From Berlin to Bagdad and Babylon

by J. A. Zahm

But fascinating as one may find the myths and legends of Edessa, they must prove but secondary to its long and eventful history. For, in the days of its glory it ranked with Nisibis, Damascus, and Antioch as one of the four great cities of Syria. As a center of trade it was the rival of Palmyra which was then the great emporium of western Asia. Through it passed the highly-prized products of India and China on their way to the marts of Egypt and Rome.[304]

As a literary center, it was, as a recent writer observes, “admirably situated between the Greek world and the Oriental world. Communicating on the one hand with Antioch, on which it depended and on the other with Persia, Greater Armenia, and even with India, the capital of Osrhoene was well placed to profit both by the culture of Greece and the powerful originality of the barbarous countries of the East. It was, as it were, the confluence in which the ideas of two worlds became intimately blended and where the various nationalities of its inhabitants as well as the diversity of religious beliefs brought there by strangers and merchants tended to give the city a physiognomy not unlike that of Alexandria.”[305]

After suffering greatly from a destructive inundation in the early part of the sixth century, Edessa was restored by Justinian on such a magnificent scale that it was reputed to be one of the wonders of the world. According to Arabian writers there were at one time no fewer than three hundred convents and monasteries in and around Edessa. These, like similar institutions in Asia Minor and Europe, were schools of intellectual culture in which the lover of learning could devote himself to the acquisition of knowledge in entire peace and security.

One of the most celebrated of Edessa’s homes of learning and culture was that known as “The School of the Persians,” because its first students and teachers were chiefly Christian refugees from Persia. Its foundation was largely due to St. Ephrem, who so eclipsed all his contemporaries in scholarship that their works soon fell into oblivion. So voluminous were his works, so widely read were they, and so great were their authority that their author was acclaimed the “Column of the Church,” “The Prophet of the Syrians,” “The Harp of the Holy Spirit.” And in so high esteem were his books held, that they were, as St. Jerome informs us, publicly read in some churches after the Holy Scriptures.

It was in the schools of Edessa that the Syriac language and literature reached their highest degree of development. It was in them that Syriac was molded into what subsequently became the classic speech of the Syrians from the Tigris to the Mediterranean and which is seen at its best in the works of Bardesanes and St. Ephrem, in the Peshito and in Tatian’s “Diatesseron.” But neither in Edessa nor elsewhere did the Syrian Church ever produce such eminent scholars and men of so great literary genius as a Basil or a Eusebius, a Chrysostom or a Gregory Nazianzus. We are, however, indebted to Syrian scholars for the translation of many precious Greek works which otherwise would have been lost, and for thus “having passed on the lore of ancient Greece to the Arabs” who in their turn were so greatly instrumental in putting it at the disposal of the scholars of the West.

There is but little in Urfa to-day to show what it was when it was known as Edessa and when students and learned men flocked to it from all parts of the East as to one of the greatest seats of learning in Christendom. There is, it is true, a great castle standing, and walls and towers that date back to the time when Edessa was a Latin principality under Baldwin, and evidences of the city’s former occupation by Romans and Persians and others, but there is little which will long claim the attention of the serious visitor.

Like all travelers we visited the city’s chief lion—the great reservoir which, as Pliny informs us, won for Edessa the name Callirhoe—the city of the beautiful well—spring—Callirhoen a fonte nominatam. From the earliest days to the present, this reservoir has been held in great veneration. In pagan times it was consecrated to the goddess Athagartis. To-day it is known as the Pool of Abraham. The large number of fish with which it is always filled are sacred in the eyes of the Mohammedans, who consider it a very meritorious act to supply them with nourishment. The groups that are sometimes gathered around this pool feeding the sacred fish seem quite as preoccupied as the crowds that so generously distribute their supplies of grain to the pampered pigeons of San Marco, Venice.

The only ecclesiastics in Urfa to-day to devote themselves to the work of the Church which St. Ephrem and his associates served so well, whose convent was our home during our visit to their famous city, are the Capuchins. It is now more than two and a half centuries since these zealous sons of St. Francis inaugurated their missionary labors in Mesopotamia and the adjoining countries, and these have been centuries of trial and sacrifice and persecution which would have forced less heroic men to abandon an undertaking that often seemed impossible. Everywhere they were confronted by the fanaticism of Mohammedanism, which was naturally suspicious, and the jealousy of schism and heresy which were quick to take umbrage at whatever was calculated in any way to affect their age-long belief and practices.

During hundreds of years the torch of the faith which St. Ephrem had preached had been extinct in the broad region which the Capuchins had chosen for the field of their missionary activity. And during an almost equally long period, all vestige of union between the churches of Mesopotamia and those of the adjacent regions had completely disappeared.

It was thus also at Urfa when in 1850 two Spanish Capuchins, Fra Joseph of Burgos and Fra Angel de Villarubbia, took up their abode in this city of noble memories and world-famed achievements. They had to face the same difficulties and fanatical agencies that had been arrayed against their brethren elsewhere. The old schismatic Greeks, Syrians, and Armenians joined forces with the Mussulmans, the Jacobins, and the Nestorians as against a common foe and left nothing undone to render the undertaking of the new missionaries a failure and to compel them to leave the country. But the admirable patience of the good fathers, their great self-abnegation, their abounding charity towards the poor and the distressed soon won all hearts, and churches, schools, and asylums sprang into existence as if by magic. And it was not long until large numbers belonging to the dissident Greek, Syrian, and Armenian churches began to return to the Church of their forefathers and to apply for union with the Church of Rome. Nor were the Mohammedans less impressed than the Christians by the superior virtue of the missionaries. Their veneration for Father Angel was so great that they always called the Latin Church “The Church of Father Angel”—Abuna Angil Kilisesi—a name which it still bears.