Yusuf, Who Is Also the Baker

by Ignatius of Antioch, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

I

Yusuf, deacon, who is also the baker, to the church of Antioch which is scattered: to those in Mersin, to those in Istanbul, to those in Iskenderun with their cousins, to the Hanna family in Hanover, and to whoever reads this aloud to Umm Jiryis because her eyes are bad. Grace to you and peace. Write back on paper if you can. I have a telephone, but I have no charger I can trust, and a message is not a letter.

I am in the containers by the river. Number 4-17. It has a door, a window, a heater that works when the generator works, two beds and a shelf. I share it with Rıza from the kebab house on Kurtuluş Street, whose wife and boys are with her sister in Adana. He snores. I snore. We are even.

You want news of the church, so here it is. The walls are down. Not cracked, down. The roof came in on the nave and lies in it. The iconostasis is under the roof. The bell is in the courtyard on its side, whole, with a dent in the lip the size of a thumb. I put my hand flat on it. It was cold. It is a real bell and it is really lying in the courtyard, and I tell you this first because some of you have been sending each other photographs of the church as it was, with hearts under them, and that is the church as it was. This is the church as it is.

Of ours, thirty-one are dead. You have the names. I will not write them again here, because I wrote them on the list for the municipality and on the list for the Patriarchate and on the list for Abuna Nikola, and my hand will not do it a fourth time this week.

Now the other matter.

Mişel has written in the group that we should keep Pascha this year on the screen. Abuna Nikola to serve in Mersin, the camera on him, and every family, wherever it is, to bake a loaf at home and hold it up to the telephone at the right moment. He says it will be one liturgy because it will be one stream. He says the church is the people, not the stones. He says I am old.

The last is true. The second is true. The first is not.

The church is the people, yes. Truly the people. The people's bodies, in one place, round one table, under the one man the bishop has given us to stand at it. Not the people's faces in little squares. A face in a square cannot be handed the bread. A face in a square cannot be kissed at the Peace. I have been a deacon for twenty-six years, and I know where I stand in the liturgy: I stand where the priest can reach me, and the people stand where I can reach them. That is the whole of the deacon's office, reaching. You cannot reach through glass.

And the loaf in each kitchen. Forgive me, children. Fifty loaves held up to fifty telephones are fifty loaves. They are not one bread. Our first bishop, who went from this city to Rome in chains, wrote back to the churches from the road: one flesh of our Lord, one cup, one altar, as there is one bishop. He did not write: let each house have its own altar and agree to call it one. He was being taken to be eaten by animals, and on the way there he took the trouble to say this. I take him at his word.

So I say no. Not because I am a deacon and Mişel is not. Because I am a baker and I know what a loaf is.

I will write to Abuna Nikola about what can be done instead.

Farewell in Jesus Christ. Pray for the city. Do not pray for the church as it was; that church does not need your prayers. Pray for this one.

II

Yusuf to Mişel, son of Corc and Marta. Peace.

Your answer came. Rıza's nephew brought it from the post at the container office, because you sent it on paper as I asked, and I thank you for that before I say anything else. Your handwriting is your father's. He also made his g like a fishhook.

You say I am an old man in a box who wants everyone to come and stand in a ruin to make a point about bread. You say that half the parish cannot travel, that the road is bad, that the second shock in February frightened the children so that they wet the bed at the word Antakya. You say the screen is better than nothing.

All of that is true, and I am not going to argue with any of it. I want to tell you something instead.

On the sixth of February, at about half past four, I was already in the bakery, because I am always in the bakery at half past four. The first trays were proving. I felt the floor go and I went under the big table, the steel one, because my father told me fifty years ago that the steel table would stand when the ceiling would not, and he was right. When it stopped, I was in the dark with the trays on top of me and flour in my mouth. My left wrist was broken. I did not know it yet. I knew only that my hand would not do what I told it.

Above the bakery lived Madame Wadad. You knew her: the teacher, the one with the green shutters, who gave you an orange every Sunday until you were twelve and told her you were too old for oranges. The building came down on itself, and on the bakery, and the table held. By the time I had dug myself to the front, it was light. Her floor was now at the height of my head. There was a gap between two slabs, as wide as a loaf tin. Through it I could see her hand.

I held it. You will ask how long. I do not know. Rıza says it was the whole of that day and most of the night, because he came and found me there at noon and went for help and came back at dark with no help, because there was no help anywhere, all the city was the same. She talked. She talked about you, as it happens, and the oranges. She asked me to tell her what bread I had put in that morning, and I told her, every tray, and she said, Yusuf, you are a terrible liar, you never make that many simit on a Monday. And I laughed, God forgive me, holding her hand through the concrete. Some time in the second morning her hand stopped holding mine back. I went on holding it for some time after that.

Mişel, I am not telling you this to win. I am telling you because you said the screen is presence. I have spent a day and a night holding a hand I could not see. I know what presence is and what it is not, better than I wanted to. She could not see my face. It did not matter. Her hand was in my hand. That was the whole thing. If I had been on a screen in Mersin, saying kind words to her through it, she would have died alone. Not seeming to die alone. Alone.

The bread on the altar is the same. Either it is truly His flesh or it is a picture of bread. Either we are truly gathered or we are a picture of gathering. I do not say the picture is wicked. I say it is a picture.

Come at Pascha. Bring whoever can come. If Umm Jiryis cannot travel, I will take the bread to her myself afterwards, with Abuna's blessing, as deacons have done since there were deacons. That is not a screen either. That is a man on a bus with a cloth bag.

My wrist is in plaster still. I can knead with the right and push with the left forearm. It is slow, but it is kneading.

Greet your mother for me. Tell her I found her mother's icon of Saint Thekla in the courtyard, face down and unbroken, and I have it on my shelf.

III

Yusuf the deacon to Abuna Nikola, priest of the church of Antioch, now at Mersin. Bless, Father.

I need four things from you, and I will tell you what I have already, so you know I am not asking for what I can do myself.

What I have. Flour: two sacks of the white flour from the aid lorry, the twenty-five kilo ones with the red crescent on them. I tested it. It is good flour; it takes water well. Salt: Rıza's. Yeast: Rıza's cousin in Defne, who has a pastry shop that did not fall. Water: from the tanker, boiled. An oven: the field kitchen at the end of row 4 has a gas deck oven, and the woman who runs it, a volunteer from Kayseri named Sevgi Hanım, has said I may have it between three and five in the morning, when they are not baking for the camp. She did not ask what the bread was for. When I told her, she said, Then I will leave you the good trays.

And the seal. Father, I found the seal.

I went back into the bakery with the boys from the municipality on the eleventh of March, when they came to clear the street, and I asked them for ten minutes before the machine. They gave me fifteen. Under the steel table, where I lay that first morning, in the drawer that did not open because the table had been pressed half an inch lower into the floor, was the seal my grandfather carved, the olive-wood one with the cross and the letters and the little triangles for the Mother of God and the nine ranks. Split along the grain on one side. I have bound it with wire. It prints a little crooked now, on the left, like my hand.

So I can make the qurban. Five loaves for the proskomedia and enough beside for the antidoron, for perhaps sixty people.

Now what I need.

One. You. Not a deacon's service of readings. I cannot do the Liturgy and I will not pretend to. Nothing without the bishop, and nothing without the one the bishop sends. The bishop has sent you. Come.

Two. The antimension. The one from our altar is under the altar, and the altar is under the roof. I have looked. I have asked. The engineers say no one goes into the nave until they have shored the east wall, and no one is shoring anything until after the summer. Without the cloth with our Metropolitan's name on it there is no table, only a table. I know you know this. I write it so that you will not forget to ask him for another, and so that he will sign it, with his own hand, in ink, and not send a photograph of his signature. Forgive me. I have seen too many photographs this spring.

Three. Wine. The proper wine. I do not trust what is sold in the camp shop, and neither should you.

Four. Mişel. He is angry with me. He has reason. Make him come, even if he comes to film it. Better he film it standing among us than watch it lying in Istanbul. I would rather have him with his telephone in the courtyard than without it on the other side of the country.

I had the courtyard measured. With the bell moved against the wall, and the rubble from the porch pushed to the north side, there is room for an altar table, a tarpaulin over it, and perhaps eighty people standing, if they stand close. They will stand close. They have been sleeping close all spring.

The city fell in the time of our first bishop's successors, when the emperor Trajan was here and had to climb out of a window. It fell again in the time of Justin, and again two years later under Justinian. It fell in 1872, and they rebuilt this church on top of what fell. I do not say this to comfort anyone. It is not comforting. I say it because every time it fell, someone baked on the Saturday night, and someone came on the Sunday.

Kiss your wife's hand for me. Tell your boys I owe them each a simit and I have not forgotten.

IV

Yusuf, deacon, who is also the baker, to the church of Antioch which is scattered, and to the church of Antioch which, for one night, was not. Grace and peace, and Christ is risen.

I write to tell you what happened, because some of you were there and some of you were not, and those who were there saw only the part in front of them. A deacon sees the whole room. That is what he is for.

On Saturday I was at the field-kitchen oven at three. Sevgi Hanım had left me the good trays as she promised, and also, which she had not promised, a thermos of tea and four boiled eggs in a bag with a note: for the bread man. I made the dough the night before in Rıza's big washing-up bowl, and Rıza sat up with it, because I had told him the dough must not get cold, and he took this so seriously that he slept with the bowl between his feet wrapped in his own coat. In the morning his coat smelled of yeast and he wore it anyway.

Two layers for each loaf, the lower and the upper, as my father taught me: the lower for the earth and the upper for heaven, he used to say, though I think he got that from his own father and nobody knows where his father got it. I pressed the seal into each upper layer and held it there for the length of the Our Father, as it is done. With the plaster off now, but the wrist weak, I had to lean my whole body on it. Five times the Our Father. On the left side, each stamp came out faint where the wood is split. IC faint, XC strong. I thought: let it be so. He is both. He was truly born and He truly bled. Let the bread show the crack.

I pricked them round the edge so the seal would not lift in the oven. They came out at a quarter past four. Sevgi Hanım came in at half past to start the camp's bread and stood in the doorway and said, Those are beautiful, what are they? And I said, They are bread. And she said, Yes, but what are they for? And I could not answer her in Turkish properly at that hour, so I said, They are for eating, and she laughed and said, Everything is for eating, uncle.

She is right. Our first bishop said he wanted to be ground fine by the teeth of beasts so that he would be found pure bread. Everything is for eating. The question is only whose.

The buses came from Mersin at nine in the evening. Two of them. Abuna Nikola got down first, with the wine in a cooler box and the antimension in a plastic folder, flat, signed in blue ink. I opened the folder in the bus's headlights and looked at the ink. I am told I made a sound. Mişel got down from the second bus. He had his telephone in his hand. He did not look at me.

We were eighty-three, not counting Rıza's people at the gate or the two drivers. I counted, because I am a deacon. Umm Jiryis came after all, in a wheelchair her grandson had borrowed from the hospital tent, and I do not know if he gave it back. The Hanna family did not come from Hanover, but they sent a box of candles, the long thin ones, which were better than ours. Three of Rıza's people came and stood by the gate with their hands folded, and Rıza stood among them in the coat that smelled of yeast.

I will not describe the service. You know the service. I will tell you three things only.

The first. At midnight, when Abuna came out from the altar under the tarpaulin with the one candle and we all lit ours from his, and from each other's, I watched the light go across the courtyard from hand to hand. It cannot be sent. It must be passed. For a moment the whole courtyard was dark except for one flame, and then it was not dark anywhere. I have seen this every Pascha of my life, and I had never seen it before.

The second. When it came to the Communion, Abuna held the cup and I held the cloth under every chin, as the deacon does, eighty-one of them, because two did not come forward, and that is between them and God. I knew every mouth. I had baked for every one of them since before some of them had teeth. I put the cloth under Mişel's chin, and he looked at me then. He had been crying, or it was the smoke from the candles. I do not ask.

The third is the bell.

Mişel had his telephone. He had held it up for the procession and for the Gospel, and I said nothing, because I had asked for him to come with it, and I had meant it. But when Abuna stood at the edge of the tarpaulin and shouted it, Al-Masih qam!, and we shouted it back, Haqqan qam!, truly He is risen, Mişel put the telephone in his coat. He went across to the wall where the bell lies on its side. He picked up a half-brick from the rubble by the porch. He knelt beside the bell.

He struck it.

It is a bell lying on the ground with a dent in it, and it did not ring the way it rang in the tower. It gave a short flat note that stopped too soon, like a word cut off. He struck it again. And again. Three times for the Trinity, then he went on, faster, the way the bell is rung at Pascha, and the note never once rang out properly, every stroke was cut off by the ground. But you could hear it at the gate, Rıza says. You could hear it by the river. Some of the people in the containers came out to see, in their slippers, with blankets round them.

He struck it until the half-brick broke in his hand. Then he sat back on his heels with the two pieces, and looked at them, and put them down very carefully on the paving, side by side.

I am going now to scrape the trays. Sevgi Hanım needs them by five.

Farewell in Jesus Christ, children. Come home when you can. Come in the body.

✾ ❦ ✾ ❦ ✾

Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem septimum decimum Kalendās Novembrēs (16 October 2026), ab Ignātiō Antiochēnō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Ignatius of Antioch, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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