In the shadow of Gertrude Bell
The early-20th-century travels of explorer Gertrude Bell through Türkiye’s Tur Abdin are as overlooked as the region itself. Pat Yale traces her path to discover why the area’s story captured the fearless Bell’s imagination
I first met Nişani in the village of Mercimekli in 2011. I’d been standing disconsolately in front of the locked gate of the church of Mor Shemun (St Simeon) when suddenly I saw her striding towards me, a tiny woman in violet-coloured flip-flops wearing a baby-blue robe and a white headscarf that was secured with a band of black cotton. In her hand she held a key the size of a carving knife. Minutes later we were standing side by side in the nave of a church dating back to the seventh century AD.
Mercimekli lies within the Tur Abdin, a remote region in Turkey (formally known as Türkiye), deep in the south-east, whose name means ‘Mountain of the Servants of God’ in Syriac Aramaic. It’s an area awash with villages built with honey-coloured stone reminiscent of the Cotswolds, where flocks of sheep press up against the walls in refuge from the sun. It’s also an area with a complicated past.
Above the low roofs of the village rises the unexpected presence of a belltower, hinting at the complex history that has left even the smallest villages here with many different names. Today, most of them are inhabited by Kurds, but this was once an area with a largely Christian population, its ancient name evoking the Syriac Orthodox families who would once have filled the now-shuttered churches.
As is the case with most of the Tur Abdin churches (there are said to be 100 of them, and roughly 70 monasteries), the door cut into Mor Shemun’s austere outer wall swung open to reveal a vibrantly colourful interior, its walls decorated with an eclectic mixture of somewhat sickly Western-style portrayals of saints interspersed with the velveteen rugs that are so popular with locals. Nişani showed me photographs of burly, bearded clerics, their names inscribed in Aramaic. Then she led me into the narthex (antechamber), which was lined with white cassocks backed with tomato-red crosses, hung as if a priest might still stride in at any moment and pull one over his head. On the floor lay dusty wooden cribs, final gifts to the church from those who had left the village for good.
Memories of that visit came back to me when I revisited years later. This time I had come here for a reason, though. I was on the trail of the British explorer, archaeologist and writer Gertrude Bell, who had ridden into the Tur Abdin in 1909 on the way back from her exploration of Mesopotamia, a trip that later formed the basis for her travel book, Amurath to Amurath. By then, she had chalked up many adventures and probably assumed that the Turkey part of her journey would be an anti-climax. It proved far from the reality.
The base of the pillar at Mor Loozor, on which a stylite once perched as an act of extreme religious devotion (Alamy)
A fortunate discovery
‘It was almost by chance that I took my way from Mosul to Diabekr (Diyarbakır) through the Djebel Tur Abdin… Into this country I came, entirely ignorant of its architectural wealth, because it was entirely unrecorded,’ Bell wrote of her journey.
Stunned by her discoveries, she rushed back two years later, leaving a detailed record of her findings in The Churches and Monasteries of the Tur Abdin. And yet word never really spread. Almost a century later, the local priest-historian Hans Hollerweger could still bemoan the Western world’s ignorance of the Nusaybin’s Syriac Christian tradition in ‘this out-of-the-way plateau which has been the formative spiritual power in the region for centuries.’ Even now, an outside visitor such as myself remained sufficiently rare for word of my presence to travel ahead of me to the monasteries.
I was here because of a chance encounter with an Ottoman guestbook in which I’d spotted Gertrude Bell’s signature. It set me off on the trail of her travels in Turkey, which seemed to have slipped under the radar almost as much as the Tur Abdin. Given the region’s importance to Bell, I was keen to return to the area to see it through her eyes. I was also eager to renew my acquaintance with Nişani. Fortunately, a taxi driver named Feyzi knew the way to her house, down the cobbled backstreets.
“Stunned by her discoveries in the Tur Abdin, Gertrude rushed back two years later”
When I’d first met her, Nişani had been one of three members of the Syriac Orthodox congregation still living in the village. By the time I returned, only she and her husband, Abdullah, remained. As we lounged on cushions on the floor of their light-filled living room, Abdullah spoke to me in Turkish, to Feyzi in Arabic and to his wife in Turoyo, the vernacular version of Aramaic – a telling reminder of a complex local ethnic make-up lost amid arguments about Turks and Kurds. Then, with the tea glasses drained, Abdullah escorted me to the ruins of the monastery of Mor Loozor (St Lazarus) on the outskirts of the village. This site is even older than Mor Shemun, and dates back perhaps to the fifth or sixth century AD.
In 1911, Gertrude photographed a nun standing beside the base of a column amid the ruins of the monastery. She had assumed it to be the remains of a belfry, but it tells an altogether more curious tale. A stylite (religious ascetic) had once marooned himself on top of the pillar in the kind of act of extreme religious devotion more associated these days with sadhus. Its base still rested on a stepped plinth in the middle of the courtyard, surrounded by a cloister.
I’d also come here on my first visit to the region with Nişani, whose eyes had grown misty as we wandered. She had explained how long tables would be set up in the monastery on feast days, when they’d all eat together.
This time, Abdullah name-checked the rooms for me: “That was the kitchen; that was for the animals; this was the oven; this was the well – we stored our yoghurt in there before there were refrigerators.”
A silence fell. “What happened to the monks?” I ventured.
“There were twelve of them. They died at the time of the ferman,” he replied.
Ferman is Turkish for ‘edict’; in this case it stood for a decree that unleashed mayhem on the Tur Abdin. In the turmoil that ripped eastern Turkey apart during the First World War, the majority of the descendants of the early Syriac Orthodox Christians were either killed or driven out. A people who had been living here since at least the second century all but disappeared. Suddenly, the string of villages with Syriac second names and the presence of locked churches dating back to the Byzantine era made horrifying sense.
This was the Çelebi who came to help find Gertrude’s stolen belongings at Anıtlı (Hah) after she’d had her bags and the notes from her travels stolen while she slept (Gertrude Bell Photographic Archive)
A fateful return
Villages encircle Midyat, the de facto capital of the Tur Abdin. Once a Silk Road town whose caravanserai (inn) would have echoed with Arab accents and the snorts of camels, it grew fat on trade with the Levant, its wealth reflected in the houses of the older neighbourhoods, whose doors and windows still display filigree flourishes like those found in better-known Mardin. Half-a-dozen belltowers indicate its churches, and one at least was still battling to instil a love of Turoyo in a generation taught Turkish at school.
I’d arrived in search of a building I knew Gertrude had visited. The ‘cathedral’ of the Tur Abdin stands in splendid isolation 23km south-east of Midyat. Mor Gabriel Monastery is believed to date back to 397 AD, making its church one of the oldest in the area. Inside, its walls were hung with hand-painted curtains, some of them signed by the late Nasra Şimmeshindi, the last in a line of folk artists who made the churches their galleries. But Şabo wanted to show me a much greater treasure. On the ceiling of the apse was painted a Byzantine mosaic, the most easterly known in Turkey. It glittered with green and gold. A Greek inscription identified its makers as residents of Antioch, better known these days as Antakya, which was so cruelly felled by the 2023 earthquakes.
Gertrude, too, had seen that mosaic, photographing it by the light of a flash hastily improvised from magnesium wire. But the ruins of Mor Gabriel had been hard to interpret. In any case, the smaller church at Anıtlı (the Syriac Hah) was for her ‘the jewel of the Tur Abdin’.
Her photos showed a church whose soaring dome has since collapsed, leaving behind a squared-off superstructure with no peers. Pitching her tent nearby, Gertrude fell asleep, only to wake in the night and find a man rummaging through her belongings. Before she could raise the alarm, he had made off with her saddlebags containing the notes taken on her journey through Mesopotamia.
“We would parade around the courtyard and toss olives at the priest as a symbol of peace”
The loss was too devastating to be ignored, and Gertrude raised such a hue and cry that soldiers were despatched from Midyat to help, rounding up all sorts of innocent locals in the process. A pair of gloves dropped in flight quickly betrayed the thieves’ escape route. Luckily, they soon took fright at the commotion. Within days, everything except her money had been returned to her, leaving Gertrude to reflect: ‘Revenge is not so sweet as it is said to be, nor is it easy when wrong is afoot to determine who is the more wronged.’
It was in the grounds of a second ruined church at Anıtlı that I bumped into raven-haired Hanem, who was on her way to pick grapes but paused just long enough to reminisce about the past with me.
“On 16 August, we celebrated the Zeytin Pazarı (Olive Market),” she told me. “We would parade around the courtyard and toss olives at the priest as a symbol of peace.”
When I mentioned Gertrude, time suddenly stood still. “My grandfather guided her,” Hanem said. “When I was growing up, he told me about the strange English lady who came to look at the churches.”
Before leaving the Tur Abdin, I had my heart set on reaching the distant monastery of Mor Augen, which lolls against the slopes of Mount İzlo, near the border town of Nusaybin. A previous attempt had failed due to the tragic death of a villager from stepping on a landmine, which had put the site off-limits; unsurprisingly, the taxi drivers had thrown up their hands at the idea of a visit.
This time, I had the benefit of assistance. At the church of Mor Yakup (St Jacob), the last-remaining representative of the Syriac Orthodox community organised an unofficial taxi and sent his son to accompany me.
When Gertrude had ridden down the mountainside to Mor Augen, she found ten monks in residence. But their bishop had retreated into a cave high up in the rocks.
“When he is sick to death, he will send down written word telling us to come up…and fetch his body,” the prior had told her.
Now the only resident here was Father Joachim, the monk-priest responsible for the monastery’s restoration. He was hosting another visitor, Father Dale Johnson, an American Syriac Orthodox priest and Gertrude Bell expert.
Dale pointed out the cave where the bishop had immured himself and the final resting place of his bones. Then, in a moment of sheer magic, the two men led me into the church and I lit a candle in memory of Gertrude while, behind me, they intoned the Lord’s Prayer in Aramaic, the language of Jesus.
It was with difficulty that I dragged myself away from the Tur Abdin. My journey in pursuit of Gertrude Bell took seven months to complete and led me across the country, from İzmir to Cizre and back via Konya to İstanbul. Along the way I bumped into many Gertrude fans who knew and loved her photographs in particular. But it was in the Tur Abdin that I most felt her presence live on. It was as if she had just ridden out of one village and would be arriving in the next one imminently.
Pat Yale is the author of Following Miss Bell: Travels Around Turkey in the Footsteps of Gertrude Bell (Trailblazer Publications; £12), which is out now.
Where to follow Gertrude Bell in Turkey
Troy The future ‘Queen of the Desert’ visited what was then the newly excavated ruins at Troy in 1899. A new museum opened there in 2018.
Bodrum Bell visited Bodrum in 1907, when its castle was still a prison, walking across the peninsula and back again to do so.
Ephesus She visited the ruins of Ephesus four times, on at least one occasion having them to herself.
Sagalassos In 1907, Bell rode up to the lofty Psidian site of Sagalassos, where her photograph of its ruined theatre is now on display.
Konya Bell met Dick Doughty-Wylie here in 1907. The married British consul was the love of her life, but was sadly killed at Gallipoli.
Binbirkilise The Tur Abdin aside, the part of Turkey most strongly associated with Bell is Binbirkilise in Central Anatolia, where she was part of a six-week-long excavation in 1907.
Kızkalesi Bell camped at what is now the Mediterranean seaside resort of Kızkalesi, later writing about the many Byzantine ruins in the surrounding region.
Carchemish Bell met her friend and colleague TE Lawrence (aka Lawrence of Arabia) at Carchemish (Karkamış), on what is now the Turkey-Syria border. The Hittite site there recently opened to the public as an archaeopark, though travel near the border is dissuaded by the UK’s FCDO.
Pera Palace Hotel, İstanbul Of all the hotels in İstanbul patronised by Bell between 1889 and 1914, the Pera Palace is the only one still operating as a hotel under the same name and in the same spot as when she was there.
Need to know: Türkiye
Getting there and around
Turkish Airlines have several connections from the UK via İstanbul (and one via Ankara) to Mardin, which is 65km west of Midyat. Flights costs from around £303 return, taking around 7.5 hours.
The Tur Abdin is best explored with a car, which can be hired at Mardin Airport. Few bus services travel from Midyat to the villages, and taxi fares soon add up.
Carbon offset
A return flight from London to Mardin via İstanbul produces 596kg of carbon per passenger. Wanderlust encourages you to offset your travel footprint through a reputable provider. For advice on finding one, visit wanderlustmagazine.com/inspiration/sustainable-travel.
Where to stay
Most hotels in the old part of Midyat are housed in glorious old stone buildings. The semi-fortified Kasr-i Nehroz (hotelnehroz.com) offers modern design in stone-arched spaces. Slightly cheaper rooms are available at the Mons Masius Boutique Hotel (monsmasius.com), whose terrace has a spectacular view.
Privacy can be an issue in old Midyat. If things get too much, there are more conventional hotels in its Estel extension, which is connected to the old town, 3km to the east, by regular minibuses.
Further information
Tur Abdin: Living Cultural Heritage by Hans Hollerweger – This covers most of the churches in the area and is usually on sale at the visitor centre at Deyrulzafaran Monastery in Mardin.
The Church of the Mother of God at Anıtlı (Hah) has lost its original dome since Gertrude visited, but it has since gained a belltower (Alamy)