I am imagining the old Christian refuges in Cappadocia. Vacillating spires of stone, sprouting up from the barren firmaments of Anatolia. These hermitages were like water poured onto a speaker cone. As the water, or any fluid, is exhorted by the acoustic forces below to obey its tyranny, in doing so transfiguring the elusive substance of sound into a tangible choreography, the Cappadocian landscape was a translation of some hidden divine will. During their persecution by the Romans, fleeing from the total authority of the known world, the imperious and unflinching hunt for brothers of their faith must have been sanctifying in of itself. Even in fatal defeat, there is no fate more glorious than for a stag-of-the-hunt to be a trophy in the halls of a Habsburgian palace.
Inside the holy city I see the acolytes busying themselves in the narrow passageways, engaged in some holy encounter. Few knew how the necropolis was made and few cared. Most assumed it was the work of divine intervention. Clay housed creatures of clay and the world was better for it. No preachers stand on pulpits. Rather, icons, drawn on every available surface, as graffiti is today, tenderly lip-talk the story of a Nazarethian holy man. Cloistered in earth, hymns pursed from lips in toil.

Yet is not the quintessential sin of man and woman the urge to elope? Desolation returns to desolation and the holy city, again became a sprawl of dust once its inhabitants left its habitude. The subsequent wars, saints, schisms and diets officiated by the offspring of these evacuees consecrates a new generation of holy sites and ours was on a parking lot.

Church of North Melbourne. A miniature foldable sign, sat upon the curb of the adjacent street, announces the presence of a church within the assembly hall of a local public school. Up-sized and spray coated chicken wire fence enclosed the complex of cinder blocks, H beams and an assortment of coloured cardboard. Austere in its wanton cheapness, only the student posters, projects and artworks, desperately pressed upon the glass, is any indication it is a school and not another structure built by the government.