Saints Thomas & Matthew

It was a very foggy morning when we had breakfast at Baron Hotel’s rooftop restaurant.  There was a Taiwanese group there.

The idea had been to go to Mar Matai (St Matthew) monastery out of town first before returning to see places closer to the hotel.  But with the dense fog, it seemed better to leave the excursion till the fog had burnt off.

We took a walk around the surrounding area and E ended up buying a long Syrian coat.  We returned to store it at the hotel before resuming the walk in earnest to the Mar Thomas (St Thomas) church.

We found the Church of Our Lady of the Hour (which E said was a Franciscan monastery) before we found the Mar Thomas, which was closed.

The former had fixed visiting hours and it wasn’t the right time.  And Mar Thomas looked locked up for renovation.  We walked away a little disappointed but while looking at a small chapel nearby from a carpark, an old gentleman approached us.

He offered to go get the key for Mar Thomas and show us through.  We hopped into his truck to go the caretaker’s house next to the church.  The caretaker wasn’t particularly impressed with the requested but played along.

E is seriously Catholic and the visit was particularly meaningful to him.  He sang a plainchant while in there.

Wikipedia describes the church as Syriac Orthodox while indications here were that it is Syriac Catholic.  E explained that the Eastern churches were kinda different from the Western Catholic churches and they switch allegiance some time ago and there are some factions too.

The St Thomas Church was mentioned in historical text as early as 770AD but the current structure is from the 13th Century.

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Mar Mattai monastery

Back on the streets around 1000, it was still quiet being a Friday morning.  We hailed a taxi and explained that we wanted to go to Mar Mattai monastery.

We headed out of the city and around 1100 crossed a Kurdish checkpoint.  As far as I had known, the church as in the main part of Iraq and not in Iraqi Kurdistan.   But things are not clear-cut and I later realised that it is in one of the many Kurdish-held areas which are still in dispute or negotiation.

Shortly after, we went off the main road and could see the monastery tucked in the hills above.  We arrived at the monastery around 1120.

The monastery was established in 363 AD but some of what we see are from 1929.  It had buildings around a large courtyard.

We visited the church and a room with graves of some saints.  There were a number of kitchens and rooms that were closed.  This St Matthew died around 411 AD, so I’m guessing he’s not one of Jesus’ twelve apostles.

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Nineveh

After about 40 mins at the monastery, we returned to the taxi for our ride back to Mosul, asking to be dropped off near the site of Nineveh.  Nineveh takes up a big area so we chose a side to our convenience.

Nineveh was the world’s largest city during Biblical times until destruction in a civil war in 612 BC.

There’s not much of the place left in the areas that we explored.  ISIL destroyed one of the remaining restored gates and there were supposed to be some large some blocks which we didn’t see until leaving Mosul the next day.

What we saw of Nineveh.

Around Mosul again

We returned to the hotel again around 1345 and rested until taking a pre-dinner walk.  We crossed the old bridge which was partially built on a historic stone one before taking an early dinner around 1730.

We’ve been having light sandwich lunches lately, made up from hotel buffet breakfasts.  It’s also cold in Mosul especially at night and we wanted to keep warm indoors.