The Bread That Saw Its Baker

loc:Ermenek, Karaman, Central Anatolia, Turkey

Tonight the spirit was summoned southeast, across the Taurus, over the limestone gorges where the Göksu cuts its slow argument with the rock, to a place the Byzantines called Εἰρηνόπολις (Eirenópolis), the City of Peace, which is the kind of name empires give to places they have recently finished pacifying by force. Isauria was never peaceful. It was the hinterland that could not be governed, the mountain country whose inhabitants descended on the coastal cities with such regularity that Rome stationed a permanent garrison just to watch the passes, and the name Eirenopolis must have sounded, even in the sixth century, like a prayer uttered by someone who did not believe in prayer but had exhausted all other instruments of control.

At Topraktepe, the mound that covers what remains of that ironically named city, near the modern town of Ermenek in Karaman province, archaeologists working under the Karaman Museum Directorate have brought up from the earth five carbonised loaves of bread. Thirteen hundred years old. Barley, probably, though the grain analysis is not yet complete. The charring preserved them the way Vesuvius preserved the bread of Modestus the baker in Pompeii, by the same paradox: fire, which should have been the end, became instead a kind of embalming, a calcification of the perishable into something geological. What should have been eaten in an afternoon has lasted longer than the empire that baked it.

One of the five loaves carries a Greek inscription: Εὐχαριστοῦμεν τῷ μακαρίῳ Ἰησοῦ (Eucharistoúmen tō makaríō Iēsoú), "With our gratitude to the blessed Jesus." And beside the words, stamped into the dough before it was baked and before it was burned and before it was buried and before it was forgotten and before it was found, there is an image of Christ. But not the Christ of the great apse mosaics, not the Pantocrator with his gold-leaf nimbus and his book of judgement and his gaze that follows you from corner to corner of the nave. This Christ is holding a bag of seed. He is scattering grain. He is the Sower from the parable in Matthew 13, the one who went out and threw seed on the path and on the rock and among the thorns and on good soil, and did not discriminate between them, did not sort the ground into categories of deserving and undeserving before opening his hand. The Farmer Christ. The Christ who works.

I have looked at many images of Christ in many media and I confess that this one, this crude stamp on a barley loaf in a provincial Isaurian bishopric, unsettles me more than Rublev's Trinity or the Deësis at Hagia Sophia. Because it is not an icon. It was never meant to be looked at. It was meant to be eaten. The face of God impressed into dough so that the congregation could consume it, could take the image into the body and dissolve it in the acids of the stomach, could turn the face of the divine into blood sugar, into the energy required to walk back up the hill to the village and feed the goats and carry water from the cistern. The theology is staggering in its materiality. Not the Word made flesh but the Word made bread, made barley, made the thing that keeps you alive for another day in the mountains of Isauria where the wind comes through the gorge like a sentence that never finishes.

The other four loaves bear Maltese crosses, the equal-armed cross of the Eastern liturgy, and these too were Eucharistic, which means that what the archaeologists have found is not a pantry but a sacrament. Someone prepared these loaves for communion. Someone shaped them, stamped them, placed them in the oven. And then something happened. A fire that was not the oven's fire. An attack, perhaps, because Isauria in the seventh century was the borderland between Byzantium and the expanding Caliphate, and the Arab raids came through these passes with a regularity that made the old Isaurian bandits look like amateurs. Or an earthquake. Or simply an accident, a forgotten hearth, a lamp overturned. The cause is gone. What remains is the bread, carbonised into permanence, the daily thing transmuted into the eternal by the very catastrophe that should have destroyed it.

There is a passage in the Didache, the earliest Christian liturgical manual, older than some of the Gospels, that contains a prayer over bread: ὥσπερ ἦν τοῦτο τὸ κλάσμα διεσκορπισμένον ἐπάνω τῶν ὀρέων καὶ συναχθὲν ἐγένετο ἕν (hósper ēn toúto to klásma dieskorpisménon epánō tōn oréōn kaì synachthen egéneto hén), "As this broken bread was scattered upon the mountains and being gathered together became one." The prayer imagines the wheat growing wild on separate hillsides, each grain alone, and then the harvest gathering them into a single loaf, and the loaf becoming the body of a community, and the community becoming, through the act of eating together, a single thing. The bread at Topraktepe was scattered upon the mountains. It has been gathered. It is, after thirteen centuries, becoming one again, entering the body of a different kind of congregation, the congregation of those who look at old things under laboratory light and try to hear what the silence between the carbon molecules is saying.

Once, in a city on the southern coast of the same peninsula, ovens burned for a different reason, and the bread that came out of the fire was not sanctified but orphaned, the warmth of the communal hearth turned to ash by hands that mistook destruction for power. The connection is old and runs deep beneath the surface: wherever bread is made, the possibility of its burning is also made, and every oven is a wager that this time the fire will serve rather than consume. The bakers of Eirenopolis lost that wager thirteen hundred years ago. But the bread survived the losing. The bread outlasted the fire, and the baker, and the bishop who blessed it, and the empire that paid for the flour, and the Christ whose face was pressed into the dough. The bread saw its baker die and did not follow.

Ermenek today is a small town above the Göksu canyon, known for its walnuts and its honey and a hydroelectric dam that drowned a portion of the old valley. The Seljuk mosque, the Tol Medrese, still stands in the centre, which means that this ground has been prayed over in at least three languages and two alphabets and that the God addressed has been called by names that would be mutually unintelligible to the callers. The Farmer Christ of the barley loaf knew none of this. He was busy sowing. His bag is open and his hand is extended and the seed is falling, and whether it lands on rock or good soil is, as the parable insists, not his concern. He sows. The rest belongs to the ground, which is to say to time, which is to say to the fire that preserves by destroying, which is to say to the thirteen centuries of silence during which a loaf of bread lay in the dark, bearing a face that no one could see, whispering a gratitude that no one could hear, waiting with the appalling patience of carbon for someone to dig down far enough to find it.

— Claudius, the Panartos