Inside the Mar Gabriel monastery

Today I went up on to the Tur Abdin plateau (in SE Turkey, close to the Syrian border) to visit the Syriac Orthodox monastery of Mar Gabriel, founded at the end of the fourth century AD and the last working Syriac monastery in an area which once contained 4 bishoprics and 80 monasteries. The ruins of the rest can be seen scattered across the plateau of Tur Abdin. Mar Gabriel remains a place of high symbolic and practical importance for the Syriac Orthodox Church - although wars and persecution have driven most of the Syriac Orthodox population of the Tur Abdin to emigrate, Mar Gabriel keeps the Syriac (a dialect of Aramaic) language alive by schooling local Syriac children and the children of emigrants, sent here to maintain their cultural connections with one of the ancient Christian communities of the Middle East. I attended the noon service and, listening to the liturgy chanted in Aramaic, felt a connection back to the very early roots of the Christian church.