Source: Today's Zaman (Turkey)
The Rev. George Percy Badger reached Constantinople from England on June 24, 1842. Badger, an emissary of the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, was burning with the religious fervor and self-righteousness of a recently ordained Church of England priest.
His mission, “with the sanction and approbation of His Grace the Archbishop of Canterbury,” was to make contact with the ancient Christian communities of northern Mesopotamia, particularly the Nestorians, who lived alongside the tribal, Muslim Kurds in the lofty mountains of Hakkari. Like all the best travelers, Badger kept an account of his journey, which was later published under the title "The Nestorians and their Rituals."
Badger was held up for three months in Constantinople awaiting his ferman (a document compelling the local Ottoman officials on his route to provide aid). Finally, on Sept. 30, accompanied by his wife Maria, he caught an Austrian-made steamer for Samsun. The Black Sea port city today is, if not exactly beautiful, at least a prosperous, progressive sort of place. Badger, though, describes it as “a miserable assemblage of wretched houses.” Still, he managed to obtain the services of a praiseworthy Turk he calls Kushker Oghloo to accompany him on the long journey south and east across Anatolia. Complete with hired horses and in typical Black Sea drizzle, Badger's party set out across the mountains. Mrs. Badger must have wondered what she'd let herself in for, as the han they had hoped to stay in the first night was full and they were forced to take shelter in a “wretched hovel” where “swarms of fleas prevented any one of our party from sleeping a wink.”
In the spectacularly beautiful town of Amasya, Badger's party lodged in a building next to an Armenian church and was entertained by the town's only resident foreigner, a Swiss merchant called Krug, and members of the 500-family strong Armenian community. Badger was impressed by the next town en route, Tokat, writing: “The houses are well-built, the streets clean and regular, and the bazaar spacious and well supplied with merchandise. A branch of the Iris flows through the town and waters the picturesque vineyards and gardens.” What really grabbed the reverend's attention though, were leeches, which were collected by locals “entering into pools and streams, having their legs covered with felt stockings to which the leeches adhered, and were thus easily secured.” Like Amasya, Tokat too had only one foreign resident, a young man from Trieste. His occupation? Exporting said leeches to Europe, where they were used medicinally.
Badger was less impressed with Sivas, a two-day ride from Tokat, noting disapprovingly, “The entry to Sivas we found dirty in the extreme, arising chiefly from the narrowness of the streets and the numerous streams which flow through the environs.” Badger's party was lodged with a prosperous Armenian family before leaving, the following morning, for the long ride across inhospitable terrain to Diyarbakır. For the first time since leaving İstanbul, Badger appears to be genuinely impressed by what he saw, particularly the city's famous Ulu Camii, with its copious reuse of late Roman pillars and capitals and its famed six-kilometer circumference black basalt medieval walls. These of course survive to this day, as do many of the fine old courtyard houses which Badger describes as “well-built.” Of the Hasan Paşa Han, then housing an Ottoman garrison but now home to an array of trendy breakfast salons, antique and souvenir shops, he says, “Constructed of alternate layers of rectangular blocks of white and black stone, it is deservedly admired for its size and the symmetry of its parts.” The Armenian church of Surp Giargos, currently in ruins and awaiting restoration, was then “the new Armenian Church.” According to his sources, there were then some 1,700 Armenian families in the city -- now just one elderly couple remains.
The Chaldean church
As part of his research, Badger also visited the Chaldean (converts from the Nestorian to the Catholic faith) church, which still stands and continues to serve the handful of Chaldean families left in the city. He also visited Diyarbakır's most historic church, the Syrian Orthodox Church of the Virgin Mary. The Syrian Orthodox clergymen who accompanied Badger around the church had the dubious privilege of listening to him pontificate on the Church of England. “I had abundant opportunity of explaining the doctrines and discipline of our Church, of which they were profoundly ignorant.” The pragmatic Mrs. Badger, meanwhile, had spotted something appetizing in the bazaar and “could not resist her home associations; and so a rhubarb pudding was made, and our host [a Syrian Catholic] was not a little surprised to see us eat it with sugar.”
Fortified with rhubarb pudding, the Badgers left Diyarbakır at 2 a.m. on Oct. 26, bound for Mardin. Badger wrote of the lands before him, “We had now fairly entered upon the Coordish district, as nearly all the villages from Diarbekir to Mosul are inhabited by this race.” According to his journal, the Kurds were being squeezed mercilessly by Ottoman tax-collectors and many, unable to pay, were “preparing to leave for the mountains.” Managing to be rude to the Ottoman government under whose protection he was journeying, and condescending to the Kurds, whose rights he claimed to be upholding, he commented, “I am persuaded, that under a righteous government, the Coords might be made an obedient and useful class of subjects.”
Today Mardin is the tourism hub of southeastern Turkey. Boutique hotels are sprouting like mushrooms, quaint gift shops selling local herbal soaps and the like have spread like a rash down the main street and the backstreets are full of gaggles of well-to-do İstanbulites cooing over its gracious stone-built mansion houses, mosques, medreses and churches recently restored with European Union funds. Things were somewhat different in 1842. “On entering the city walls we found ourselves amidst a heap of ruins, and it was some time before we could convince ourselves the place was not deserted … we passed the market place, where to our horror we saw no less than seven heads, covered with dust, lying on the ground.” The Ottoman garrison, Albanians, had apparently just launched massive reprisals against the Kurds for non-payment of their taxes. Mardin, spectacularly situated on a prominent limestone ridge overlooking the vast expanse of the Mesopotamian plain, boasts one of the most dramatic views of any town in Turkey. Of this Badger notes dryly: “Beside the prospect, there is nothing worthy of note in the town of Mardin. …The streets are narrow and filthy in the extreme, and the inhabitants look wretched and woebegone.” He does, however, visit what remains Mardin's prize draw, the Syrian Orthodox monastery of Deir-ul Zaferan, a few kilometers southeast of the town. Now complete with gift shop and cafe but only a metropolitan bishop and one monk, the monastery was then the patriarchal seat of the Syrian Orthodox Church.
Before heading south to Mosul (now in Iraq but then part of the Ottoman Empire), the usual gateway to the mountains of Hakkari, Badger visited Midyat. Then entirely populated by Syrian Orthodox Christians, it is today mainly ethnically Kurdish, though a few working churches remain to serve the dwindling Christian population of some 50 families. The journey to Mosul was arduous, and Badger writes, “A severe fever which had attacked four of our party, carried off one of our servants after a lingering illness, and brought Mrs. Badger and myself to the brink of the grave and suspended our operations and researches for the first four months after our arrival at Mosul.”
Leaving Mrs. Badger behind, the recovered reverend left Mosul on Feb. 20, 1843, crossing the Tigris on a ferry. He had with him three mules and an interpreter called Daood. Their first stop was the Kurdish mountaintop town of Amadiyah, just south of the modern Turkish-Iraqi frontier. From here they headed north toward Berwari (Pervari on modern maps). Badger wrote, “Mountains upon mountains rose before and around us, and I could scarcely realize the fact that I was traveling to an hospitable part of the world.” The snow was meters deep in places and ice covered the rocks and rimed the turbulent mountain torrents.
Badger had, at last, reached the region which was the crux of his mission, a land inhabited by a people adhering to an ancient branch of the Christian church, the Nestorians (known more properly as the Assyrians). Their belief that Christ was predominantly human in nature differed from Byzantine orthodoxy and was declared a heresy at the Council of Ephesus in 431. The followers of Nestorius (the bishop who had promulgated the creed and who was cruelly martyred) sought refuge on the eastern borders of the Byzantine world, then Iran, before finally relocating, in the 16th century, to one of the remotest habitable regions in the world -- the rugged mountains south of Lake Van and west of the Zagros Mountains.
Badger eventually made contact with the Nestorian patriarch, Mar Shimun, in a deep, wintry-wild mountain valley. They discussed the abstruse (the finer points of Church of England theology) and the practical (the likelihood of all out conflict between the warlike, tribal Kurds of Hakkari and the equally tribal and warlike Nestorians). Badger's successful meeting with Mar Shimun marked the end of his first journey into the mountains, and he was reunited with Maria in Mosul on March 7.
But the region Badger left was to enter a new period of turbulence which was to go far beyond the squabbles of mountain neighbors of different faiths. The Ottoman government eventually gained control of the mountains, prompted in part by pressure exerted by Britain at the behest of Badger, and both Kurds and Nestorians came under Ottoman tutelage. Then, in World War I, feeling they had little to lose, the Nestorians sided with Christian Russia. When the Russians withdrew following the Bolshevik Revolution, the Nestorians were eventually driven out of their mountain fastnesses and fled to Iran and Iraq. Now all that remains of this proud people in Hakkari are the remains of their simple churches, scattered through the remote valleys. And even these scant ruins are virtually impossible for today's travelers to visit as strife, this time between the Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) and the Turkish security forces, still hangs like a cloud over these spectacularly beautiful mountains.
George Percy Badger
Badger was born in 1815, into a military family in Malta. His sister married an American missionary and moved to Mosul, soon followed by her mother. In 1838 he wrote a guidebook to Malta; he then became a Methodist. Changing his religious stance, he moved to London, where he trained at the Church Missionary Society before being ordained as an Anglican priest in 1842. A scholar and linguist, he had an Arab-English lexicon published in 1881. His “The Nestorians and their Rituals” was published in 1852. He also served as a chaplain to the armed forces in India, Aden and Zanzibar. Badger died in 1888.