“In The Steps of St. Paul.”

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 53, Issue 3831, 9 November 1936, Page 7

“In The Steps of St. Paul.”

SERIAL

(By

H. V. Morton)

SALAMIS, PORT OF GHOSTS. The cargo boat lay in Larnaka Bay waiting for the shore officials. It was not quite 7 a.m., but the sun was warmer than on a summer afternoon at home. I thought Cyprus looked exquisite that morning, with the mists moving from her mountains and on her shores a white town set about with palmtrees, lapped by blue water. ** Although anxious to get ashore, I was content to stand gazing over the rail towards the land where long ago the copper breastplate of Agamemnon was hammered, where Aphrodite rose from the sea, and where Mount Olympus housed the gods of Greece. A motor launch came out to us flying the British flag, for Cyprus has been under British rule since 1878, and has been a British colony since 1925. The port doctor and other officials stepped aboard. The crew lined up on the f’oc’sle. The doctor walked along, examining eyes, throats, chests, and feeling under armpits. When he had finished we were free to go on shore. I sat in a small rowing boat. Before the oars cut the water I looked down into clear, green depths and 1 saw huge twisted shells lying fathoms deep, and strange fish swimming. On the hot sea-front of Larnaka a number of one-horsed victorias converged on me while the drivers cracking their whips tried to attract my attention in a bewildering mixture of Greek and English. Although Cyprus Gias been British for over half a century the English language has not made much progress there. But at least one inhabitant can speak American. I went up to a saloon car that stood for hire under a line of dat e palms. “ I want to go to Salamis,” I said to the driver. “ Sure,’ ’he said. “ Step in, boss.” “ How far is it ? ” I asked. “ I guess it’s about thirty-five miles.” “Well, don’t step on the gas,” I said. “ Take it easy, for on mornings like this I have a great prejudice in favfcour of living.” " “ I’m the best driver in Cyprus,” he replied. We went off over a flat road into a luscious district of green fields of broad beans. Oxen yoked to ploughs were turning the rich earth. Oxen in the shafts of cumbersome countrycarts swayed towards us over the road.. Now and then we passed through mud-coloured villages, where houses with flat roofs and wooden balconies stood huddled in narrow lanes set about with sesame fields, pomegranate groves, and orange gardens. For nearly ten miles we ran beside a sea as blue as the most improbable seascape, then, turning inland, we mounted into low, brown hills. It is almost with a shock that you recognise the profile of Victoria and of George V. on Cyprian money and Cyprian stamps. There is little to show that Cyprus has been British for half a century except the admir- , able roads, the neatness and tidiness of the country, and the fact that policemen do not smoke cigarettes while on duty. But this, of course, is only a superficial impression. The island is a curious phenomenon. Those ancient enemies, the Turkish lion and the Greek lamb, lie down together in apparent contentment under British rule. The Greeks in Cyprus number 247,000. The educated Cypriots speak modern Greek, but the peasantry speak a pure Turkish comparatively tree from Arabic or Persian words. The Greeks are, of course, Christians, and their domed churches dot the island. The Turks worship in mosques which were once Christian churches These churches were captured centuries ago from the Crusaders. Christian church and mosque stand side by side in the island, and the Greek priest and the Moslem imam seemed to be on excellent terms. You will see one thing in Cyprus that you will see nowhere else today: you will see the old-fiashioned Turk in his pleated trousers and his fez. He sits smoking a chilouk, or bubble-bubble, outside the cafes as if Kemal had never been bom I Wie went through the ancient walled town of Famagusta, and in about five miles came to all that is left of Salamis, the port whore Paul, Barnabas, and Mark disembairked on their first missionary jourmry from Seleucia. “ So they being sent forth by the Holy Ghost, went down to S'.eleucia and from thence they sailed to Cyprus. And when they were at Salamis they proclaimed the word of God in the synagogues of the Jews.” That is all we are told in th.e Acts about the visit to Salamis. Hut we know from Josephus, and otheit ancient writers, that this port was ait that time one of the most important an the " Mediterranean. It was the commercial capital of Roman Cyprus; Pajphos,

at the other end of the island, was the Government headquarters. We may be sure that any town which included more than one synagogue was a thriving commercial centre, for the Jews in the first century were never found in poor places. As I mentioned in a previous article, this race had settled in Cyprus centuries before Christ and they were, no doubt, interested in the oil, fruit, wine and copper trade. They had been there long enough to become very rich. I left the car and plunged into a dense wood growing on sandhills near the sea. I followed the path as I had been told to do; but of the ruins of Salamis I could at first see nothing. Then I came to the marble stump of a pillar, and then another. They stood in the shade of acacia and eucalyptus trees, and brambles grew over them. I came to a flight of marble steps half covered with grass and brambles, and I realised that the whole wood was haunted by the ghost of Salamis. A ruin on a hill is stark and sad, but a ruined city in a wood is terrifying. I half expected some ghost to step from the shadow of a tree, and point and beckon; and my heart was saddened by the utter loneliness of a wrecked city and of the ease with which weeds and brambles can conceal the most ambitious works of man. I found the remains of three market places in these woods; three enormous squares, which were once lined with market pillars and proud with marble temples. I found the remains of a splendid Roman house with manybathrooms in it and a complete system of central heating. Here and there in the undergrowth were broken pillars and scraps of Greek inscriptions on which it was possible to make out that “ the City of Salamis ” gave this or decreed that. And when I looked for the oncesplendid harbour where Paul stepped ashore I could see nothing but sand dunes. In ancient times an earthquake wrecked both city and harbour, and brought proud Salamis crashing to the ground. “ When I was jn Noo Yark,” said the driver, as we drove off, “ I saved a bit and came here, but they are a lazy bunch in this island. They don’t know how to work. I wish I was back in the States ”

But I scarcely heard him. I was thinking of the ruin in the acacia wood, and the mournful whisper of wind moving through trees that had grown out of the bones of Salamis. LEGEND OF ST. BARNABAS. “I looked inside the half-open door. A Greek monk was sitting at an easel, painting an ikon. He was so intent that he failed to notice me.”. I walked about the little Monastery of St. Barnabas, but could make nobody hear. The place seemed dead. The heat of afternoon had closed down on Cyprus; in the warm stillness you could almost hear the crops growing. The monastery is a picturesque, many domed building standing by itself in bean fields not far from the ruins of Salamis. It owes its fame to the burial, in a nearby vault, of Barnabas, the travelling companion and friend of Paul. I looked into the sun-steeped courtyard, and I went into the dim, cool church whose domes are upheld by piers into which are built marble columns from the ancient ruins of Salamis. The gilded ikonostasis—which, in Greek churches takes the place of a rood-screen, and divides sanctuary from nave—literally groaned beneath the weight of ikons. The Greek Orthodox Church forbids statues in its buildings, a ban that dates from remote times, when sculpture was associated with pagan worship, but it delights in ikons. No matter how poor or small a Greek church may be, it generally lias a good display of these sacred pictures, to which the country people sometimes attach all manner of miraculous qualities, often piously kissing them to the bare wood. Coming to a half-open door, I looked inside. A Greek monk was sitting i.t an easel, painting an ikon. He was so intent that he failed to notice me. He sat there, his bun of hair drawn under a brimless hat, his hand steadied on a bamboo guiding rod; his attitude was one of intense concentration as he added little touches of red, blue and gold to the figure of the saint. When he discovered me, he smiled in embarrassment, wiped his hands on his cassock, and came forward. While we talked about ikons, I discovered that his technique was probably 1500 years old. He had been taught to mix his colours and to paint by a monk of seventy, who had learnt his art from a monk of seventy; and so on right back to the dim ages of ikonography. Like all people who love the work they do, there was something pleasant and poised about this Greek priest. “I want to see the tomb of St. Barnabas,” I said.

“Come with me,” he replied. We went out together into the sunlight and down through the bean field to a little stone building, from which a flight of steps led underground. It was damp and cool. There were a few rotting ikons on the walls of the vault and someone had lit a candle. He told me the story of the saint’s burial and the finding of the relics. "Where the saint’s body was found,” he said, “sprang a well of water. And this water cures skin diseases.” We ascended the damp stairs and entered a vaulted building erected above the well. In a corner was a tin bucket tied to a long rope; the monk let this down into the well. He drew it up full of ice-cold water. It is still in great demand as a cure for all kinds of complaints. When the monk had returned to his painting, I sat on a wall near the tomb of St. Barnabas and tried to put together the jigsaw of history and legend. We know that Barnabas went through Cyprus with Paul and Mark, probably in A.D. 45. A second tour was suggested, but was vetoed by Paul (Acts xv, 36-41) because he refused to let Mark go with them, as on the first journey. Paul chose Silas and went into Asia Minor, while Barnabas, with his cousin, Mark, paid a second visit to Cyprus. Here the clear light of history fades from Barnabas, and we see him only in the moonlight of legend. The Cypriots believe that Barnabas so infuriated the Jews of Salamis that they stoned him to death in the hippodrome of that city. Mark stole the body of his friend and buried it secretly at night in a Roman tomb outside Salamis.

So far the legend is probable. It is just the kind of thing that might have happened. Over 400 years passed by. Since the death of Barnabas, Christianity had become the official religion of the State. At this time —the period A.D. 474-491—the church in Cyprus was engaged in a long dispute with the church in Antioch. It was a struggle for supremacy. The church at Antioch claimed that Cyprus came under its jurisdiction, but the church in Cyprus claimed to have been founded by an Apostle and to be equal in authority, and independent of, Antioch. However, the dispute was settled in favour of Antioch.

It was at this moment that help came from a remarkable quarter. St. Barnabas, appearing in a vision to the Archbishop of Cyprus, advised him to take the dispute personally to the Emperor Zeno in Constantinople, and revealed the tomb in which he had been placed by St. Mark. The Archbishop, accompanied by his clergy and a great crowd, went on the following day to the spot indicated by the vision, and digging under a carob tree, found the remains of St. Barnabas lying with a copy of St. Matthew’s Gospel, which Mark had placed on his breast. The Archbishop at once set out with the relics for Constantinople. The Emperor Zeno was so impressed that he called together a special synod to discuss the question. It was eventually decided that Cyprus was to be independent of Antioch. We are now on firm historical ground. So impressed was the emperor by the discovery of the saint’s bones, that he conferred on the Church of Cyprus the privilege of being autocephalous, or of electing its own head, the Archbishop of Cyprus, a right which this church still possesses. The emperor also conferred on the Archbishop the privilege of signing his name in red ink—a colour used only by Byzantine emperors on their State documents—of wearing a cope of imperial purple, and of carrying a sceptre instead of a pastoral staff. These privileges, granted over 1450 years ago, are closely guarded to-day by the Archbishops of Cyprus. They sign tfieir names in red ink; they wear a purple cape sewn with little hells; and they still carry a sceptre like that of the Byzantine emperors of Constantinople. It might be imagined that all this betokens tremendous pomp and worldly splendour. But this is not so. I believe the fixed personal stipend of the Archbishop of Cyprus is £2OO a year.