[1] Dalrymple's third book, From the Holy Mountain: A Journey in the Shadow of Byzantium (1997) saw him trace the ties of Eastern Orthodox congregations scattered in the Middle East to their ancient origins; it also deals with the question of how they have fared over centuries of Islamic rule and the complex relationship of Islam, Judaism, and Christianity in the Middle East.

A large part of the book covers the lives of the final remaining Christian communities in Asia Minor, the Levant and Egypt as they are driven away from the region by civil war and factional violence.

[3] Dalrymple's journey in the footsteps of Moschos starts from Mount Athos, Greece, at the end of June 1994, proceeds to Istanbul, and thence to eastern Turkey.

Ted Conover of The New York Times wrote "Dalrymple, a decidedly learned sort who allows that at Cambridge I spent my final year specializing in the study of Hiberno-Saxon art," has a zeal for ecclesiastical arcana that occasionally blinds him to the limits of what might interest the general reader.

("Scholars believe that work produced in the Tur Abdin may well once have provided the inspiration for the very first figurative Christian art in Britain," he enthuses.)