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[Paul Younan]

"The building at Lezan, [Grant] noted, resembled every other Nestorian church he saw in the mountains. These structures, spare and simple, bore little resemblance to churches elsewhere. Several features stood out. First was their strength. Some, according to their records, had stood for over fourteen centuries when Grant saw them. Heavy stones, mortared with lime cement, were the only materials used. Yet these alone would have done little to ensure their longevity had not their roofs and portals employed the catenary arch, a building technique unknown to many mountain Kurds and a testament to the Nestorians' origins in Mesopotamia. In May 1977 I saw such a church in the village of Kespiyanish, near Beyt??ssebap, in Hakkari. It was utterly bare, yet intact, a structure no doubt centuries old and likely to last for centuries more. The Kurds of Kespiyanish marveled at the church's construction: "These people were rich!" they declared, and it was useless to argue with them. The oddest feature of a Nestorian church was its entry, and in this the Kespiyanish church matched the pattern described by nineteenth-century visitors to Hakkari. According to Thomas Laurie, the mountain tribes quoted Matthew 7:14 ("strait is the gate and narrow is the way") to explain it. Imagine a bare stone structure, some twenty feet on a side, surmounted by a vaulted roof. No windows were visible; the walls were a foot thick. Piercing the facade was an arched portal, perhaps three feet high, more like the entrance to a cave than a house of worship. The threshold barrier reached to knee-height, and in order to enter the visitor had to step over it with one leg and bend almost double to avoid hitting his head. Inside was a tiny vestibule, then two stone columns and another arch leading to the sanctuary. There, in a bare grotto the size of an average suburban living room, two square openings high upon the ceiling pierced the blackness of the dome. Such was the typical church of the mountain Nestorians. These were monuments to insecurity, masonry vaults that could be neither attacked, defended, nor modified, and in the end served for two things only: worship services and the preservation of sacred texts. In them Christianity survived from late Roman times until 1915."

--Fever and Thirst, Chapter 7

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