Product Description

The third book from the most gifted young travel writer at work today, author of the best-selling In Xanadu ('one of the best travel books produced in the last twenty years' -- Scotland on Sunday) and City of Djinns ('the best travel book I have ever read' -- George Mackay Brown). In the spring of 587 AD, two monks set off on an extraordinary journey that would take them in an arc across the entire Byzantine world, from the shores of the Bosphorus to the sand dunes of Egypt. On the way John Moschos and his pupil Sophronius the Sophist stayed in caves, monasteries and remote hermitages, collecting the wisdom of the stylites and the desert fathers before their world shattered under the great eruption of Islam. More than a thousand years later, using Moschos's writings as his guide, William Dalrymple set off to retrace their footsteps. Despite centuries of isolation, a surprising number of the monasteries and churches visited by the two monks still survive today, surrounded by often hostile populations. Dalrymple's pilgrimage took him through a bloody civil war in eastern Turkey, the ruins of Beirut, the vicious tensions of the West Bank and a fundamentalist uprising in southern Egypt. His book is an elegy to the slowly dying civilisation of Eastern Christianity and the peoples that have kept its flame alive. It is a rich and gripping blend of history and spirituality, adventure and politics, laced with a thread of black comedy familiar to readers of Dalrymple's previous work.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #13137 in Books
• Published on: 1998-05-05
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 512 pages

Review
'Compulsively readable' John Julius Norwich, Observer; 'Everything a really good travel book should be: witty, learned and also very funny' Eric Newby

About the Author
William Dalrymple was born in Scotland. His first book, In Xanadu, won the Yorkshire Post Best First Work Award and the Scottish Arts Council Spring Book Award, and was shortlisted for the John Llewelyn Rhys Prize. His second, City of Djinns, won the Thomas Cook Travel Book Award and the Sunday Times Young British Writer of the Year Award. He was recently elected the youngest Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and is currently writing a six-part television series on the buildings of the Raj for Channel 4.

Customer Reviews

Beautiful synthesis of spirituality & history
I knew William Dalrymple as a fine travel writer after his early success with In Xanadu, a re-enactment of Marco Polo's journey to China. From the Holy Mountain attempts a more ambitious journey, and the author brings it off brilliantly. His narrative is a re-enactment of the travels of a 6th century Byzantine monk, John Moschos, who recorded the religious communities and the miracles he encountered in his book, The Spiritual Meadow.

Dalrymple travels in Moschos's footsteps, from Mount Athos in Greece, to the Great Oasis at Kharga in Upper Egypt. The journey takes Dalrymple across Turkey, Lebanon, Syria and Israel before reaching his conclusion on the edge of the Sahara, surrounded by Egyptian army guards bristling with automatic weapons protecting him from Muslim fundamentalists.

The historical theme he brings to life is the way that Christianity began as a religion of the Middle East, centred on Alexandria and Constantinople, long before it became the established faith of Western Europe. But his travels take him through a series of conflicts: the Orthodox Church of Southern Turkey caught in the cross fire of civil war between Kurd nationalists and the Turkish state. In Lebanon, he walks through the remains of the Maronite Christian community who have propelled their country into a disastrous civil war. In Israel, the Orthodox monks and the Palestinian Christians are trying to cope with the growth of Jewish settlements across the Holy Land. And in Egypt, the Coptic Church is menaced by the growth of Muslim fundamentalism.

What makes the book special is the way Dalrymple can sink into Moschos's world. His eye for art and architecture brings the Byzantine world to life, and his ear captures conversations with monks who regard miracles and saints hovering above their monasteries as everyday events. The bizarre hallucinations and beliefs of the early Christian church become matter of fact occurrences as Dalrymple talks to Christians whose prayers, music and way of life have changed little over 1500 years. His outlook remains admirably compassionate. He brings off a journey through history that is intertwined with some of the nastiest conflicts of the 20th century. It's a lament to the disappearing world of Eastern Christianity, but it's also informative and spiritually very moving.

packed with knowledge and sympathy
What I most enjoyed about this wonderful book was not the fact that it was packed from cover to cover with knowledge -and it truly is- but the sympathy that the author obviously felt for the people he met in his journey.Dalrymple speaks about them with such a good-humoredly warmth that, after reading his narrative, you feel you would like to know more about their lives and you even worry about what is going to happen to them in the decadent and perilous world that the author depicts. I think this is the real triumph of this book: that the author makes us learn about a truly fascinating world while, at the same time, feeling respect and concern for the people who inhabit it and make it possible.And this is something quite unusual in the usually author-traveler centred travel literature I absolutely recomend it!

An able treatment of tragedy
It's been two years since I read this book and I am still ecstatic over it. Indeed, if I were to pick up Mr. Dalrymple's narrative again and re-read it, I have no doubt I would be just as moved and fascinated as the first time I read it.

Dalrymple is a master of prose: he paints tragic portraits with his words. Following the path outlined in an old Greek book by the medieval Byzantine tourist and monk John Moschos, Mr. Dalrymple travels through the Aegean, the Levant, and the Nile Valley. From Greece's Mt. Athos to the necropolises of southern Egypt, his journey is a record of history in the making. For what he sees on the way is the end of an era, the end to what his medieval "tour-guide" saw the beginning of: the almost-complete collapse of Eastern Christianity in the Levant. His writing will haunt me forever: old Orthodox churches crumbling to dust; living human relics of the savage persecutions in Armenia at the beginning of the 20th century; abandoned monasteries perched solemnly in the desert. If apocalypse were but silence, I think Mr. Dalrymple has described it perfectly. His Borgesean treatment of this ghostly land is gripping and, at the same time, terrifying.

Various partisan ethnic and political groups have criticized the author of "From the Holy Mountain" for taking a supposedly "unbalanced" view of the decline of Christianity in the Middle East and the mistreatment of the Palestinians. This argument is misguided. Mr. Dalrymple's portrayal of various non-Christian groups is often unsympathetic indeed, and his book is perhaps somewhat "unbalanced" (depending on the reader's position) in that he has sympathies of his own, but what I admire especially about his account is that it clearly refuses to condone persecution of any sort, by anybody, of anyone, by giving the irresponsible excuse that the persecuted have also been the persecutors. The politics of ethnicity should not condone the desicration of the Middle East's beautiful human cultures, priceless treasures of art, and rich traditions of faith. Mr. Dalrymple expresses this sentiment ably.

I also found the author's account of his personal renewal of religious faith very touching. Who could not be moved by the grandeur of that landscape, the mystic hills, the face of God in every look of those people as they reminisced on the joys and horrors of the last century and the slow death of a 2,000 year-old faith? Dark churches in the early morning, dusty altars, the extremities of old Byzanitine hermits: deep, narrow canyons and tiny caves, tall pillars where stylites once chastised themselves. What a rich land! What a place to lose oneself in thinking about divinity and history!

Five stars for this beautiful book! A perfect investment of time and money.