Maaloula is some 50 kilometers from Damascus. The first part of the route, a steep climb all the way, is by motorway, then, on top of the limestone plateau, it follows a narrow road at the foot of a line of cliffs at an altitude of more than 1,600 meters. The light is blinding, the landscape is bare, there is not a single tree. There are only a few crawling vines here and there to relieve the stony ochre landscape, brilliant in the relentless sunshine. Suddenly a narrow fissure appears and widens soon into a deep valley. There are large patches of green again; fig trees sprout from the slopes; there are gardens surrounded by apricots; slender poplar trees appear - an oasis after the rigor of a desert crossing. Around the last bend in the road Maaloula appears.

To call it a honeycomb is really too hackneyed. Perhaps as many as a couple of hundred little cubes of masonry, all close together, seem to cling to the cliff - piled against it up to the point where it becomes a sheer wall. They are plastered in yellow, blue and sometimes mauve, making a bright contrast with the ochre of the rock, fissured in great dark stripes. Tiny windows and openings and little balconies on rickety wooden beams give some contrasting shadow to what seems like a vast cubist painting.

Saint Sergius and Saint Thecla

At the foot of this town the road divides. The left-hand branch leads up a steep ravine and emerges on a plateau planted with vines and fruit trees. A low, blue-domed building houses a small community of monks who work are peasants and in their vineyards, and have a particular devotion to Saint Sergius: Mar Sarkis. A low doorway - defensive as well as being a sign humility - leads to the monastery and the Byzantine church, which are of little interest apart from the impressive view they afford of the country below.

The right-hand branch of the road at the foot of the town leads up the slope; a stream gushes down a cleft at our feet and ahead there is good close view of the jumbled pile of houses. The imposing building to the right, at the foot of the cliffs, is another convert, dedicated this time to Saint Thecla, Mar Takla, a native of Asia Minor. Deeply moved by Saint Paul’s epistles, Mar Takla converted to Christianity. Disowned by her father, she went into exile and found asylum in Syria where she lived a mountain cavern in the Qalamoun mountain. She devoted her life to prayer and to others, which won her the respect, admiration and gratitude of the region’s rural inhabitants. When she died, the cavern became a holy place. Today it is open to tourists. A series of steps and terraces leads to the various levels of the building and to a modern domed church of no artistic interest; from there we can reach a grotto where the water dripping from the roof is said to possess miraculous powers.

To the side of mar Takla a path leads to a very narrow cleft - you can touch both sides of it - dug by the waters draining down from the plateau. This steep passage was for ages the only access to the upper monastery, Mar Sarkis. It is dangerous to use it during stormy weather.

The square minaret of a mosque rises up at the foot of the town even though the majority of the inhabitants are Christian. Religious cohabitation here is most peaceful - an encouraging example of tolerance in a region of the world that, in spite of having undergone numerous colonizing efforts, nonetheless still respects each inhabitant’s spiritual choice.

The community has another feature that will interest the visitor. Both men and women in Maaloula understand Arabic, the national language taught in all the schools, but continue to speak among themselves in the old Syrian dialect known to philologists as "Western Aramaic", an extremely ancient language current in the Middle east during the first millenium before Christ. Two books of the Bible, Daniel and Esdras, were written in Western Aramaic. It was also the language of Christ. The Lord’s Prayer, the prayer of Christians all over the world, was first spoken in Aramaic; the monks of Mar Sarkis have made a recording of it in this language for visitors.

This linguistic tradition is also preserved in the two neighboring villages of Jaba'adin and Bakhaa.An excursion to Maaloula can be easily combined with a visit to another Christian site, the convent at Seidnaya, 30 kilometers to the south-west, towards Damascus, by a good, if narrow, road.