The Red Church

This morning in the Mardin museum, standing in front of the map of Mardin’s monuments, I catch sight of the Red Church, marked with the red number 54 and emphasized with a small drawing. And the passion that a hunter can feel at the unexpected reappearance of a capital deer that has been scouted for years flares up in me again.

I have been looking for Kırmızı Kilise, the Red Church, officially called Surp Kevork, i.e. St. George Armenian Catholic Church in Mardin for years. Google Maps gives its location, and the available literature also roughly locates it there, but there is no church of any kind in that place. The people in the neighborhood haven’t heard of it either, they shrug their shoulders. At this time last year, Noémi and I spent an entire morning visiting the whole quarter, with the only result that we were able to typologize the informants: there are those who admit they do not know it (mainly women), those who quite resolutely steer you in the wrong direction (mainly men), and those who even lead you to the wrong address, mostly to the Mor Hürmüzd Syriac Catholic Church on the other side of the main street, which I have seen many times (red number 18), and there they ask for the bakshish (mainly young boys).

This time I am stubborn. I dismiss the group at five o’clock, I have time until seven. I put on my chamois-feathered hat, I load my rifle, and sit down where everyone knows everything, the Kiraathane, the smoky old boys’ café found in every Turkish neighborhood.

Affedersiniz, Kırmızı Kilise’nin nerede olduğunu biliyor musunuz? excuse me, do you happen to know where the Red Church is? I ask the waiter after the first coffee. He frowns deep, then admits that he is new here, he does not know it, but will ask someone. This someone is the owner of the café, Servet, who willingly comes to my table. “Hungarian? There were many Hungarians in the city this morning.” I congratulate him on his insight, and tell him that it was my group. I will bring the next one to him. “A hundred meters ahead on the main street, under the Sultan Sofrası restaurant you go down into the bazaar, down to the Great Mosque, from there straight down to the well of the Jews, and everyone will tell you there.” Because the above map is not meant for flat terrain, but for a hillside, so that each street is at least thirty meters lower than the previous one. “And if you are interested in anything else, feel free to come. We can help with everything here.” He lets himself be photographed under his grandfather’s photo. The café was opened nearly a hundred years ago.

My descent through the winding alleyways is followed by the suspicious glance of three-headed lions, worrying for their prey. I am only a hundred meters away from the destination marked on the map, when the manager of the Mardius historical guest house would direct me back on the main street, because he had never heard of the Red Church either. But I’m moving on.

A steep staircase leads up from the well of the Jews. The block on the left, where Google Map marks the Red Church, really stands out, it is surrounded by a fortress wall with a gabled roof, and tall buildings with large arches rise above it. But at the place marked by Google Map there is no entrance.

A man comes down the stairs with a water can in the hand. I ask him, too. He answers firmly – but not with the Oriental male determination which is just making it up – that I should go up the stairs to the Cevheriye fountain, turn sharply back on the other stairs, and there will be an entrance.

The 14th-century Cevheriye fountain is an important point of reference in the Great Mosque neighborhood. Its water is considered to have a healing effect.

From there, steep stairs lead up along the west side of the block. At the turn, a fourteen-year-old boy stands in front of a house. He looks at me and asks: “Are you looking for the church?” I say yes. He steps forward and pushes open an iron door that you would have never thought was open.

After the iron door, there is a dark doorway a few meters long, followed by a former church courtyard densely overgrown with fig trees. The church gate rises several steps to the left, but is locked with a chain and padlock.

To the right, an open gate leads to another courtyard, whose arcades recall a former monastery courtyard. I just enter and start taking photos, when a belligerent old Kurdish woman comes out of the end of the courtyard, and shouts that it is forbidden to take photos. I am saving the trump card, the red-bellied tranquilizer, for the next week, when I am going to come here with a small group, so now I am just eagerly nodding while taking photos around the yard from left to right.

In the courtyard itself, there are a few carved gravestones, most of them in secondary placement. Their inscription is mainly Arabic. Yıldız Deveci Bozkuş in his study Mardin yöresinde Ermeni-Arap ilişkilerinin (Armenian-Arab relations in the Mardin region) writes that the Armenians of Mardin used the majority language of the city, Arabic, as their everyday language and on tombstones, and he illustrates this with several tombstones of the Red Church (which, according to the photos of the article, were in the wall of the courtyard, but I could not find them).

The Arabic text of the fragment used as a stair begins with the year 1904, which refers to the Christian calendar, since the Muslims only wrote 1322 at that time

A retaining wall assembled from carving fragments. The boy who let me in is still standing next to me and retails me information: “A Christian tombstone. You know, this is a Christian church. Here there were Christians and Jews, that is, giaours”, he uses a term with absolute nonchalance which I thought was used the last time by the 16th-century Ottoman conquerors

An Armenian-language tombstone fragment on the top of the retaining wall

Tombstones with Arabic and Armenian inscriptions in the garden of the Red Church. From Bozkuş’s article

Tombstone of Father Der Hovsep Kendiryan from 1822, with Arabic and Armenian inscription, in the garden of the Red Church. From Bozkuş’s article

Bozkuş reports, that during the repair of the church in 1791, an inscription was found, which dates the foundation of the church to 420. Nesrin Aykaç’s informative article in Mardin Söz (December 1, 2022) also adds that after the Armenian Genocide of 1915 – which claimed especially many victims in Mardin – the two Armenian Catholic churches, Surp Kevork and Surp Hovsep, were used as barracks and as an orphanage for children left without parents in the genocide. The two churches were returned to the Armenian community in 1949. The latter was restored in 1949, the former between 1950 and 1954, and opened for worship. Today, however, most of the surviving Armenians have left Mardin, and the church is permanently closed. It seems that several people live in its courtyard and monastery building. The municipality has not yet decided on its fate.