Luckily the Almighty, realising that his divine plan for mankind was in danger, intervened at this point and promptly turned the furnace into a pool full of carp. The carp, obedient to divine promptings, came together to form a sort of lifeboat. They caught the baby and carried him to the poolside. In his gratitude, Abraham promised that anyone who ate the carp would go blind.
I heard several other versions of the story while in Urfa, most of which tended to contradict each other in the details, but which all agreed on the broad outlines of the tale, one way or another linking Abraham, the citadel, the pond and the carp, with a walk-on part for Nimrod the Hunter. While the Book of Genesis does quite specifically mention Abraham’s visit to Haran, only twenty miles from here, quite why Nimrod should turn up in Urfa is a mystery. His brief appearance in the Bible after the Flood in no way links him either to Abraham or to Urfa, yet the imam firmly insisted that it was Nimrod who founded the town, and raised its walls and palace: a bizarre dogleg from both Biblical and Koranic tradition.
But the true history of the fishponds as disentangled by historians is no less bizarre than the versions I heard by the pool. Apparently the ponds may well go back to the era of Abraham, and even the taboo on the consumption of the fish seems to be a remarkable survival from ancient Mesopotamia. For historians are unanimous that the origins of the fishponds are not linked to Islam, nor even to early Christian or Jewish legend. Instead it seems almost certain that they are a relic of one of the most ancient cults in the Middle East, that of the Syrian fertility goddess Attargatis.
The second-century writer Lucian of Samosata, the only reliable ancient source for the goddess’s cult, describes the worship of Attargatis as being centred on the adoration of water – naturally enough for a fertility cult that grew up in a desert. In the goddess’s temples, statues of mermaids stood on the edge of ponds in which – then as now – swam fish of immense size. The fish were never eaten and were so tame, claimed Lucian, that they came when summoned by name. Attargatis’s altar lay in the middle of the lake, in which devotees used to swim and perform erotic ceremonies in honour of the Goddess of Love and Fertility.
When Edessa was converted to Christianity, the new religion took on much of the colouring of pre-existing pagan cults in the town. The priests of Attargatis used to emasculate themselves; as late as the fifth century A.D. the Christian Bishop of Edessa was still frantically trying to stop his priests from taking knives to their own genitalia. In the same way, astonishingly, the fishponds seem to have succeeded in making the transition from being sacred to an orgiastic pagan fertility cult to being holy to Christianity instead.
In 384 Egeria, the abbess of a Spanish nunnery, arrived in Edessa on her epic pilgrimage to Jerusalem and was invited for a poolside picnic by the bishop. Had she read Lucian’s description of the fertility ceremonies performed by the fishponds she might have suspected the bishop’s intentions. As it was, clearly ignorant of the ponds’ pagan origins, she recounts that they were miraculously created by God and were ‘full of fish such as I had never seen before, that is fish of such great size, of such great lustre’.
After the Arab conquest the fishponds continued to attract reverence, but under a new Islamic guise; Islam thus became the third faith to which these fish have been sacred. The name of the religion and the sex of the deity has altered with the centuries, but the fish have remained sacred age after age, culture after culture. It is a quite extraordinary example of continuity despite surface change: as remarkable as finding Egyptians still building pyramids, or a sect of modern Greeks still worshipping at the shrine of Zeus.
In my reading I have found only one reference to these sacred fish ever being eaten. This occurs in the imperious dispatches of the Rev. George Percy Badger, an Anglican missionary who passed through Edessa in 1824 while attempting to persuade the local Christians that what they really wanted to do was to abandon two thousand years of tradition and join the Anglican communion. He was not impressed by Edessa. The Ottoman troops there were ‘a cowardly set of poltroons on horseback’; the women ‘were excessively ignorant, untidy and not over clean in their persons or habits’; and as elsewhere in the Levant there was a ‘severe lack of English clergy … I had ample opportunity to explain the doctrines and discipline of our church, of which they were profoundly ignorant … and they seemed pleased when I promised to send them a stock of books on our ritual.’ There was not even any rhubarb to be had in the Edessa bazaars, the one thing which recommended Diyarbakir to Badger, for there at least ‘Mrs Badger could not resist her home associations’ and had made a ‘good rhubarb pudding’.
In Edessa Badger visited the fishponds. Dismissing Muslim superstition he commented that: ‘the Christians often partake of the forbidden dainty, the fish being easily secured in the streams which flow from the pond through the gardens. They generally cook them with a wine sauce,’ notes Badger approvingly, ‘and declare them excellent.’
I climbed to the citadel and looked down over Urfa. On every side the hills were brown and parched. It was nearly noon, and beyond the town’s limits nothing moved except the shimmering heatwaves and, in the distance, a single spiral of wheeling vultures. But the town itself was a riot of greens, reds and oranges: trees and gardens backing onto flat-topped Turkish houses, with the whole vista broken by the vertical punctuation of a hundred minarets. Some of these were the conventional Turkish pencil-shape, others were more unusual: the Ulu Jami retained its Byzantine octagon, while a square campanile rising above the fishponds with four double-arched horseshoe openings may once also have been the bell-tower of an early medieval church.
But there are no functioning churches in Edessa any more. Although legend has it that Edessa was the first town outside Palestine to accept Christianity – according to Eusebius, its King Abgar heard about Jesus from the Edessan Jews and corresponded with Him, accepting the new religion a year before Christ’s Passion – there has been no Christian community here since the First World War. For in 1915 the governor began ‘deporting’ the Armenians: rounding them up in groups, marching them out of town with a ‘bodyguard’ of Ottoman irregulars, then murdering them in the discreet emptiness of the desert. Fearing this treatment would be extended to the rest of the Christian community, the two thousand remaining Christian families in the town barricaded themselves into their quarter and successfully defended themselves for several weeks. But eventually the Ottoman troops broke through the makeshift defences. Some Christians escaped; a few were spared. More were massacred.
On my way back to the hotel I passed the old Armenian cathedral. Between 1915 and last year it was a fire station; now, as I discovered, it is being converted into a mosque. The altar has been dismantled, leaving the apse empty. A mihrab has been punched into the south wall. A new carpet covers the floor; outside lies a pile of old ecclesiastical woodwork destined for firewood. Two labourers in baggy pantaloons were at work on the façade, balanced on a rickety lattice of scaffolding, plastering the decorative stonework over the principal arch. I wondered if they knew the history of the building, so I asked them if it was an old mosque.
‘No,’ one of the workmen shouted down. ‘It’s a church.’
‘Greek?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘Armenian.’
‘Are there any Armenians left in Urfa?’
‘No,’ he said, smiling broadly and laughing. His friend made a throat-cutting gesture with his trowel.
‘They’ve all gone,’ said the first man, smiling.
‘Where to?’
The two looked at each other: ‘Israel,’ said the first man, after a pause. He was grinning from ear to ear.
‘I thought Israel was for Jews,’ I said.
‘Jews, Armenians,’ he replied, shrugging his shoulders. ‘Same thing.’
