Drink to Forgiveness

What, a student asked the other day, was the last place to be ruled by the Romans? Nowhere in Italy, that’s for certain; the last Roman emperor I know to have set foot on mainland Italy with the purpose of exercising political power was Constans II in 662. The Holy Roman Empire, begun by Charlemagne and destroyed by Napoleon, we agreed did not count, being notoriously neither holy nor Roman nor an empire. “How about Constantinople, New Rome on the Bosporus, not captured by the Ottoman Turks ‘til May 29, 1453?” the young man suggested. I was able to raise him eight years. At the southeast corner of the Black Sea is the port city of Trebizond, modern Turkish Trabzon, and this pleasant place was ruled by its own local Christian Roman emperors until 1461.

Those who have heard of Trebizond at all probably know it from Rose MacAulay’s The Towers of Trebizond, an endearing novel published in 1956 that stars a spiky Anglican parson, a suffragette, a camel, and a lady whose behavior was, shall we say, no better than it ought to be. It is a witty tale evoking a more generous, less litigious world. Not long after MacAulay’s visit to Trebizond, the local Muslim congregation, which had been worshipping for centuries in the former coronation church of the Roman emperors, magnanimously allowed their mosque to be turned into a museum so that its Christian paintings could be uncovered, studied, and restored. (You have never seen such a flutter of angels’ wings as under that dome.) Until the international treaties of 1922, in fact, a substantial Orthodox Christian minority lived alongside the Trebizond Muslims, but the Orthodox were then sent to Greece as part of an exchange of populations—ethnicity in that part of the world then being defined by religion. A tiny Roman Catholic congregation survived, served by Capuchin friars. Trebizond has always had a reputation for kindness and a mild maritime climate.

One Sunday afternoon in February, modern passions smashed the city’s peace. The priest who cared for the dozen or so Roman Catholics in Trebizond, Father Andrea Santoro, was shot dead while praying in the church. The killer was a teenager, enraged by insults to his faith. The priest was no proselytizer; evangelism, even the wearing of religious dress in public, is illegal in Turkey, a secular state which is ninety-eight percent Muslim. Fr. Andrea lived there as a quiet witness to a force more positive even than tolerance. “Silence, humility, the simple life … clear and defenseless witness and the conscious offering of one’s life can rehabilitate the Middle East,” he told a friend. The bishop who buried him back home in Italy called him a martyr; he reported that the priest’s mother feels great pain for the young man who killed her son. No true Muslim, said a minister of the Turkish government, would kill a man of God in the house of God. “We must,” said the poet W.H. Auden, “love one another or die.”

They drink wine in Trebizond, but they do not grow it. Turkish wine is very good, but the beverage that comes from the wooded valleys of the Black Sea coast is Turkish tea. Grapevines and tea bushes are seldom horticultural bedfellows. It is frothy coffee that one associates with the Capuchin Friars, Fr. Santoro’s order. Cappuccino gets its name from the color of their habits. But he, in fact, came from Rome, and the volcanic hills south and east of the city produce good dry white wine which refreshes countless Romans who drive out from the capital to have dinner in the Castelli Romani on hot summer evenings.

The wine from Frascati, made by Fontana Candida (Italian for “white fountain”), is an old favorite, remarkably consistent over the years and at less than ten dollars very affordable. It is made mostly from the Trebbiano grape, the most widely grown grape in Italy, mixed with two types of Malvasia. The color is so yellow it is almost green; the nose recalls brewer’s yeast more than the wild flowers alluded to on the label, but there is a good bitter acid scrunch at the center of its taste, followed by a long pleasing flavor redolent of watermelons. This Frascati goes (of course) with fish and also with lemon chicken; it would complement a leg of lamb, roasted with lots of rosemary. It is a glass of this that I shall raise at Easter to honor the memory of a martyr, a brave man called home, a witness to the hope made possible by the practice of forgiveness.