, across the covered bridge and onto a roof. After that, they hid or dispersed in the gardens on the other side of the city wall.

As we stepped onto the convent roof, guarded by a sixth-century gable, George explained the economics of Jerusalem life before the British occupied the city in 1917. ‘Three or four hundred people lived in the convent,’ he said. ‘It had about eight hundred rooms. They filled with pilgrims at Easter. In fact, at the times of pilgrimage, the whole city’s population grew about ten times. This convent could take in eight to ten thousand people.’ After the Armenian genocide by Turkey, the convent filled with refugee families. Some of them, like Albert Agazarian’s, were still there.

‘In 1917,’ George said, ‘three days before they left Jerusalem, the Turks demanded the Treasury.’ The convent’s treasure of gold, silver and jewels lay hidden behind another secret door within the church. George opened it, but swore me to keep the secret of its location until I died. ‘The Armenian patriarch filled wagons with the treasure in sealed boxes. He covered the boxes in coal.’ Horses pulled the Armenian community’s wealth to safety outside the city until the Turks withdrew. It seemed strange that no Turkish sentry would question a load of coal leaving the city in winter. George referred me to Sir Ronald Storrs’ Orientations , where the tale is recounted as he told it.

The Cathedral of St James, beyond a small plaza near the iron-door entrance to the monastery, was more beautiful to my eye that any other church in Jerusalem. ‘In sharp contrast to the sombre weariness of the Holy Sepulchre,’ Fr Jerome Murphy-O’Connor wrote in The Holy Land , ‘this church mirrors the life and vigour of a colourful and unified people.’ I was not sure about the unity, but the ceilings and walls let loose tributes of colour and vigour. In terms of icons per square foot, St James’s could hold its own with any Greek church. It also contained one of the holiest relics, the head of St James the Less. Herod the Great’s feeble son, Herod Antipas, had done with the apostle’s head what his father had to John the Baptist’s, in AD 44. George, with great patience for a man who must have shown the church to hundreds of ignorant visitors, told me the story of every panel, every painting, every door.

Three hundred and fifty candle-bearing lamps, all lit and suspended from ropes, could be lowered and raised via small pulleys. Each bore the inscription of its Armenian donor community. Much of the church’s beauty was the gift, George said, of an eighteenth-century patriarch called Gregory the Chain-bearer. In Gregory’s time, Armenians elsewhere were neglecting their church in Jerusalem. He went to Constantinople to shame them. ‘He put a chain around his neck and sat in front of the churches to raise money,’ George said. Gregory’s takings paid for the grand plaza, or porch, at the church door and for much of the restoration within. The cathedral was a warren of hidden doors and secret passages. Some led to chapels, others to refuges from tax collectors – the world’s first tax shelters.

George and I wandered through the convent grounds. They comprised about a sixth of the old city and almost the entire Armenian Quarter. At the Convent of the Olive Tree, there was indeed one olive tree. ‘This is, of course, a very young tree,’ George said, ‘but they say it is Ananias’s tree.’ By very young, George meant a few hundred years. Ananias had been a high priest two thousand years ago, when, legend claimed, Christ had been tied to the tree and whipped. Interestingly, both a non-Armenian church and a mosque stood within the grounds of the Armenian Quarter. St Mark’s, believed to have been the house of St Mark’s mother, Mary, was a Syrian Orthodox church. And the tiny Yaqubieh, or Jacob, Mosque had once been the chapel of the martyr St James of Persia. He was known as St James the Cut-Up, because the martyr’s singular form of execution was to be chopped to pieces.

The entire Armenian Quarter was clad in the smoothest stone I had ever seen, as slick as a seal’s back. The roofs, the courtyards and the plazas all had surfaces you could run your hands over or run barefoot across without taking a scratch. The rooftops and walkways formed an intricate system of water collection. Every massive stone was set to point the water towards a channel, and every channel made its way to a reservoir. ‘Under every church,’ George said, ‘there is a cistern. Before the rainy season, people spend weeks cleaning the roofs.’ Like the Nabataeans of the desert, the people of Jerusalem saved every drop the sky gave them. To waste water was a sin. To run dry was death.