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Turkey's gift to the world
By
K Gajendra Singh
If one drives from the Turkish
city of Fethiye to Antalya, littered with hotels and
resorts for millions of tourists who throng its
Mediterranean coast, which was known as Lycia in ancient
times, after passing innumerable ancient ruins, one
reaches the town of Demre, known as Myra in olden days.
In the center of the town one will come across
the Church of St Nicholas, the patron saint of children,
sailors and the poor and one of the most popular saints
in Christianity now associated with the celebration of
Christmas. Many legends have been woven around Nicholas,
who was the bishop of this church in the 4th century AD
and where he died in 342. He was born in about 280 AD in
the town of Patara, which the traveler would have passed
about 100 kilometers earlier.
As a young man
Nicholas traveled to Palestine and Egypt and became the
bishop at Myra on his return. He was imprisoned during
the persecution of Christians by Roman Emperor
Diocletian. The persecution ended when Emperor
Constantine made Christianity the state religion and
built his capital at Constantinople in 324 AD on the
Straits of Bosporus, separating Asia and Europe. When
conquered in 1453 by Sultan Fethi Mehmet, Constantinople
became the new Ottoman capital, now known as Istanbul.
After his release from prison, St Nicholas
attended the first Christian Council in 325 at Nicea.
There is definite historical evidence of this in the
records of the council. Nicea, now known as Iznik,
famous for its Ottoman tiles, is not far from Istanbul
on the Asian side of the city that straddles two
continents.
The stories of miracles and
benevolence associated with St Nicholas and the legends
woven around him have identified him as Santa Claus and
Father Christmas. The earliest reference to him occurs
in a Greek text of the 6th century, according to which
three officers condemned to death by Constantine were
saved when St Nicholas appeared to the emperor in a
dream. In another legend, a merchant fallen on bad times
was very much worried about dowry for his three
daughters who could not be otherwise married and might
have ended up as prostitutes. One evening, while passing
by, St Nicholas overheard the unhappy merchant's
conversation of with his wife. So the next day, secretly
entering by the window, he lobbed three bags of gold
coins in the house of the merchant, thus enabling his
daughters to marry and live happily ever afterwards.
That story lies behind the three gold balls used
as a sign by pawnbrokers. Another legend consists of
three boys who had been cut up by mistake by a butcher.
St Nicholas restored them to life. There are many other
such stories.
A biography of St Nicholas written
by a 6th century abbot of a nearby church, also named
Nicholas, spread his fame throughout the Christian
world, starting with Germany and other countries of
reformed Christianity and later to France. St Nicholas
was chosen the patron saint of Russia, Greece and
various charities and was a popular name for kings and
common men alike. Thousands of churches are dedicated to
him, the first built in the 6th century AD at
Constantinople by Emperor Justinian. His miracles became
the subject for medieval artists and liturgical plays.
But Santa Claus' tomb in Myra is of a later
date. By the 6th century his shrine was quite well
known. Being specially benevolent to sailors and
merchants, who had adopted him, his remains were
spirited away to Bari in Italy in 1087 by a group of
merchants or sailors to save it from desecration by
Muslims. His relics are enshrined in the 11th century
Basilica of St Nicholas. Its removal on May 9 to Bari is
celebrated with fanfare, making it a holy and crowded
place of pilgrimage for Christians.
The word
Christmas comes from old English cristes maesse, or
"Christ's Mass". For Christians, Christmas is a
celebration of Jesus' birth, although the exact date of
birth is not known. However, in 336 AD, Christian
leaders set the date to December 25 in an attempt to
counter a popular pagan holiday in Rome that celebrated
the winter solstice. Originally, Christmas involved a
simple mass, but slowly it has subsumed or replaced a
number of other holidays in many countries, and a large
number of other religious and cultural traditions have
been absorbed into the celebrations.
Christmas
comes three times each year to Bethlehem, where Jesus
was born. While the Western Church and the Russian
Orthodox Church both celebrate Christmas on December 25,
the Russian Church still uses the old Julian calendar
which places their (December 25) celebration on January
7, according to our calendar. The Armenian Church
celebrates on January 6 by the Julian calendar, which
becomes January 19 to us. To add to the confusion, the
January 6 celebration of Epiphany overlaps into the
Russian Christmas. In addition, the diversity in climate
has shaped Christmas festivities all over the world.
Ethnic groups have brought their own traditions,
specially in an immigrant society like the United
States. Even food varies from country to country.
Americans concentrate on Turkey (in Turkey, the bird is
called Hindi - anything exotic has to be from India),
while dinner on Christmas eve in Germany consists of
dishes such as suckling pig, white sausage, macaroni
salad and many regional dishes.
The English
celebrate Christmas season with hearty feasting and
merrymaking with wild abandon. They have been doing so
perhaps since King Arthur, as the legend goes, made
"merrie" in 521 AD at York surrounded by "minstrels,
gleemen, harpers, pipe-players, jugglers and dancers".
It appears that celebrations went underground during
puritan Cromwellian rule as did sex during another
puritan Victorian era.
Apart from Le Pere Joel
(Father Christmas), the French have Le Pere Fouettard
(Father Spanker) to "reward" bad children with spanking.
In the Netherlands, children are told that Santa Claus,
known as Sinterklaas, arrives from Spain on a steamer on
his feast day, December 6. The night before, children
fill their shoes with hay and sugar for his horse. In
the morning they find them filled with gifts such as
nuts and candy. Sometimes Sinterklaas appears in person
in the children's homes, along with his assistant, Black
Pete.
The people of Twente, Denenkamp and
Ootmarsum in eastern Holland announce the coming of the
Christ child by blowing special horns, handcrafted from
birch saplings three or four feet in length, which when
blown over wells produce a deep-toned sound similar to a
foghorn. This tradition goes back to around 2,500 BC
when horn blowing was believed to chase evil spirits
away. Now horn blowing is relayed from farm to farm to
announce the arrival of the Christmas season.
In
what is now the US, Christmas was perhaps first
celebrated at Tallahassee, Florida, in 1539 in Spanish
style by Hernando de Soto and his army. Legends of Santa
Claus and the celebration of Christmas as the feast day
were taken to New York by Dutch immigrants. In the
beginning the Puritans in New England had even
suppressed it by law (identifying it with pagan rites
and Papist practices), arguing that the New Testament
gave no date for Christ's birth.
But it then
blossomed into a carnival and became even rowdy and
disruptive, almost like "Holi" - the north Indian
festival of colors. It was neither a family nor a
commercial holiday at the beginning of the 19th century,
but become so by its end. The transformation of Santa
Claus around the 1820s, into a night visitor bringing
gifts for children and the poor, made it pro-plebian and
Christmas became an enjoyable festival. But Santa Claus'
magical tricks, benevolence and love for children have
made Christmas a family festival with gifts for
children, perhaps based on Nordic tales of rewarding
good children and the exchange of gifts among family
members and friends. That is why people from all over
the world from other religions also join in.
While New York has its tree, in California
thousands flock to Hollywood for the annual Parade of
Stars, while others converge on Balboa Park in San Diego
for Christmas concerts on the world's largest outdoor
pipe organ. Festivities range from a picnic on the beach
at Waikiki or Key West to candles in a window during the
twilight of a cold day in Alaska. Nowadays consumerism
has overtaken simple celebrations, in the US the most,
where traders, economists and government look at counter
sales between Thanksgiving and Christmas for its likely
impact on the US economy. As George Bernard Shaw
commented, "Christmas is forced upon a reluctant and
disgusted nation by the shopkeepers and the press; on
its own merits it would wither and shrivel in the fiery
breath of universal hatred."
To most Americans,
St Nicholas is just another name for Santa Claus - plump
and rosy-cheeked - whereas for most of Europeans and
Asians he is a thin figure dressed in bishop's robes,
also so it is shown in Demre town's square in Turkey. As
Christmas in Europe and North America falls in
mid-winter, the tradition of a white snow Christmas,
white bearded Santa Claus and other myths, have emerged.
The popular song "I'm Dreaming of a White Christmas" for
the movie "Holiday Inn" (1942) sung by Bing Crosby,
perhaps further confirmed this perception.
Myra,
though, is not cold. Nor is Patara, his birth place five
kilometers from one of the longest sandy beaches in
Turkey. When I went there in August 1994, it was
impossible to walk on the hot sand, although many north
European tourists looking like grilled lobsters were
enjoying themselves, some bicycling around in steaming
temperatures. But it was quite pleasant in March. Patara
is also full of Roman and Byzantine ruins, including a
theater, the magnificent Hadrian's Gate and a Christian
Basilica.
Myra was an important town in the
region. St Paul and St Luke had visited it a few times
while going to Ephesus. It was the capital of the
Byzantine Lycia until it fell to Caliph Harun al Rashid
in 808. Apart from St Nicholas' Church, Myra attracts
tourists for its shrines and rock-cut sepulchers on a
hill, looking like carved wooden houses. At the foot of
the hill is a large Roman theater.
Demre town is
located in a swampy flat area full of mosquitoes and its
hothouse cultivation of vegetables and fruit with acres
of plastic sheets make for an ugly sight. The harbor of
Demre, now known as Chayazi, the ancient Andriace on the
river Xanthos, has boats to take one to the beaches of
Kekova island or Kas, both popular spots with rich yacht
owners from Europe and the US. Turkey is now seriously
in the business of exploiting its ancient historical and
religious sites to attract tourists. It holds a festival
every year on December 6 to celebrate St Nicholas Day at
Demre, with great fanfare, inviting tourists, clergymen,
journalists and others.
Turkey, known as Asia
Minor in ancient times, was the cradle of early
Christianity. In a grotto near Antakya (Antioch),
bordering Syria, St Peter held the first mass. Followers
of Jesus Christ were called Christians here for the
first time. Christianity spread from here and first
blossomed in the east at Edessa, now known as Urfa, from
where 500 people went to Malabar Coast in the 4th
century AD (and other groups later) to form early
distinct Syrian Christian communities.
Nearby in
Tur Abdin and Midyat, with old Syrian Christian
monasteries and churches, Suryani Christians still speak
Syriac, a language akin to what Jesus Christ spoke. St
Paul was a native of Tarsus in Cilicia. Seven churches
located in Turkey are mentioned in the Revelation of
John: Ephesus (nearby the Virgin Mary is reputedly
buried), Smyrna, Pergamum, Thiatira, Sardis,
Philadelphia and Laodicea. Chalcedon is an Asian suburb
of Istanbul, known as Kadikoy and not far from it is
Nicomedea, now called Izmit, a major industrial center.
With more Greek ruins than Greece and more Roman
monuments than Italy, Turkey, with its Mediterranean and
Aegean coast resorts, attracts nearly 10 million to 12
million tourists a year and earns over US$8 billion in
tourist dollars every year. Even Europeans are amazed to
find that places where Greek and hence the earliest
European political and religious thought evolved are in
Turkey. The spiritual forefathers of Socrates, Plato and
Aristotle, the very first Greek philosophers Thales,
Anaximander and Anaximenus, were born and lived in
Miletus around the 6th century BC, east of present day
Ephesus and Izmir, then known as Smyrna, the birth place
of Homer, of Odyssey and Iliad fame.
From Ionia
along Turkey's western coast entered the word Yunani for
the Greeks in the Eastern lexicon. The historian
Herodotus was born in Halicarnassus, now known as
Bodrum, a port. The geographer Strabo was born at
Amasia, east of Turkey's capital Ankara. Troy, of Helen,
Trojan horse and Achilles' heel fame, is located on the
Asian side of the Dardanelles. Across at Gallipoli on
the European side lie buried thousands of Indian
soldiers, with their Australian, New Zealand and British
comrades. They were killed (some say foolishly
sacrificed) in fierce battles during World War I when
the mighty British navy tried to take over the
peninsula. Its defense made Kemal Ataturk, a colonel
then, a hero among Turks.
It was at Zile,
northeast of Ankara, that Julius Caesar proclaimed
veni, vidi ,vici (I came, I saw, I conquered)
after his unexpected quick victory over Pharnaces II,
whose father Mithradates VI had given a tough fight to
the Romans.The name Mithridates (gift of Mithra), a
popular name in the region, comes from the Vedic and
Avestan god Mithra.
The Greek Hellenic world
came in contact with the sophisticated religions and
philosophy of the East, including Mithraism, after the
small town boy Alexander and his hordes cut a swathe of
victories across the Achaemenian Empire. They also
learnt about state protocol and the divinity of the
emperor. Coming into contact with neo-Platonian and
other ideas, Mithraism flowered between the 2nd and 4th
centuries in the Roman world and became a very popular
religion among the Roman aristocracy, military leaders
and soldiers, traders and slaves with powerful patrons
among Roman emperors, like Commodus, Septimium Severus,
Caraculla and others. Diocletian built a temple for
Mithra near Vienna on Danube as "the Protector of the
Empire".
Along the Rhine, Danube, Euphrates and
in Roman north Africa, where Roman legions used to camp,
there are ruins of hundreds of underground Mithra
temples, with the slaying of the Cosmic Bull symbolizing
the creation of the universe and fertility. (Perhaps the
Spanish sport of bullfighting originates from it). As
the god of Light and Sun, contract, loyalty and justice,
Mithraism was organized (but open only to men, being an
Aryan patriarchal religion) in a graded hierarchy, with
novices ascending up the highest seventh level -
something like Buddhist /Hindu sanghas (orders).
Various astronomical symbols, still
indecipherable, with their meanings transmitted orally
from teacher to pupil in Aryan/Avestan tradition, still
remain unknown. One can speculate that they were similar
to levels in meditation for final unity with God.
Celebrations for Mithra's birthday on December 25, the
sun's solstice, was so popular in the East that
Christmas had to be shifted to this day from January 6
to make it acceptable among the masses. Christianity
also took over many of the rituals and symbols of
Mithraism, like baptism, resurrection and prayers in
honor of the sun.
The earliest written mention
of Mithra, the guarantor of contract, was found on
tablets not far from Ankara amid the ruins of Bogazkoy,
the capital of the Indo-European Hittites. The Mithra
gods (also Indra, Varuna and Natasya) were invoked as
the god of oath in the peace treaty between the Hittites
and the Indo-Aryan Mitannis, who ruled for three
centuries in southeast Turkey and Syria (1,500 BC to
1,200 BC). The Bogazkoy archives also produced a
horse-training manual. The technical terms used in horse
training and chariotry, like aika wartanna,
navartanna (one turn, nine turns) are like ek
vartanam, nava vartanam, as in Vedic Sanskrit. Both
the treaty and the training manual tablets are displayed
from time to time at the Archeological Museum in
Istanbul.
Mitannis also signed a peace treaty
with the Pharaohs to counteract the Hittite threat from
the northwest. This was cemented with Mitanni princesses
being married to the Pharaohs. Princess Gilukhepa was
married to Amun Hotep III. She went to her husband in
style with 317 Mitannian maidens.
Later, the
Mitanni king Tushratta (whose chariot wheels rolled the
fastest - a la Ferrari nowadays) gave his daughter
Tadukhepa to Amun Hotep IV, who also married Gilukhepa,
youngest in his father's harem. It is generally believed
that Gilukhepa was no other than the beautiful and
famous Nefertiti. It is known that Nefertiti fully
supported her husband's efforts to bring in monotheism.
This upset the vested interests of priests and after
their sudden disappearance, old gods and cults came
back. It was from Egypt, where Moses was born and
brought up, that he led out the Jews with the idea of
one god Jehovah.
But for the 312 AD victory at
the Milvian Bridge under the banner of the Cross, after
which Constantine opted for Christianity, leading to the
decline of Mithraism, it is conceivable that Mithraism
might have spread and become a world religion. But like
most religions, Christianity, which was itself
persecuted, did the same to other religions and its own
newer sects, with religion, alas, becoming another tool
for control and exploitation by the powerful.
Then came Islam with jihads and to counter the
Crusades. The concept of crusades and jihad is once
again at the forefront, and if pursued could play havoc
with earthlings. It's crucial that leaders of all
countries forget their short-term interests and ponder
what has gone wrong with the human race. They should
strive for reconciliation and peaceful solutions to
differences.
K Gajendra Singh, Indian
ambassador (retired), served as ambassador to Turkey
from August 1992 to April 1996. Prior to that, he served
terms as ambassador to Jordan, Romania and Senegal.
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