Books have their own lives, like children when they grow up. When I do readings, everyone wants to hear excerpts from The Journey into the Shadow of Byzantium, something they didn't ask me for five or ten years ago. It is said to be my best book – that’s what they say. In many ways, it is my least commercial book. So many unexpected events occurred during the journey: it happened to be the period when the Turks were fighting the Kurds and the PKK, in Lebanon the war had just ended and reconstruction had begun, in Syria they were waiting for Assad to die. Something was happening everywhere and it was all related to Christianity, the coincidences were incredible.

From an interview with the author in Lifo. In the spring of the year 578 AD, if you sat on a rock high above Bethlehem, you might just be able to discern two figures emerging, with their staffs in hand, from the gate of the great monastery of Saint Theodosius in the desert. The two would head southwest through the desolate land of Judea, towards the exceedingly rich, cosmopolitan port of Alexandria. It was the beginning of an extraordinary journey that would lead John Moschus and his disciple, Sophronius the Sophist, along a path through the entire eastern Byzantine world. Their goal was to collect the wisdom of the desert fathers, the sages and the mystics of Byzantine East, before their fragile world collapsed and vanished.

The result is the Leimonarion, the book I have before me. If today, in the West, it is considered a rather obscure text, a thousand years ago it was one of the most popular books of the great Byzantine literature. […] Here’s what I wanted to do: to spend six months traveling in the Eastern Mediterranean, roughly following the route of John Moschus. Starting from Mount Athos and gradually descending to the Coptic monasteries of Upper Egypt, I wanted to do what no future generation of travelers would be able to do: to see, wherever possible, whatever Moschus and Sophronius had seen, to sleep in the same monasteries, to pray under the same frescoes and mosaics, to discover whatever was left and to witness with my own eyes the final moments of the twilight of Byzantium.

THEY WROTE ABOUT THE BOOK Dalrymple’s lament for the Christianity of the East is listed among the great contemporary travel books, comparable to Patrick Leigh Fermor’s A Time of Gifts.