SANCTE PATER: 'The last Mohicans' of Christ

This blog entry is interesting and needs to be read by anyone interested in the disappearance of Christianity in the land of Jesus, St. Paul and St. Peter.

Published Date: 27 April 2008

By Robert F Worth
In Malula,
Syria

ELIAS Khoury can still remember the days when old people in the
mountain village of Malula spoke only Aramaic, the language of Jesus. Back then the village, linked to the capital Damascus, only by a long and bumpy bus ride, was almost entirely Christian, a vestige of an older, more diverse Middle East that existed before the arrival of Islam.

Now Khoury, 65, grey-haired and bedridden, admits ruefully that he has largely forgotten the language he spoke with his own mother.

'It's disappearing,' he said in Arabic, sitting with his wife on a bed in the mud-and-straw house where he grew up. 'A lot of the Aramaic vocabulary I don't use any more, and I've lost it.'

Malula, along with two smaller neighbouring villages where Aramaic
is also spoken, is still celebrated in Syria as a unique linguistic island. In the Convent of St Sergius and Bacchus, on a hill above town, young girls recite the Lord's Prayer in Aramaic to tourists, and booklets about the language are on sale at a shop in the town centre.

But the island has grown smaller over the years, and some locals say they fear it will not last. Once a large population stretching across Syria, Turkey and Iraq, Aramaic-speaking Christians have slowly disappeared, some fleeing westward, some converting to Islam. In
recent decades, the process has accelerated, with large numbers of Iraqi Christians escaping the violence and chaos of their country."