Dr Graham Jones: St Gabriel of the Tur Abdin

In the heat of the summer of 1990 I visited the monastery of Mar Gabriel in the Tur Abdin in the southern extremities of Turkey on its border with Syria. This is, as the Rev Dale Johnson describes below, one of the oldest and most important of the surviving Syrian Orthodox monasteries, and during my stay I was taken on a tour of the monastery by one of the young monks.

The sepulchre of St Gabriel, the founder of the monastery, turned out to be a somewhat nondescript affair, a low, mounded construction in a sparsely-furnished lower room, with an opening in one of its sides.

I was invited by my guide to put my hand through this opening and touch the thigh-bone of the saint. It was, he said, good for 'women who want babies'.

The saint's special efficacy apart, I was struck by the similarity of this arrangement with Bede's description, in his Ecclesiastical History of the English, of St Chad's shrine at Lichfield. Visitors to this page are invited to read the passage and make their own comparisons.

Southeast of Midyat, the monastery of Mar Gabriel is the geographical and spiritual centre of the plateau, and - if darkness is approaching - also the safest place of refuge in the area. To get there, leave Midyat on the half-paved, half-gravel Cizre-bound road; after 20 km, just before an unmarked village, turn northeast onto a similarly unsign-posted dirt driveway, which leads to the monastery gate in just over 2 km.

Founded in 397, Mar Gabriel is not only the oldest surviving Syrian Orthodox monastery, but the most vital in Turkey, with seven nuns and four monks occupying separate wings, as well as a fluctuating number of local lay workers and guests from overseas. It is also the seat of the metropolitan bishop of Turabdin, who speaks good English, and with whom you may be granted an audience.

Reference material and further reading
Click here for maps of Tur Abdin published by the Assyrian International News Agency (All Rights Reserved).
The first illustrated book about Tur `Abdin, is by the Rev. Hans Hollerweger, The Living Culture of Tur Abdin.
The monastery is also described by the Rev. Stephen Griffith, A Fourth Visit to Tur Abdin and SE Turkey ... Journal of a visit to Tur `Abdin by Rev. Stephen Griffith in Novmeber 2000 .
The best scholarly survey of the Syrian Orthodox Church 'of Antioch and All the East (together with Alexandria, Constantinople, and Rome, one of the five ancient patriarchates of the Christian Church) is The Hidden Pearl by Prof. Sebastian Brock, the world's foremost authority on the Syriac language.