From the Holy Mountain

This was recommended to me and if Dalrymple is of this quality then I am going to keep reading him.

I loved this book.

Mr. Dalrymples's fantastic ‘From The Holy Mountain', written the year before I was born, captivatingly details the lives of Eastern Christians in Anatolia, Western Mesopotamia, Canaan and Egypt.

It was fate that I picked it off my dad's dusty shelf. As a latecomer to @EmpirePodUK, they had just started Series 2 on the Ottomans, and after enjoying his excellent and erudite book, ‘The Anarchy,' I was drawn to it because it was set in a part of the world deeply shaped by Ottoman rule.

Many individuals he meets, themselves inheritors of ancient Christian traditions, are in the latter stages of life. While reading, one can't help but lament the likelihood that most of them are no longer with us and that the millennia-old, unique faith communities they represented now cease to exist.

It is witty and profoundly moving; I often laughed at Will's humorous anecdotes and observations. I also wept reading about the crying children attacked by Gema'a in the Church of St. Michael and the Virgin.

The terrible stories he retells of genocides in Turkey, wars in Lebanon, displacements in Palestine and terrorism in Egypt helped me to understand the deep pain and suffering the Palestinians are experiencing right now. It's one thing to lament the possibility that many of the older people he met thirty years ago have passed due to old age; it's another to see the slaughter of these people unfold in real-time.

I don't want to spoil the book's contents, so if you are interested in Christian history or Middle Eastern history presented in an incredibly readable way, pick it up and get going!

Kyrie eléison.