Kafr Buhum, Orthodox Town near Hama

Kafr Buhum is a town 9 kilometres south-west of Hama, on a plateau above the Orontes valley at 330 to 351 metres. Locally it is called Kfarbo. At the 2004 census it had 12194 inhabitants; most are Greek Orthodox and some Greek Catholic. The reason to come is its churches and monastery: the oldest dated manuscript at the Monastery of St George is from 1805.

Getting there

It is a short drive of 9 kilometres south-west from Hama. Together with Mhardeh and al-Suwaydiyah, Kafr Buhum is one of the few Arab Orthodox settlements in the Hama region, and it fits the same day as Mhardeh.

What to see

No one knows when the Monastery of St George (Mar Jirjis) was founded. Its oldest dated manuscript was written in 1805 by a local deacon. According to Arabic sources, the monastery keeps 18th- and 19th-century icons, most of them by the painter Hanna Saliba, church manuscripts from the 17th and 18th centuries, and old silver liturgical objects.

There are other places of worship in town. The Church of Our Lady stands, local tradition says, on top of an old Roman temple. Add the Greek Catholic Church of Mar Elias, the shrines of John the Baptist and of the Forty Martyrs, and the Greek Orthodox Cathedral of the Prophet Elias, which is 40 years old. There are rock-cut caves in the town as well.

The town’s history

Kafr Buhum was the birthplace of Ignatius III Atiyah, Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Antioch (1619-1634). In the middle of the 17th century Patriarch Macarios III ibn al-Za’im recorded the village as wealthy and counted 1025 adult men. In the 18th century it was one of the cotton villages watered from the Orontes. In the tax register of 1828-1829 it appears with 72 feddans, among the largest villages of the Hama sanjak.

With Mhardeh it was one of the two large Christian villages of the area, and both paid the jizya, the poll tax on non-Muslims; the jizya made up only 2 percent of their total tax. Early in the Ottoman period a small Jewish community also lived in the village, and most of it had left by the middle of the 19th century. Jews from Aleppo kept commercial interests there until the mid-1830s.

In 1933 Kafr Buhum was one of four villages whose land belonged to its own people rather than to the big landowners of Hama. A cement factory opened in the town in 1961.

Emigration

The town has a population spread across the world. An Arabic source speaks of more than 37000 emigrants, most of them in Argentina; the figure rests on a single source.

How long it takes

An hour and a half: the monastery, a church or two and the edge of the plateau overlooking the valley.

What most people miss

The Hanna Saliba icons at the Monastery of St George. The monastery may be locked outside services, so ask in town beforehand who holds the key.