Description
In 587 a.d., two monks set off on an peculiar journey that might take them in an arc across all of the Byzantine world, from the shores of the Bosphorus to the sand dunes of Egypt. At the manner John Moschos and his pupil Sophronius the Sophist stayed in caves, monasteries, and remote hermitages, collecting the knowledge of the stylites and the desert fathers before their fragile world after all shattered beneath the good eruption of Islam. More than a thousand years later, the use of Moschos’s writings as his guide, William Dalrymple sets off to retrace their footsteps and composes “an evensong for a dying civilization” —Kirkus Reviews, starred review