Sunday is a good day to drive to Maaloula. There are fig and olive trees and
grapes by the road and, for a time, you can forget that Syria is enduring an
epic tragedy. True, you mustn't turn right to Tell, where the Syrian Arab Army
are having a spot of bother with the Free Syrian Army and there are 35 military
checkpoints on the 100-mile round trip from Damascus; but in the cool mountains
east of the Lebanese border, Christians and Muslims live together as they have
for 1,300 years. History, however, does not leave them alone.
Enter the wonderful Catholic church of Saint Sarkis and you find paintings of
two Roman soldiers, based at the imperial fort of Rasafa north of Palmyra, who
converted to Christianity and found themselves in a rather Syrian situation.
Sergius and Pixos upset the Great Leader in Rome – the empire had not yet
abandoned Jupiter, Venus, Bacchus and the rest – who ordered their execution. So
the two legionnaires took sanctuary in Maaloula, preaching Christianity until
the long arm of Rome's intelligence service caught up with them, and they were
hauled back to Rasafa to be beheaded on the orders of the emperor. I look at the
old man who is recounting this story to me and we both nod in unspoken agreement
of its current relevance. Sergius and Pixos were defectors.
Over the Roman temple of Maaloula was built the church, and thence came in
1942 the twice wounded General Wladyslaw Anders, who was shepherding his 75,000
emaciated Polish soldiers from Soviet imprisonment through the Holy Land to join
the Second World War allies and subsequently the battle for Monte Cassino.
Anders gave a beautiful icon of Christ to the church at Maaloula; I found it
inside the front porch, his name written at the base, but no hint of his
mission. His brave II Polish Corps was condemned by Poland's post-war Communist
government as a legion of defectors...