Ninety years ago, Evelyn Waugh wrote a travel book called Remote People. You couldn’t do that today. Those remote people are now your Facebook friends. But Al Regnery has found a way to write a travel book about remote places that will never be mentioned in the New York Times travel section. That’s because he visited ancient Christian sites in Europe and the Middle East and wrote about them in a wonderful new book, Unlikely Pilgrim (Beaufort Books, 2019).
Some of the places he visited will be generally familiar to us, but even there, he takes us to places the guidebooks will have missed — the small abbey in France, the forgotten church in Romania. Some places, like pre-Sept. 11 Syria, are still more foreign still and tragically will never be seen again.
It’s also a hiker’s book, about what it’s like to walk 25 miles a day with a pack on your back, dealing with shin splints and not knowing where you’ll sleep that evening. Sometimes, it would be in a humble pension, where you’d get the equivalent of a four-star dinner; sometimes it would be an outpost of the Empire, like the Baron Hotel in Aleppo, where T.E. Lawrence and Churchill stayed and where Agatha Christie wrote Murder on the Orient Express.
One of the book’s most fascinating chapters deals with his visit to Syria in early 2001. Today, it’s a dangerously forbidden country, wrecked by a civil war that is about to be concluded with the victory of Bashar Assad. A murderous thug, as seemingly one has to be to stay on top in that part of the world, Assad is nevertheless to be preferred to some of the alternatives. He is a member of the minority Alawite sect of Islam and formed alliances with other minority groups, especially the Christians.
In 2001, nearly a quarter of Syria’s 10 million people were Christians. The country had been Christian since the first century, back when my ancestors were living in trees and eating their young. There were vibrant churches and monasteries, and places like Straight Street in Damascus, where the apostle Paul was let down from the wall in a basket. There were even villages that still spoke Aramaic, Christ’s language. The people were friendly, whatever their religion, and were happy to talk to a visiting American.
It wasn’t all roses. Regnery describes a visit to Homs, the scene of a 2011 opposition uprising and a 2014 pro-Assad victory. He stayed at a fifth-floor walk-up hotel, at $6 a night. The Arab toilets were free, and the Western toilet was an extra 50 cents — “the best fifty cents I spent on the entire trip.”
What happened since then is a historical tragedy. Hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians were killed, Christian sites were destroyed by ISIS, and millions of people became refugees. It took 4,000 years to build Aleppo, writes Regnery, and only four to destroy it. Today, there are about a million Christians in Syria. In 2001, there were 2.5 million of them.
Regnery’s travels in Slavic countries invite a comparison to Patrick Leigh-Fermor’s account of his walk from Holland to Constantinople, far-away countries of which we know little. The author visited the forgotten places that held Christian artistic treasures, like the painted monastery in Romania’s Voronet. Built in 1488, its walls and interiors are covered with hundreds of frescoes, and it’s called the Sistine Chapel of the East. I had never heard of it and, fascinating though they were, virtually every place Regnery visited was new to me.
The book’s title might seem odd. Unlikely Pilgrim, it’s called. Pilgrim I get, but unlikely? Yet, there aren’t many well-known political figures like Regnery whose religion would draw them to eleven different pilgrimages over the last 20 years, or who have the stamina to do so, for that matter.
What drew the author to the obscure churches and monasteries he visited was a growing Christian faith, and during his travels, he converted to Catholicism. The book describes a spiritual odyssey, as well as an account of visits to remote places, that takes it out of the realm of ordinary travel books, and makes it a classic that deserves to be long remembered.
F.H. Buckley teaches at the Antonin Scalia Law School and is author of The Republican Workers Party: How the Trump Victory Drove Everyone Crazy, and Why It Was Just What We Needed.
