Page:The Nestorians and their rituals, volume 1.djvu/78

44 against the Serpent; and just above the fire are seven small figures which my informant told me typified the state of infants who die unbaptized.

I found the Jacobites here as elsewhere inferior to any of the native communities in general intelligence: their ecclesiastical affairs are very badly administered, and their bishops and priests far behind the clergy of all the other sects. But as I shall have to speak of them more fully hereafter, I shall on the present occasion restrain any further remarks on this subject.

On my second visit to Diarbekir I met with Mutran Abdool-Messiah, generally known to us as Athanasius, who was acquainted with Bishop Heber in India. He had gone over to the Romanists and returned again to his own community, and was then living at one of the Jacobite villages in the vicinity, of which there are several around Diarbekir. When I last passed through the town he had gone to his final home.

Diarbekir is not the seat of a Jacobite Bishop, but is under the immediate control of the Patriarch, who occasionally sends a Bishop to act as his delegate. There are about 250 Jacobite families in the city; the papal Syrians number forty families with two priests, who are under the jurisdiction of Mutran AntooreAntoon [sic] of Mardeen. The religious services of the latter are conducted in a private house.

Before leaving the city we had a visit from one of the Italian Capuchins, who have a convent here. He complained much of the treatment which he had received from the Armenians at Urfah, whither he had gone to create schisms among them, and where the Latin Monks have at length succeeded, through the influence of France, in building a new monastery. These men, like some other missionaries, seem to deem it a strange and very wicked thing that the native churches should resist the encroachment of Romanism or dissent.

The costume of the females at Diarbekir resembles that of Aleppo, and consists of a tight silk or satin dress, open in front, with long pendent sleeves, which is bound round the waist with a rich girdle. A small red cap, with a long tassel made to hang in front of the left shoulder, and a neat turban fringed with gold braid, over which a gauze handkerchief is lightly thrown, forms the common in-door coiffure. In the streets they go