These photos were made during a 10-day search for the apartment for the Travel House project, along the route defined by the logic of newspaper ads.

PS
Apologies to anyone expecting an essay on the Greek referendum.

The journey – thankfully, not mine – begins in central Iraq. The protagonist turns twenty when his spiritual twin visits him in a dream, ordering him to improve the teachings of an eccentric man killed two centuries before for a religion he didn’t even plan to create. Exactly twelve years later, again in a dream, the spiritual twin comes back to repeat his request, and the young man awakens, declares himself an apostle of Jesus Christ and goes to India with a clear intent: to create a religion.

View of the Cao'an temple. Photo: Lazar Pascanovic

Standing on the shore of the muddy Jin river, I’m struggling to understand the concept of spiritual twin. To eyes trained on European dimensions, everything in Asia seems slightly frightening: the intimidating mountain chains that jut out far above the clouds, the yellow void of the deserts, the rivers whose other shore can barely be made out in the mist, the unimaginable masses of people in perpetual motion. In some translations, I remember, it is a celestial or divine twin. Do I have one too? Philosophers of Modal Realism claim that each theoretically possible world is as real as the one we live in, and some of them believe (or at least pretend to believe) that in each one of those worlds there is one me, just a little different. I also remember reading, in Karl Jung’s Memories, that early on in his childhood he discovered a separate person inside himself – an old man with a white wig and iron-buckled shoes – with whom he sometimes conversed. If Buddha was right and “I” really is an illusion, or an overarching process in the cerebral cortex evolved to oversee everything else (including itself), then why, beside the main I-process, there couldn’t be some minor ones, half-conscious, the parasitic frequencies that huddle around the pure tone each time a hammer hits a bell?

After India, where he got acquainted with the local religious ideas, in the mid-third century A.D. Mani returns to Persia in order to teach the religion bestowed upon him by the spiritual twin. He teaches his disciples that there are two worlds: good – light – spirit on one side, vs. evil – darkness – matter on the other. Our universe wasn’t created by God, but by a lower-rank malicious creature that belongs to the material world. That is why our world is essentially evil and unbearably painful, and our task is to somehow extricate ourselves from it. The human soul fell from the world of Light and got tangled up in materiality. However, within itself it still contains thin Light threads, strong and fragile at the same time, as the last link to that other, better place – and the hope of a return.

A whole decade and a half earlier, I stared at the entry portal of Sagrada Familia church in Barcelona thinking of Neo-Platonists: in the middle there is the god, emanating logos, which emanates the world soul, which in turn emanates our small individual souls and finally the matter. It seemed to me that, in Gaudi’s amorphous shapes differentiating from the center towards the edges, I could detect some sort of a homage, a tip-of-the-hat to old Plotinus and his teachings. All of that, of course, only existed in my imagination, for which Gaudi himself is at least partially to blame, leaving his cathedral unfinished when he was run over by a tram car, and then ignored in the hospital because he looked like a beggar; if only he had put some more effort into selecting his attire for the day, maybe the cathedral would have been finished and my musings avoided. Be that as it may, it is almost certain that Mani nicked some of his ideas from the workbook of Plotinus, his contemporary: the farther we are from the source of Light, the more defined, physical, material and miserable we are. Simply put: the more material we are, the more it hurts.

In one of my favorite short stories, H. L. Borges tries to understand Averroes, an Andalusian philosopher who tries to understand Aristotle, and in the end nobody manages to understand anybody, each remaining locked in his own time-space and isolated in the bubble of his great misunderstanding – one of the few constants that we, human beings, can always count on. At the end of the story everyone disappears, dissolved in the impossibility of touch, as Borges realizes the futility of his effort. Sometimes I play that game myself: I choose someone – a beggar in the street or a historical figure, a man sitting opposite me on the metro or one of my distant ancestors from a faded sepia photograph – and try to imagine being him or her. What do I see? What do I feel inside my chest? What am I thinking about? If all the people who have ever lived are connected by some invisible (light?) threads, I say to myself, maybe it would be possible to somehow pick out the thread between any two randomly selected human beings, and then carefully follow it?

Still on the shore of the same Jin river, now under an umbrella, I look at a small boat with fishermen pulling oysters out of a wide estuary. Green bushy aquatic plants float on the surface, and the older houses in this suburb – that once used to be a separate village – are built out of those same oysters. I relish in the knowledge that this very place, the city of Quanzhou, used to be the largest port of the Old World, from which Marco Polo set sails on his final journey home. At about that time, and also from here, the fleet of Kublai Khan sailed out on his ambitious conquest of Japan. Their ships were pulverized by a typhoon (which even now, as the weather forecast informs me, creeps somewhere just behind the horizon). The typhoon that saved Japan from the Mongolian invasion earned itself the name of kami kaze, the divine wind. And in those hard and murky times, on a mountain on the other side of the city, a statue was being carved following the order by a divine twin.

Riffling through scanned specimens of Manichaean scripts (feeling grateful to the Light Deity for the miracle of Internet that enables me to never leave my house) on the websites of various museums, archives and universities, I discover that, in fact, very little has been preserved. The pivotal document on Mani and his religion was discovered in Egypt in 1969, which was hardly breaking news in the year when humans, among other endeavors, landed on the Moon (at the same time planning to destroy their own planet with nuclear bombs). The text was written in Greek by Mani’s disciples “based on his own words”. That was how we found out about the syzigos, the spiritual twin. Using this document, as well as the scripts found in the oasis of Turfan in the Chinese Taklimakan desert, in the Thousand Buddhas Caves in Dunhuang and the writings of St. Augustine (a former Manichaean who abandoned the religion due to a disagreement about the nature of evil), L. J. R. Ort wrote a book in which there is a chapter entitled Mani’s Perception of Self. There I learn that the spiritual twin, after the second revelation in a dream, stayed with Mani for the rest of his life, even at the moment of his death in a Persian prison. He whispered into his ear what to say, how to preach, and traveled around the world with him helping him in the battle against the evil forces of the darkness/matter. I also learn that the young Mani first shared his revelation with his father, who was – upon hearing all that – “amazed” and soon afterwards “converted”. And it is exactly here, says Ort, that we can for a brief moment hear the voice of Mani himself, telling about his childhood and his father. The father who became the first disciple of his own son.

Illustration from a Manichaean manuscript, 8th-9th century.

At the other end of Quanzhou, climbing towards a small mountain temple of Cao'an, I wonder what happens in a man to make him wish to create a new religion. (The same conundrum bugs me when it comes to politicians, military leaders, statesmen: greedy charismatic egomaniacs, or idealists to the bone?) Pulling on the thin Light thread I try to fathom who is on the other side: a trickster or a prophet, a villain or a madman? Or neither? Or all?

Psychologist V. S. Ramachandran writes that localized epileptic seizures in the brain’s temporal lobe sometimes induce the feeling of direct communication with god. People who suffer from this kind of seizures often claim to have seen the all-illuminating light, fathomed the absolute truth that lies beyond the grasp of mortals, clearly felt the presence of angels or heard god’s voice. The effects of the seizure are long-lasting: obsession with theological, philosophical and metaphysical topics and an unbearable urge to talk about it; hypergraphia (compulsive writing, in this case of religious manifestos, treatises, essays, theories). He also mentions his patients who showed him their lengthy manuscripts full of complex symbols and explanations: the holy books with only a single follower. In the late 20th century, scientists Koren and Persinger made a contraption aptly named “God helmet”, which uses fluctuating magnetic field to stimulate the brain’s temporal lobe. The subjects who underwent the stimulation allegedly attested to direct communication with god, visions of long-passed relatives, or the presence of an unidentified conscious being (in a BBC documentary, Richard Dawkins put the helmet on his head and felt, in his words, just slightly dizzy).

At the foot of the rock on which the Cao'an temple was built there is a giant conifer, with a plaque that informs us that the tree was one thousand years old as of March 2016. For a moment I ponder the insufferable Chinese logic – instead of writing the year when the tree was planted, they always write how old it was in the year when it was dated, meaning that in the future every visitor will have to do the adding up – but I instantly abandon that futile train of thought and put my foot on the first step of the staircase that leads to a small building made of red bricks and stones of varying shapes and shades, the temple whose religious affiliation seems impossible to determine from the outside. On the way I stop to take a photo of a wacky insect, who eyes me wearily and then slowly moves away.

Somewhere towards the end of his book The Selfish Gene, Dawkins puts forward the possibility that ideas evolve and fight for dominance in a way akin to the evolution of living things. Since the unit of information for the development of living things is gene, he suggests the term meme as the unit of the idea. Some memes are more successful – for example, those that make up the greatest ideologies of our world – while others aren’t particularly tough, so they eventually drop out of the meme pool. Religious ideas – we were told in our Marxist-oriented schools in the penultimate decade of the 20th century – developed as the result of the human inability to understand the forces of nature, from our fear of chaos and randomness. The universe – even if it really was created by a lower-rank malicious demiurge – obviously wasn’t made for us. Not only are we not located at the center of it, but even in our own galaxy we are tucked away at the deep periphery, and so on, in short – nobody and nothing cares about us. But at the same time we feel that we have to matter for something. How to make up these two extremes? At his ripe age, Leo Tolstoy was so tormented by that question that he removed the belt from his trousers every night before going to sleep, lest he should give in to the urge to hang himself: how can something finite, such as human life, have a meaning that is infinite? If only we could somehow forget about the cruel indifference of the universe, wriggle out of the meaninglessness and avoid death! And if we can’t – well, let us at least shut our eyes and avoid ourselves. The ideas that help us do that (or at least promise to do so) are the most successful memes in the history of mankind (except, of course, for those of you who wish to stop being Borges).

Cao'an, the temple on the rock that rises before me was built a thousand years ago, at which time a tree was planted in front of it. A thousand years, I mumble, a bit theatrically, trying to envision the hand putting a sapling into the hole, then burying the root and patting the soil. The planter disappears, and instead of him, in that very same place, I stand under a large canopy. The thought travels the distance of a thousand years in one second.

A 1000-year old tree growing in front of the Cao'an Temple. Photo: Lazar Pascanovic

Mani envisaged his teaching as an integrative, ecumenical religion based on Zoroastrianism, supplemented with dualist (good-evil, spirit-matter, light-darkness) teachings of various Gnostics, and then stuffed with the ideas and iconography of other religions that he came into touch with. In a temple in Japan (Seiun Ji, city of Kofu, Yamanashi prefecture) an image of Buddha Jesus has recently been discovered. Some historians of religion believe that the image was made in the Manichaean community in Southern China, in the 12th or 13th century. Buddha Jesus has slant eyes and a wide halo, sits cross-legged on a lotus flower, and holds a golden cross on his chest. The memes of Jesus and Buddha, mixed in the embrace of Manichaeism, merged into one.

Left: Aristotle with a disciple, Arab illustration from 1220. Right: Manichaean Buddha Jesus.

The day before, I clambered around a forested hill in this same city of Quanzhou, looking for old Islamic tombs from the times of Sinbad the Sailor and thinking how everything that comes to China sooner or later becomes China. On the weed-covered tombstones, the image of lotus flower and the bismilah ir-rahman ir-rahim written in Arabic calligraphy sit next to each other. Lotus is also present in the old mosque in the city center, that to an untrained eye looks exactly like any Chinese temple, plus a minaret. The Mongols led by Kublai Khan conquered China in the 13th century, but already the next generations of Mongol emperors spoke Chinese and called themselves the Yuan Dynasty. The great civilization relentlessly pulls towards itself, but its gravity at the same time distorts and adjusts everything to its own needs: Jesus gets to keep his cross, but somewhere along the way he also becomes Chinese, crosses his legs and takes a seat among lotus petals.

Língshān Islamic Cemetery in Quanzhou. Photo: Lazar Pascanovic

The small plateau is deserted. The Temple of the Buddha of Light, the arrow says. Under it there’s another arrow that says toilet. The door is open. In semi-darkness on the right side I see another door leading off to a small side chamber, in which an old woman in worn-out clothes sits, staring absent-mindedly at nothing and clicking a rosary in her hand. On the table in front of her there are several jars with pickles or fruit preserves.

Manichaeism is long forgotten in its Middle Eastern cradle. Then it also disappeared in the West, lingering on for a little longer in the mountains, disguised as the religion of the Bogomils in the Balkans (which then lingered on just a little longer disguised in the person of a crackpot painter Lazar Drljača). For the longest time it survived in Southern China, as a once large community that crumbled from one century to another, to finally disintegrate completely. From a religion that once spread on three continents, all that remains is a couple of torn scraps of parchment, several books on history of religion that nobody reads... and the miniature Cao'an temple, today a Buddhist one, without any priests.

A thousand years, I repeat, mockingly, to myself. And if any priest comes to confess me and give me communion, tell him to make himself scarce, and may he give me his curse! ... Men like me should live a thousand years! – bellows, from the edge of death, the sick, aged Zorba the Greek, or at least the man who served as the inspiration for the literary character, if the memoirs of Nikos Kazantzakis – written on the brink of his own death – are to be trusted. But how can one live a thousand years? I will die twice, whispers Ivo Andrić into my ear with some self-pity, once when I leave this world... and the second time... when my lifework disappears.

Eyes are getting used to the darkness. In front of me, in his last temple, sits the Buddha of Light.

He is carved out of living rock that at the same time makes the head wall of the temple and the mountain on whose ledge the whole building sits. At first sight he looks like any typical statue of Buddha, but a closer inspection reveals secret signs, tiny traces, bits of the riddle carved in 1339 during the great renovation of the Cao'an temple, which had then already been more than three centuries old. Long hair falls over his shoulders, and his beard flows down his chest. His brow is prominent and his jaw strong and pronounced. Instead of looking down, as Buddha normally does, Mani is looking straight at me. Instead of having one palm facing upwards and the other downwards according to the Buddhist tradition, both his hands rest on his belly, palms upturned.

Old weasel Borges once wrote that it doesn’t matter what Buddha is, but what he becomes. By the same token, one might say that it doesn’t matter what Mani was – an overexcited boy, a self-proclaimed prophet, a hardcore idealist, a charlatan, the owner of an atypical brain, a twin of his spiritual twin – but what he became.

The statue of Mani in Cao'an, the last standing Manichaean temple in the world.

The statue sits behind a protective glass wall, with a white rectangular reflection of the main door and, trapped in it, my confused face, broken in the glass. In the background there is the crown of the millennial tree and an adjacent hilltop. And I can’t help but wonder how many of us, following the complicated Light threads of our lives, have lingered here, passing a brief moment on his doorstep? And we have all gone.

Disappeared, once or twice.

"- Sheikh Adi is a dangerous den! – the captain said.
 - Extremely dangerous! – added the lieutenant.
 - People there pray to the Devil!
 - The Devil! May Allah chop them up and crush them!"

Words from the book I read as a kid bounce in my head like pebbles crumbling off from the mountain of memory. The protagonist travels the world mediating between warring tribes, protecting the weak and stamping out tyrants. “Dear God, how precious human life is! – he cries at one point – and yet... yet... yet!”

This sentence he utters in Lalish, the place referred to in the book as Sheikh Adi. The urchin who devoured adventure novels in his primary school days could never imagine that Karl May wrote all those books never setting foot in Kurdistan. Or, for that matter, never having been to America, in which his hero knocks a grizzly bear down with his fist and becomes a blood brother of an Indian chief. However, our final breakup came much before I was able to question the veracity of the said adventures: Winnetou had died, and I no longer wanted to read.

Then other things started pouring into my life, teenage traumas and adolescent soul-searches, and the valley of the Devil’s worshippers was soon forgotten, just like many other, more important questions. And now – here I am, standing in that valley.

All around me are barren hills, covered in sparse forest and dry grass. Gnarly trees are leafless because it is January 3rd. The new year 2012 found us in a shabby motel in Sulaymaniyah, at the eastern end of Iraqi Kurdistan. Outside, the rain was moving streams of garbage, and our room had a broken window pane. Now it is sunny, the sky is perfect blue, and we are standing on a small square of a town where nobody lives. Tall ribbed cones, light beige in color, stick out from between flat-roofed stone houses.

Lalish is eerily quiet and, it seems, completely abandoned. Leaving my travel mates behind, I decide to climb the highest hill, following narrow trails, over boulders, through wintry groves and across steep meadows. First I take off my warm winter jacket, then the sweater, and finally the sweatshirt too as I reach the summit. I sit on a rock under a lonely tree.

Weeks before the trip flew by me like hurled rocks. I hardly had time to realize it, and there we were, sitting on the night train to Dimitrovgrad. I had copied a bunch of articles about the places we were planning to visit to a flash drive, hoping to print them out somewhere along the way, but the pace of the trip was such that there was no time for that. Trains and trucks, hitchhiking on desert roads of south-eastern Turkey under the freezing December sky, crossing the border into Iraq... And so I am here now, sitting on a hill above Lalish, the holiest place of the Yazidi faith, knowing about it even less than what Karl May wrote in the late 19th century.

"The large, wide cauldron of the valley was lit like in daytime. Most light came from two giant bonfires, whose roaring flames danced against the barren rocks on both sides of the temple. I was overcome by that sweet dread, pleasant and burdensome at the same time, that lights up a man’s heart when something divine penetrates his small inner world.”

In his novels, May describes Kurds as cruel highlanders, warriors who respect no power except that of their tribal sheikh, and whose blood vendettas span centuries. That was written more than a hundred years ago, but it might as well have been written yesterday in the rugged mountains of northern Iraq. Rough, hard facial features. Bad teeth, bushy eyebrows, furrowed foreheads. Loose trousers with legs connected at knee-height. Bearded old men with turbans and prayer beads. Guerillas with pubescent moustaches, armed to the teeth, barely able to lug their heavy Kalashnikov rifles, stopping cars and checking everyone’s IDs. Even though Kurds are predominantly Muslim, their women don’t cover their faces, maybe because that is an Arab tradition, and Iraqi Kurds generally dislike Arabs as much as Turkish Kurds dislike Turks.

However, Arabs and Muslim Kurds in the region are united by one thing: ethnic hatred of Yazidis.

Yazidis are Kurds who managed to resist islamization. Their faith is so old that nobody knows when it emerged. It most likely came from India, brought to the Middle East thousands of years before Jesus was born and Mohammad overhauled Christianity. Over time it absorbed fragments of surrounding religious ideas, evolving into a somewhat bizarre cocktail that teaches how in the beginning God created Heaven and Earth.

At one point, God sent his seven angels to bow to Adam. Six of them obeyed, but the seventh, Iblis, refused.

- Why didn’t you bow to Adam? – asked God, vexed.
- Because I’m better than him – Iblis replied. – Because you made him of clay, and me of fire.
- Well in that case, you’re not an angel anymore! – God bellowed. – And now, I’m going to...
- Please – Iblis said – could you postpone your punishment? At least until the Judgement Day?
- Deal – said God (merciful as he is) – But FYI, from now on you’ll be known as the Devil.

This, though maybe not exactly verbatim, is written in the Quran. However, Yazidis claim that that is not how it happened.

- Why didn’t you bow to Adam? – asked God, vexed.
- Because I’m better than him – Iblis replied. – Because you made him of clay, and...
- Atta boy! – bellowed God, giving Iblis a savage slap on the wings – you are the only one who understood that you must not bow to anyone but me! And that makes you the brainiest of all my angels.
- What happens now? – Iblis asked.
- Now I have to go, and you and your big brain are in charge of the world.

Extremist Muslims, of course, know that Yazidis worship the fallen angel, in some religions also known as the Devil. They see it as their holy duty to wipe out the Devil’s worshipers from the face of the Earth, which they have tried to do many times, with some success. Yazidis, on the other hand, passionately hate their Muslim neighbors, and would probably be happy to wipe them out too – if they only could.

In the Yazidi religion, the controversial angel is not called Devil, but Taus, which means – peacock. Melek Taus, or Angel Peacock, is in charge of the world until God returns. Where God has gone, what he is doing there and whether he is coming back at all is not for us to tell. When the Peacock heard that the world was now his responsibility, he spread his wings and flew down to Lalish. And he is still there.

"I know that for you this bird is not a deity, but a sign that you will put on yourself as a mark of our friendship. Every Yazidi to whom you show this Taus will give his property and life to protect you."

I get up from my spot under the crooked tree and slowly walk down towards Lalish. As I try to find the trail between boulders, it occurs to me that this hike wasn’t the most prudent idea. Iraq is boiling over with paranoia, feuding peoples and armed men. Only sixty kilometers from here lies Mosul, a city less known for the fine fabric by the name of mousseline, and more for the killings that go on in its streets, where extreme Sunnis are trying to eradicate Shias, Yazidis and Nestorian Christians. If someone stops me and asks what I am doing on top of this hill... Luckily, there is nobody. Only the wind, bringing the tinkling of sheep’s bells from the distance.

Together with my travel mates I go to the tallest ribbed cone: the tomb of Sheikh Adi, a mysterious Sufi who reformed the Yazidi religion in the 11th century. Adi was Angel Peacock’s reincarnation. At the entrance we are stopped by two men: one has a mustache, while the other one is bearded and wears woolen socks. The mustached one puts his hand out.

- My name is Lohman. And this is the head priest. We will show you the tomb of Sheikh Adi. Walk this way, but first take your shoes off. And be careful not to step on the doorstep.
- Why?
- It is forbidden.

The Yazidi faith is rich in taboos, just like any other faith. Don’t step on the doorstep. Don’t spit on the ground, in the water or fire. Don’t wear blue clothes. Don’t eat lettuce. And so on.

We cross the stone-paved courtyard, past several ancient olive trees. Then we stop in front of a large door. Above them, in bass relief, I can see a peacock, a lion, a sun and a moon. Next to the door frame there is a long carved snake, black in color, getting out of a hole and crawling upwards.

- Why is the snake here? – I ask.
- When Noah’s Arc was about to sink, a snake curled up and blocked the hole in the hull. That is why we respect it.

"In that courtyard there is the building of the tomb temple itself, and above it there are two white towers that beautifully stand out against the dark greenery of the valley. The tips of the towers are gilded and full of sharp edges on which light plays with shadows. Above the main door there are several carved symbols of which I managed to make out a lion, a snake, an axe, a man and a comb. "

Even though Karl May never visited Lalish, writing his book in 1892 from his armchair in Germany, his descriptions of the far periphery of the Ottoman Empire are amazingly accurate (except for the carved comb, which might be down to a mistranslation).

The interior of the temple is dark, empty and freezing. The cold goes right through my thin socks, numbing my feet. In the spacious hall there is a spring with a tiny pool of water, and a sarcophagus covered with a big cloth.

"The interior of the building is divided, as I noticed later, into three main rooms: one large and two smaller ones. The largest nave’s ceiling rests on columns and arches. In it there is a spring whose water is considered holy by Yazidis. In one of the smaller naves is the tomb of the saint, and above it a large rectangular tower built of clay and covered with plaster. Above it, as the only decoration, lies a large green woven cloth."

- If you have any kind of problem – Lohman says – just tie a knot on this cloth. You can also try to untie some of the existing knots. If you succeed, the problem of the person who tied that knot will be solved. In that way one person helps solve another one’s problems.

Instead of exploring the spiritual implications of the knot system, I am painfully focused on the fact that I’ve been taking antibiotics since the beginning of the trip, my throat is so sore that I can hardly talk, and I will probably not get well by standing barefoot in a basement.

- Come on – Lohman says, pointing at a small door – this way. Bow down to avoid hitting your head. And be careful not to step on the doorstep.

We walk through the door, followed by the taciturn priest with a lantern. The first room we enter leads to another one, then another, each one narrower and lower. The floor is covered in thick sediments of olive oil crust, accumulated there over the centuries. Along the wall there are dozens of clay pots with oil, whose thick fragrance grates against my throat.

- This is for the lanterns – Lohman explains – for our greatest holiday. That is when Yazidis come here, to Lalish, for the festivities that last for seven days.
- How many Yazidis are there in total?
- Around 300,000 in Iraq. There are some in other countries too, but not that many.
- What happens at the festivities?
- Yazidis gather here in Lalish. All of the houses you saw outside are there for accommodation. Normally nobody lives here except the head priest, but during the festival the whole Lalish is full of people. That is when we sacrifice a bull, which is slaughtered on the main square.

Yazidis have a Hell, but they have no Heaven. There used to be one until Angel Peacock closed it down because it was always empty. When you die, the soul moves on to the next body, then to the next, and so on. Consecutive reincarnations continue until the soul reaches the level of spiritual purity necessary for entering the Heaven.

Apart from the reincarnations, Yazidis have kept another memory of their distant Indian motherland: the caste system. The society is divided into castes, and there are strict rules about what one can and can’t do. For example, you can’t get married to someone from a different caste. And whatever you do, you must never ever marry a Muslim. Lohman points that out at least ten times.

A large portion of Yazidis were killed off in the Ottoman days, when Belgrade and Baghdad were in the same country. They were killed by Kurds (because faith is stronger than ethnicity), Turks and Arabs. Their Islamic neighbors have never forgiven them their bowing to the Devil. After the collapse of Saddam’s regime, the local sheikhs became powerful and well-armed, and these rugged mountains slowly started sliding back towards the Middle Ages. People are killed for blood vendettas or religious hatred, women burned alive for alleged adultery, and complicated written laws are gradually being replaced with unwritten, but much easier to understand and follow, law of the jungle.

Off the temple courtyard there is a vast hall covered with thick carpeting, where we are served tea in round-bellied cups that Turks compare to the body of a perfect woman. I ask Lohman how much we should pay for the tour, but he just shakes his head, saying that it is his job to talk about Yazidis to anyone willing to listen. Then he interviews us for a Yazidi newspaper, which will publish a short article about our visit.

It crosses my mind that this is the perfect opportunity to ask some more questions about Yazidis, and I am angry with myself for coming on this trip so unprepared. I promise to myself to make up for that as soon as I get home. Several weeks later I was to discover more questions – when it was too late to ask them.

On the Internet I find an article about a Yazidi girl from the nearby village of Badri. Her name was Du’a Khalil Aswad, and she was 17 when she fell in love with a Muslim boy. After days of reading and following links, I realize that it is impossible to find out how exactly the events unfolded in that April of 2007. The girl ran away from home. According to some sources, the police offered her protection. In other sources, the sheikh of Badri himself offered protection. Some say that her parents forgave her and invited her to come back home. But this whole Rashomon effect actually bears little importance to what ensued.

When she returned, the girl was pulled out of her home and stoned to death. She was then tied to a car, dragged down the streets and finally buried with a dead dog. Of course, we read about such things all the time. In Iran, Afghanistan, Somalia... When we hear about it, it sounds almost unreal, distant and abstract. We slightly raise our eyebrows, and then forget. Those countries were not on our travel list anyway, and even if they were there is little chance that we will see anyone killing children with rocks.

However, in Du’a Khalil Aswad’s case, the stoning party made sure that everyone learn about it, probably not contemplating the horrible consequences that was to have for the Yazidi community. They recorded the stoning with their cell phones: rock in one hand, smartphone in other. Half an hour of brutal, sadistic murder. The recording quickly made it to YouTube. I will not describe the details of it here, and I don’t recommend checking.

"Even if they kill me – what of it? Doesn’t each drop of water have to rise towards the Sun? Doesn’t the shining Sun itself die every single day, only to be reborn tomorrow? Isn’t death a gate to a brighter, purer world? Have you ever heard a Yazidi say of another Yazidi that they have died? We only say they have transformed, because there is neither death nor grave, but only life and nothing but life."

The concept of the noble savage, a romantic ideal of living in harmony with nature, far from the demands of the industrialized society, could only ever have existed because the European authors of the time – Karl May among them – rarely bothered to take a closer look at those simple, honorable highlanders who talk straight, look in the eyes and honor their word as the highest sacrament. In his essay from 1853, Charles Dickens gave his opinion on this matter.

"If we have anything to learn from the Noble Savage, it is what to avoid. His virtues are a fable; his happiness is a delusion; his nobility, nonsense (...) The world will be all the better when his place knows him no more."

When they saw the video of the stoning, radical Muslims from Iraq only confirmed their long-standing conviction: that Yazidis are the Devil’s servants. Two weeks later, unidentified people stopped a bus on the way to Mosul. They checked the IDs of the passengers: Muslims and Christians were allowed to leave. The Yazidis, 23 of them (in some sources 24) were taken off the bus, made to lie face down, and shot in the back of the head.

Several months later, in August 2007, a series of bombing attacks shook the Yazidi villages around Lalish. The total death toll is estimated to 500, with 1,562 wounded. It was the bloodiest attack of suicide bombers in Iraq to date, and the second bloodiest terrorist attack in history, second only to the 9/11 in New York.

In a bizarre attempt to untangle this knot, the government of Iraqi Kurdistan ordered the exhumation of the girl’s body, which was then sent to Mosul for a post mortem. It was determined that she had died a virgin.

⁂

I tear myself away from the computer and suddenly realize that it is already dawn. I hear first morning sounds coming in from the street, suddenly become aware of the pulsating pain in my backbone, followed by a new wave of guilt for not having prepared for the trip, which made me unable to ask that very important question at the temple.

However, the more I think about it, the less I am sure what that question is.

"Dear God, how precious human life is! And yet... yet... yet!"

After the war, Nanao Sakaki went to Tokio and found a job in the publishing industry. However, after a year he decided that it was not the kind of life he wanted for himself. He quit his job and started living on the street as a homeless person. That is when his obsession with walking started. He spent his days walking all around Tokio, which back then was already one of the largest cities in the world. Then he started going out of town and walking to the nearby towns and cities, and then farther and farther. He traveled extensively all over Japan, often on foot, until he found a small island of Suwanosejima, where he decided to start a farming commune based on the idea of rural life far from the materialistic world that he left behind. He and his small counter-cultural commune, known in the West as the Tribe, came to prominence when the government decided to build the airport on their island; they protested, wrote poems about the environmental destruction of Japan, held rallies and even went to San Francisco to find international support for their activism, mostly thanks to Gary Snider, American poet fascinated with Japanese culture, who introduced Nanao to Allen Ginsberg and other poets from the American Beat circle.

The concept of a wandering, vagrant sage has a long tradition in the Far East.

They invited Nanao Sakaki to visit America, where he spent around ten years in total, mostly in California and New Mexico. In this period, Nanao did exactly what he used to do in Japan before that: he lived freely, homeless and jobless, relying on the hospitality of his friends, writing poetry – and walking. He is reported to have walked from California to New York and back, and even all the way up to Alaska, but as he was mostly on his own and did not like to discuss how he spent his time, these accounts are impossible to verify. It is safe to assume that he walked a lot, spending days, months and years on the road. He often stayed at Zen Center in San Francisco, where he was known for never having any money, private property or a place of his own; however, as he just read books, discussed philosophy and wrote poetry, never doing any community work or even washing the dishes, after a while he would overstay his welcome and move to another hippie commune, which were numerous in California at that time.

Nanao Sakaki on the cover of one of his books.

The concept of a wandering, vagrant sage has a long tradition in the Far East. The sage is a poet, a monk, a teacher or a philosopher – and most often all of that at once. He renounces the rigid societal rules and the materialistic world, and roams the world in pursuit of knowledge, at the same time learning new things and sharing his wisdom with those he meets on the road. Probably the most famous from the line of wandering poets-philosophers in Japan was Matsuo Basho, who lived in the 17th century. In fact, many similarities can be found between Nagao Sakaki and Matsuo Basho: their renunciation of the society, their fascination with the natural world, and their love of walking.

Matsuo Basho by Katshushika Hokusai, 18th century.

Nanao Sakaki’s walking was a part of his Zen worldview, which advocated personal freedom, environmental activism, and spending time outdoor. In one interview, recounted in the book “Nanao or Never”, Sakaki tried to explain the kind of Zen he followed: “Most Zen is uninteresting to me …It’s too linked to the samurai tradition – to militarism. This is where Alan Watts and I disagreed: he didn’t fully understand how the samurai class with whom he associated Zen were in fact deeply Confucian: they were concerned with power. The Zen I’m interested in is China’s Tang dynasty variant with teachers like Lin Chi. This was non-intellectual. It came from farmers - so simple. Someone became enlightened, others talked to him, learned and were told, Now you go there and teach; you go here, etc. When Japan tried to study this kind of zen, it was hopeless. The emperor sent scholars, but with their high-flown language and ideas, they couldn’t understand what it was about.”

To stay young,
To save the world,
Break the mirror.

Lin Chi is the Japanese name of Linji Yixuan, a Chinese sage who lived in the 9th century. He was known as the founder of the Linji school of Buddhism. Remembered as a rebel Zen-master who preaches the wordless truth, Lin Chi was focused on trying to explain his teachings without getting mired into words, which he considered useless and misleading, as the true essence of the world lies beyond concepts and ideas. To that end, he taught relying on non-conceptual forms of expression, allegedly shouting and even hitting his students to help them reach enlightenment. The Linji school eventually spread to Japan where it gave rise to the Rinzai school, one of the three main denominations of Zen in Japanese Buddhism.

Two very different representations of Linji Yixuan (Lin Chi), the Chinese Zen master renowned for using his stick as a didactic tool. 

The recurring themes in Nanao Sakaki’s poetry are related to the natural world: forests, rivers, deserts, jungles, oceans, mountains, and mankind’s relationship with that world. He lamented the destruction of Japan’s nature, the deforestation and cementing of the riverbanks and sea shores, the engineering and building mania that caused a rift between man and nature.

After returning to Japan, Nanao Sakaki settled down in the mountains, where he spent the rest of his life walking in nature and writing poetry; he lived to be 81. Several of his poetry collections have been translated into English, thanks to his friends in the American Beat circle.

*

If you have time to chat,
Read books.
If you have time to read books,
Walk into mountain, desert and ocean.
If you have time to walk,
Sing a song and dance.
If you have time to dance,
Sit quietly,
You lucky, happy idiot.

*

Soil for the legs
Axe for the hands
Flower for the eyes
Bird for the ears
Mushroom for the nose
Smile for the mouth
Song for the lungs
Sweat for the skin
Wind for the mind.

*

In the morning
After taking cold shower
- what a mistake -
I look at the mirror.

There, a funny guy,
Grey hair, white beard, wrinkled skin,
- what a pity -
Poor, dirty, old man,
He is not me, absolutely not.

Land and life
Fishing in the ocean
Sleeping in the desert with stars
Building a shelter in the mountains
Farming the ancient way
Singing with coyotes
Singing against nuclear war -
I’ll never be tired of life.

Now I’m seventeen years old,
Very charming young man.
I sit quietly in lotus position,
Meditating, meditating for nothing.

Suddenly a voice comes to me:
“To stay young,
To save the world,
Break the mirror.”

In September 2013, using the Travel House in Granada as the starting point, we got on a ferry and crossed into Africa, to travel around Morocco, Western Sahara, Mauritania and Senegal. The trip lasted for three weeks and was very exhausting, partly for the heat, partly due to the bad and, as we ventured deeper into the Sahara, non-existent roads. Using a small pocket camera we recorded a lot of video-materials, most of which turned out to be completely useless: random, unrelated shots, coincidental conversations, eye-catching sights without any potential to combine into a coherent story.

We then chose one conversation and tried to make it into a short documentary, but we soon parted ways and the project was forgotten. It was completed almost five years later.

The context is deliberately omitted. A desert and an ocean, the Spanish language and Islam, a ship cemetery, together form a confusing, disorientating little window into a life that takes place on the landfill of civilization, which could be located anywhere. There is a lot more that is missing: the smells of  the ocean, corrosion and rot, large putrefied sea creatures scattered on the sand, Bible and Quran on a bedside table, our host's sincere anger at our offer to pay for his fuel for giving us a ride back to town, a memory card with music (which?) that we left him as a gift, our excitement and the feeling of being immersed in life.

The film is available in full HD.

---
More info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Sahara
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nouadhibou

The Eye of the Sahara on Google Maps – it really looks like an eye!

A glance at Wikipedia told me it was huge indeed: the diameter of the outermost ring is 40 km (25 mi) in diameter. Also, it is not a hole, as I first thought: it could best be described as a series of concentric rings, each one forming an almost perfect circle. It is an "eroded dome" – not a meteor impact crater, and definitely not a mine.

** We recently published our first English book: Bantustan, Atlas of an African Journey. It is an illustrated travelogue with a collection of hand-drawn maps, available on Amazon. Find out more at www.bantustanbook.com **

The Eye of the Sahara was first described in the 1930s and 1940s and was considered to be a meteor impact site, but that theory was refuted in the early 2000s. It was created by erosion.

It is the closest one can get to walking on Mars without really being on Mars.

From the moment I saw the giant circle on Google Map, I got very excited. I started wondering if it would be possible to go there. Not just to stare at it on the map, but to really, physically go there and step into the center of the circle. I invited two friends – Inesa Adamonyte and Uros Krcadinac – with whom I had traveled to crazy places before, and who I thought might be willing to go on such an adventure. First they tried to convince me it was suicidal, but finally I managed to talk them into it. That same year, 2013, we decided to go for it.

We met in southern Spain and crossed by ferry to Morocco. Then we went down through Morocco, Western Sahara and finally Mauritania, where the Eye of the Sahara is located. From Nouadhibou we took the desert train used for transporting iron ore and after that a series of "desert buses", Toyota Land Cruisers that take people between small villages in the Sahara. For the final leg of the trip, we hired a jeep with a Tuareg driver, to take us to the circle.

The daytime temperatures were above 50 degrees C (122 degrees F). After a while, our cameras and phones got overheated and stopped working. Uros and I suffered a mild heatstroke, while Inesa suffered a more severe one, and ended up in the hospital in the Mauritanian capital Nouakchott, where we arrived after a long, arduous trip. After she recovered, we continued on to Senegal, from where we flew back to Spain. The whole trip lasted three weeks.

During the trip, it came in handy that Uros spoke  some French, and I could speak Spanish and some Arabic. French and Spanish were spoken in the cities, but when we got deeper into the Sahara we had to rely on my broken Arabic to find out where to go and how to get there.

We were planning to shoot a documentary about the trip, so we did a lot of filming along the way (until our equipment died from the heat), but sadly we never got round to editing it; it turned out that hours upon hours of desert footage don't make for a watchable story. The adventure was definitely the most challenging trip of my life (so far), and probably the most dangerous one as well.

However, I'd say it was worth it. There's no place on Earth that could be even remotely compared to the Eye of the Sahara. It is the closest one can get to walking on Mars without really being on Mars.

And there's no feeling – at least not one that I'm familiar with – that comes close to standing in the very center of the innermost ring of a 40-km wide crater, in the middle of the Sahara, knowing that it all started with an evening of sitting at home, getting bored and randomly looking through Google Maps.

Would I do it again? Absolutely. I'd do it tomorrow.

––
Photos by Inesa Adamonyte and Lazar Pascanovic.