Zahed’s voice broke through her daze.
“Where are all the tourists?” he asked Abdulkerim. “This place is like a ghost town.”
Although the valley was a national park, they hadn’t encountered more than a half dozen groups of hikers, each with no more than a handful of individuals in it.
“This canyon and the two on either side of it were deemed unsafe back in the fifties,” the Byzantinist explained. “The caves were crumbling on their occupant. All the villager were relocated to a new town a few kilometers away, and nowadays, tour group prefer to stick to safe areas, like Goreme.”
“The less, the merrier,” Zahed said, his eyes surveying the trail ahead. “How much farther?”
“Almost there.”
Moments later, they had cleared the cone village and paused by a featureless rock face. The sun was much lower now, its shifting angle bathing the moonscape around them in a striking mix of pinks and blues.
“This is it,” the Byzantinist announced.
It didn’t look like much until the man pointed upward. Tess followed his direction. There was a gaping, square-cut hole in the side of the cliff, about fifty feet above her head. It was an exposed room—part of a room, actually—that had been carved into the rock.
“The church’s outer wall collapsed in a rock slide centuries ago,” Abdulkerim explained, “taking with it the entrance tunnel and the stair that led up to it.”
“So how do we get up there?” Zahed asked.
“This way,” the Turk said as he led them to the edge of the cliff and pointed out the footholds that had been chiseled into the smooth wall of tufa.
“Lead the way,” Zahed gestured.
Abdulkerim went first, followed by Tess, then Zahed. They clawed their way up the crumbly wall and managed to reach a small ledge. Steep, eroded steps led from there to the three-walled chamber. There was no railing at its edge. Its floor just ended with a drop straight down the cliff.
Tess looked down. The sight made her wince. “I can see why this isn’t exactly heaving with tourists.”
The Turk shrugged. “This was the vestibule of the church,” he explained. “Come. The nave is through here.”
He led them through a narrow doorway and switched on his flashlight.
The room they were standing in was surprisingly large, around forty feet deep and half as wide. Aisles ran along either side of it, separated from the nave by columns that were purely decorative as they weren’t supporting anything, given that the entire church had been carved out of the soft rock. The nave rose to a soaring, barrel-vaulted ceiling and ended in what looked like a horseshoe-shaped apse.
“The mural’s this way,” Abdulkerim said, leading them farther into the church, “and the burial chamber’s under us.”
Tess followed him, her eyes roaming the Byzantine frescoes that covered every inch of the cavernous chamber’s walls and ceiling. In the soft, bouncing beam of his flashlight, she glimpsed biblical scenes she was familiar with, such as Christ’s Ascension and the Last Supper, as well as more local religious iconography, like a mural of Constantine the Great and his mother, Saint Helen, who was holding the “True Cross,” the actual cross on which Jesus was crucified, which she believed she had found on a relic-finding pilgrimage to Jerusalem in A.D. 325.
The walls were also rampantly covered with more disturbing imagery. One fresco showed a monster with three heads and the body of a serpent, devouring the damned. Another showed naked women being attacked by snakes, and another showed a giant locust being warded off by two crosses. Adding to the discomfort was the fact that most of the figures in the murals had their eyes, and sometimes their entire faces, scratched out, defaced by the Muslim invaders who believed that doing so killed the subject in the painting. The frescoes higher up and the ones on the curved ceiling, however, were undamaged, presumably because they were harder to reach. Cold, striking faces with intact almond eyes, black, cordlike eyebrows, and stern, angular mouths stared down at Tess, the smooth paint making it seem as it their skin itself had been plastered onto the wall.
Abdulkerim stopped at the far end of the nave, by the apse. Tess now realized that the darkness had hidden the fact that there were in fact three apses spreading out off the nave. Next to one of them was a doorway, through which Tess could make out a passage.
The Byzantinist shone his light at a mural high up on the half dome of one of the apses. It was a richly detailed work, delicate and finespun, dominated by pale hues of red ocher and green. Crucially, it was also unscathed. It showed a man, on foot, engaged in battle against four warriors. He wore no helmet or chain mail and had no horse. Behind him, several villagers were shown to be hiding in dark openings in a rock face.
The warriors, given that they wore turbans and held scimitars, were clearly Muslim. The figure fighting them was lunging with a broadsword in his right hand. His left hand was held up high, defiantly.
Tess leaned in for a closer look.
The figure’s left hand was clearly missing, but it wasn’t due to any paint flaking off. It simply hadn’t been painted in. The figure’s forearm just ended in a rounded stump.
She saw the inscription on the mural. It was in Greek, written in bold uncial lettering. She concentrated on translating it, drawing on a reasonable familiarity with the language, but one that she hadn’t put to use in a long time. The Byzantinist stepped in and saved her the trouble.
“’The one true hand vents his wrath on the heathen raiders,’” he read out.
Tess glanced at the Iranian. If he was feeling any anticipation, he wasn’t showing it. She turned back to the mural. There was another inscription, in smaller letters, above and to the right of the battling figures.
“What does that one say?” she asked.
“’As for pain, like a hand cut in battle, consider the body a robe you wear. The worried, heroic deeds of a man and a woman are noble to the draper, where the dervishes relish the light breeze of spirit.’ It’s from a poem. A Sufi poem, written by none other than Rumi himself.”
Which threw Tess. “A Sufi poem? Here? Written in Greek?”
The Byzantinist nodded. “It’s unusual, but it’s not that surprising. Rumi lived and died in Konya, which is only a couple of hundred mile west of here. Konya was the center of Sufism. Still is, spiritually at least. The Sufis and the Christian of these valley would have been allies of sort, outsiders—followers of an alternative faith living in a sea of Sunni Muslim.”
“Let’s see the tomb,” the Iranian interjected. Some impatience was coloring his tone, for once.
Abdulkerim looked at him with quiet resignation, then shrugged. “This way,” he muttered.
The three of them walked in single file, trailing the flashlight’s beam down the narrow passage by the side apse. Any natural light from outside was now barely coming through, but the beam was strong enough to light up the ceiling, which was enlivened by an elaborate pattern of crosses that were carved in low relief within a grid of sunken lozenges, before it faded into the shadows.
The passage led to a steep flight of narrow steps that corkscrewed downward. A small vestibule was at its base and gave onto five rooms. It was too dark to see beyond their doorways. Abdulkerim shone his light into each of them briefly to get his bearings, then said, “It’s this one.”
He led them into the crypt. It was a long, low-ceilinged room. In its flat floor, Tess noticed two parallel rows of rectangles of hard-packed earth, one row lining each side of the room. They were hard to discern, but they were there, cut into the tufa from which the entire church had been carved. Each patch seemed just big enough to accommodate a human body, and the walls behind them bore inscriptions that were more or less regularly spaced. On closer look, Tess realized they were names.