Introduction - The Dream of Saint Matthew's Monastery

Twelve miles from Mosul, in the north of Iraq, a long, sandy-coloured building clings to a dry, dusty hillside, blending in with its rocky surroundings. It is Saint Matthew’s Monastery, originally built in the fourth century for a group of monks whose head was Mar Mattai. Mar Mattai was born in Amid, near present day Diyarbakir in south eastern Turkey, where he took holy orders. The area was part of the Roman Empire where, after the conversion of the Emperor Constantine in 312, Christianity enjoyed a privileged position. However, Julian, Emperor from 361 to 363, most of whose relatives had been killed by Christian Emperors and who had grown up in fear of his own life, reacted against Christianity. He adopted and promoted the old Roman polytheistic faith, and fined Christian churches, seized land from them and put bars on Christians becoming teachers. The tradition of the Syriac Orthodox Church is that Mar Mattai and many other monks fled their homes during the reign of Julian and found refuge on the Maqloub mountain.

The Maqloub mountain was in the province of Assyria, in the Sassanid Persian Empire. There is a story that Mar Mattai befriended a local prince, Behnam, and taught him about Christianity.  The prince was impressed and when his sister, Sara, became ill with leprosy, he brought her to Mattai. The monk cured her, and inspired Behnam, Sara and forty of their companions to convert to Christianity. Behnam and Sara’s father, King Sencharib, was appalled, perhaps because he was a follower of Zoroastrianism which was the official religion of the Sassanid Empire, and had his children and the forty companions killed, but Sencharib later regretted his deed and converted to Christianity himself. In atonement for his actions and to mark the spot where his daughter had been healed, Sencharib commissioned the building of a monastery.

                  My grandfather, Severius Denno, who came from a Syriac Orthodox family, used to visit Saint Matthew’s Monastery. I never met my grandfather and I have never been to Saint Matthew’s Monastery but when I imagine him, it is often there that I picture him. I imagine the monastery being approached on foot and my grandfather arriving dusty and sweaty. Then I see him sitting in the hot sun, enjoying the grandeur of this mountainside view over the plain of Ninevah, chatting to the monks in their simple black robes, tall black hats and big beards.

                  Severius Denno came from Iraq to England in the 1940s to study Engineering at Sheffield University. There, he met my Grandma who was a librarian at the university. After their marriage in 1951, they moved to Baghdad and lived there for nearly a decade before returning to England.

                  At school, I was something of an outsider. People thought I was weird because I was a Christian, my family did not have a television and I did my homework, and I was quiet by nature and not very good at engaging with people. My reaction to being treated as different was to embrace the idea, and to think of everyone else as not worth being friends with anyway. Even though it had nothing to do with it, my difference was always connected in my head with my Iraqi heritage. So, in those teenage years that are so important in the forging of one’s self-identity, my Iraqi roots played a big part in mine. I was a fairly self-contained adolescent and I spent a lot of time reading. I particularly enjoyed books about long journeys, people running the length of the Great Wall of China, walking the route of the old Silk Road and traipsing from the Hook of Holland to Istanbul, and I always liked the idea that one day I would do a long walk myself.

                  In 2009, my friends Dan and Magali walked from Le Puy en Velay in France to the pilgrimage site Santiago de Compostella in Spain. I joined them for a week at the beginning of their journey, and I was inspired again to do something like that myself one day. I liked the idea of pilgrimage, a spiritual as well as a physical journey to a significant destination, but thought that if I was to undertake a pilgrimage, I would want the destination to be somewhere that is significant to me personally. I started to think about a pilgrimage to Iraq, the land of my grandfather, of my roots.

                  During a period of unemployment in 2011, I had a lot of time on my hands and put an advert on gumtree, the classified adverts website, asking anyone interested in walking to Iraq to contact me. A number of people did get in touch and I met up with two of them, Meqdad and Amaan, who were both living in London. Meqdad was a twenty year old Philosophy student. His parents were Afghan and he was born in Iran where he lived until the age of seven when the family had moved to Britain. He was an earnest young man, tussling with questions of identity as a Muslim in a largely secular country. He suggested books of philosophy for me to read, and when I professed a fondness for freshly baked bread, said I would love the bread of the Middle East. Amaan was from Afghanistan and had fled after getting on the wrong side of the Taliban. The first time I met Amaan, I told him about one of my ancestors on the other side of my family, Doctor Brydon, as I happened to be reading a book about him at the time. Doctor Brydon was the sole survivor of a massacre of the British army by Afghan tribes while retreating through the mountains from Kabul to Jalalabad in 1842 and is my great great great grandfather. When I asked Amaan if he had heard of Dr Brydon, he said, ‘Of course I know who he is, he’s famous in Afghanistan. I am honoured to meet his great great great granddaughter.’ 

                  Once Amaan and Meqdad were on board, my sister, Lydia, said she also wanted to come on the walk, and the four of us planned a weekend away together of walking and camping to see how we got on. Prior to the weekend, we gathered a few times, and on one occasion, Amaan and I met up for a day’s walk in the Peak District. Amaan had told me that when he escaped Afghanistan, he walked all the way from there to Britain, so I thought he would have no problem with a fairly long day’s walk. He arrived wearing a pair of smart, shiny black shoes, and he walked very slowly partly because the shoes were killing his feet and partly because he was out of shape. He said that he had driven through the Peak District many times but he had no idea people were free to walk in it. Amaan was an intense collocutor so we had a day of deep conversation and frequent rests.

                  For our practice weekend, I planned two days of walking on the South Downs Way. We were going to cook at our campsite and I suggested we keep the cooking very simple, but Amaan objected to this and agreed to take care of the cooking himself. He turned up with the most enormous saucepan in an impractical supermarket carrier bag, and proceeded to foist it on Meqdad who carried it for the whole of the trip. Meqdad had never done any walking but he was a frequenter of the gym and he had no trouble, but Amaan, a taxi driver, puffed his way up the many hills and was clearly struggling. When we realised that we were unlikely to reach our destination before dark, Lydia and I suggested that we catch a bus some of the way. Amaan was adamant that we should not, we had come to walk and that was what we would do. A little later, Amaan now suggested that we try and find a bus. It seemed it was too galling for him to accept the suggestion from someone else; he wanted to be in charge. We dropped down into the nearest town and ended up getting a taxi to the campsite where Amaan cooked us up an exquisite meal.

                  After this difficult weekend, I slowly lost touch with Amaan and Meqdad, but, though they were not part of the trip in the end, they are a crucial part of the story as their involvement helped to make the dream feel more real to me. It was now something I was preparing for and discussing seriously with people. In the spring of 2013, I was offered the opportunity to do some training at work on the condition that I committed to staying with the company for the next two years. I decided then that when those two years were up, I would set off on my walk to Iraq. At the time, things were relatively safe in the north of Iraq, and I planned, with visions of my grandfather in my head, for Saint Matthew’s Monastery to be the destination of my walk.

                  In June 2014, Mosul was in the news as it had been attacked and taken by the group Islamic State. My initial reaction was one of excitement, ‘Wow, they’re talking about Mosul on the radio, that’s where my family are from.’ However, I soon realised that this made the possibility of walking there an unlikely one, unless I wished to risk my life. Most people knew little of Islamic State in early summer 2014 though they had been active in Syria for the last year, but over the next year we got used to hearing horrifying news of their methods, as they slaughtered, maimed, beheaded and terrorised their way across the region.

                  Still, the dream of Saint Matthew’s Monastery remained. I wanted to walk towards it as the symbolic destination even if it could not be the actual one. By this time, my boyfriend, Ian, was on board and Lydia thought she would only be able to afford to come for the first couple of months. I mapped out a route as far as Budapest, planning for around fifteen miles a day and one day off a week. I started writing to potential hosts, and we bought camping gear for the nights when we would need to camp. Finally, in April 2015, after years of dreaming, we were ready to set off towards Iraq.