High on the plateau which waters the Euphrates and Tigris lie the Christian villages and monasteries of Tur Abdin. A border territory in Roman days between Rome and Persia today it is the end of Turkey and looks over Syria and Iraq. Despite a history of occupation and migration it is the centre for the dispersed Syrian Orthodox community throughout the world, and a centre of pilgrimage. In ancient times it flourished with unique styles of art and architecture, its churches resonating to St Ephrem’s hymns, some written in Nisibis on the southern edge of the area. Although Tur Abdin means ‘Mountain of the Servants’ (i.e. of God) it was not just the monks who defined its nature, but the determined faithfulness of the laypeople who still live amidst the rest of the Kurds, Arabs and Turkomen who have come to inhabit the area.

Our pilgrimage will be led by Bishop Christopher Chessun, Bishop of Woolwich. It will be his first pilgrimage with us. We are fortunate to have with us Fr Stephen Griffith who has been involved in Tur Abdin since he was reporting from Damascus on the difficult human rights situation in Tur Abdin in the mid 1990s. As well as reporting to Churches Together in Britain and Ireland he built up close relations with Turkey's embassy and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. In his many journeys there he has continued a long relationship between the Church of England and the Syrian Orthodox of Tur Abdin going back to the mid nineteenth century, and is one of the few British Christians who knows the contemporary situation there well. He is presently researching Gertrude Bell's 1909 visit to the area from a political point of view, at the University of Newcastle.