Photo: Pari Ducovic

It is a bright winter weekend afternoon in Diyarbakir, in southeastern Turkey, and visitors crowd the streets of the historic center. Diyarbakir is now the de facto capital of Turkey’s predominantly Kurdish region. Approximately 70 percent of its residents are Kurdish, despite the visible signs of the many civilizations, faiths, and ethnicities that have lived here, and dominated here, and risen and fallen here, for almost two millennia. Those strolling the streets are almost all Kurds and Turks from nearby towns and other provinces of eastern Turkey. Diyarbakir sees few foreign tourists because it is far from the Mediterranean beaches of the west and historic sights that pack heavily visited cities like Istanbul.

The climate of southeastern Turkey, like its history, is harsh and unforgiving. In winter snowstorms often sweep across the high plateau on which Diyarbakir rests, but in the summer the city and the rest of Turkish Kurdistan is punished with searing heat. Daytime temperatures often rise over 100 F, but at this time of year the roads in the higher reaches and mountain valleys can be snowbound for days. But not today. Today is seasonably chilly but sunlight bathes the Gazi Caddesi, the broad artery that divides the historic center from end to end, and some even manages to squeeze between the apartment blocks that line the tight-fitting lanes that branch left and right. Both locals and weekenders crowd the café tables in the central courtyard of the Hasan Pasha, a caravansary that opened in the 16th century for the rest and replenishment of traders trolling the Anatolian arm of the Silk Road. Others lunch on grilled meats and mounds of rice at restaurant booths that line the surrounding balcony.

A short walk away, some of the weekenders take a moment to pop into the Petyun Keldani Church, built in the 11th century to serve as the seat of the Chaldean Catholic diocese but now primarily a tourist sight. Immediately there is shift in tone, like a bank of clouds suddenly passing across a sunlight sky. The lively chatter from the street is silenced. The street musicians belting out traditional Kurdish folk tunes at the entrance gate cannot be heard. With only 10 Chaldean families left in Diyarbakir, Turks and Kurds make up almost all of the visitors. Many of the women wear headscarves. Some light votive candles and prop them in the small sandbox set up to contain them alongside others already burning. Drooping strings of lights illuminate the altar. Walls of hewn grey stone with columns and arches designed in black-and-white stripes support the ceiling and define the church’s heritage, these features being characteristic of Christian architecture in the wider region hundreds of years. A crowd gathers in the rear to eye the icon of St. George. Smartphones appear from pockets and handbags. Photos are snapped. For most of the visitors the church is reminder of Turkey’s more diverse religious history and something of a novelty—call a showpiece—for they may have been exposed to it in history lessons, however briefly, but never witnessed it up close.

Just a few steps away, in the St. Georgios Church, built in the third century, the scene is repeated. Stone columns and arches support the ceiling. Visitors stroll through the chancellery in a reverential hush and snap photos of the seven altars. Comments are exchanged in soft murmurs. There are only a few dozen in the church at any moment, though as the largest Armenian church in the Middle East it can hold three thousand worshippers. Outside a bell tower rises above the rooftops of the Old Town, still marking a former Armenian presence where now few Armenians remain.

A ten-minute-walk, across the Gazi Caddesi, tucked even more deeply into the warrens of the Old Town is the Syriac Orthodox Church of St. Mary, which lays credible claim to being the oldest in Turkey and one of the oldest in the Christian world. It was built in the third century on the site of a pagan temple and houses the bones of St. Thomas and St. Jacob of Serugh, a renowned poet and theologian who lived in the fifth and sixth centuries and rose to the rank of bishop.

In keeping with architectural tradition, St. Mary’s was also constructed in dark grey stone. An arched portico propped up by a row of columns serves as the entrance. A courtyard and fountain, like one would find in any Turkish mosque, is laid out before it.  A few visitors come and go, again almost all Kurds and Turks from Diyarbakir and surrounds. They stroll through the side corridors and take photos of the smaller chapels. In the nave they pause to admire the honeycomb arch muqarnas above the altar. Again a hushed quiet permeates the grounds. As on the other side of the Old Town, an aura of curiosity, perhaps respect, perhaps even admiration, pervades the church.

It was not always this way.

Given the array of sects that comprise the religious map wherever Christianity has spread it is no wonder that there is often some confusion over the different denominations, even those that trace their origins to the beginning of Christianity. There are the Syriac Orthodox, the Church of the East, Chaldean Catholics and Pentecostals. Slight doctrinal differences account for the divisions, and the diaspora has scattered them to Iraq, Iran, Syria, and elsewhere, but what unites them is their history, ethnicity, Semitic origins, and the Aramaic language, which dates to biblical times and was the lingua franca of historic Palestine and the Orient.

No matter the denomination, the Christian presence in Turkey is as old as Christianity itself. Credible records claim that Mary, the mother of Jesus, fled to Syria with the apostle John after the death of her son, and after traveling through the eastern Mediterranean spreading the new religious message the two settled is what is now Turkey near the ancient Greek city of Ephesus. There both died, John at the age of 93 after writing his gospel. A small chapel stands on what is believed to be the site of Mary’s last home. The apostle Paul also spent time in Ephesus, died there and was buried in Heliopolis. And so present-day Syria and Turkey became the first significant outposts of Christianity. It was in Antioch, Turkey, where the adherents to the new faith were first called Christians. After the Byzantine emperor Constantine established the capital of the Eastern Church in the city that became his namesake, Turkey served as the site of the first Christian ecumenical councils—the First Council of Nicaea in 325, the First Council of Constantinople in 381, the Council of Ephesus in 431, and the Council of Chalcedon in 451—playing the ground for the Nicene Creed, the tenets of the religion that would form its foundation for almost the next two thousand years.

But it was not to last.

Over the centuries pieces of territory were chipped off the Byzantine Empire until all that remained was little more than the city of Constantinople. Western Crusaders, seeing the followers of the Eastern Church as reprobates, ripped through the city in 1204, pillaging and laying waste to its library of 100,000 books, but the city and empire-in-name-only would hold on for another 250 years, when the fatal blow was struck by the Muslim Turkic forces that had migrated westward from Central Asia. The formidable walls that had been built to preserve what remained of the empire were finally breached in 1453. The Turkish forces embarked on a rampage of the city, slaughtering, raping, and looting at will. Sultan Mehmed II intended to allow the pillaging to continue for three days, at the time the accepted “norm” for conquering armies, but called it to a halt after two, appalled by the degree of savagery. "What a city we have given over to plunder and destruction," he said.

So ended Christian rule throughout Anatolia, and Constantinople was renamed Istanbul, but unlike the patterns of conquerors in other parts of the world the remaining Christians were spared expulsion. Instead, Christians, Jews, and other religious minorities were given “protected” status as so-called “millets.” This came with a separate judicial system and the Christians were allowed freedom of worship—but it came at a price. An oppressive tax system extracted payments from even the unborn children of pregnant mothers. Equality it was not, but Turkey’s Christians fared better than many religious minorities in other parts of the world, and in Christian majority Europe.

But this, too, was not to last.

World War I would see the fatal splintering of the Ottoman Empire, and by 1915 its losses took the form of wrath aimed at the Christian peoples of the southeast, with a spirit of vengeance originating from the highest levels of the Ottoman government. One factor that propelled anti-Christian violence was the question of loyalty, to the Ottoman Empire in particular, a question that progressively colored the views of the higher authorities as Ottoman losses increased. Nine predominantly Christian villages near the border with Persia were set aflame when the men refused service in the Ottoman army. With the Syriac, Chaldean, and Armenian villages in the mountain valleys difficult to reach, the lowland Christians paid the price for the perception of betrayal and collaboration.

Anti-Christian violence took a new turn when the Ottomans enlisted the collaboration of local Kurds, some claim promising them Christian lands and property once the Christians were killed or expelled. Armed with German-made weapons provided by the Ottomans, Germany and Turkey being allies in the war, the Hamidiye Alaylari, Kurdish light cavalry regiments, razed villages throughout the territory, driving the Christian communities further into the mountains. Once they fled their houses were burned, lands seized, and valuables stolen. Many still-standing churches and monasteries were destroyed, some of which dated to the fourth century.

The Tigris River, cradle of the Mesopotamian basin, passes alongside Diyarbakir after it departs from its source in Lake Kazar, in the Taurus Mountains near the city of Harput, or Mamûretü'l-Azîz, in eastern Anatolia. Today the historic bridge that crosses the river is a popular strolling spot for regional visitors and city residents out for an afternoon getaway. Restaurants line both sides of the bank, with seating in lines of cushy sofas, allowing the guests to dine on chicken and beef kebabs and other specialties under the shade of trees beside the slowly rolling waterway. But like much in southeastern Turkey it was not always this way.

In the lead-up to the Sayfo the local Kurdish militias piled the dead bodies of slaughtered Christians onto a raft and floated it down the river in a warning to those still seeking safety in the city. Later most of the Christian libraries were pillaged, the books thrown into the river, and it is said that the water turn blue from the dissolving print.

Lutfi Al-Rahawi is a Syriac Christian and scholar who has written extensively on the Syriac culture and maintains close ties with the Syriac diaspora. Higher studies led him into the field of molecular genetics and he now lives in London, though his ancestral ties are deep and personal. His maternal grandfather was a judge in Diyarbakir. Just before World War I and the upheaval of 1915 he was transferred to the Supreme Court of Damascus, then under Ottoman rule, but after a few years he was transferred to Mosul, in present-day Iraq, then also part of the empire. But while in Damascus and Mosul survivors of the Sayfo began to arrive, among them members of his immediate family and relatives who had been displaced from Diyarbakir and elsewhere. After the war ended none could return to their homes, and in many cases there were no homes to return to, so they settled wherever they had landed—Iraq, Syrian, Jordan, Palestine, or elsewhere. This included his grandfather.

As Al-Rahawi sees it, in the Ottoman Empire the Christians in general and Syriacs in particular came out on the short end of the church-state realignment after the Turkish conquest of Constantinople 1453:

The Ottomans may have promoted a version of tolerance for the confessional community, known as the millet system, although by today’s standards some would label it religious apartheid, others premodern religious pluralism. But in reality only the Greek and Armenian Orthodox were granted full millet status, while the rest of the Eastern and Oriental Orthodox were relegated to the status of sub-millets and some have even described us as a micro-millets.

In the violence of the takeover the Greek Orthodox patriarch was executed—hanged in his patriarchate.

The Ottomans appointed a Greek Orthodox, and the new Armenian Orthodox patriarchs were given the status of “millet pashas,” leaders of the autonomous religious communities. They lived in Istanbul and were responsible to the central government for all the Christians then subject to the Ottoman state. Their task was to facilitate church-state relations through the evolving millet system, particularly paying jizia, or special tax imposed on Christians, and maintaining internal security. Under the millet system none of the patriarchs of the Eastern and Oriental Orthodox and their dignitaries could conduct business with the Ottoman government directly, only through the patriarchs of the Greek or Armenian Orthodox churches, who may or may not have been sympathetic to their concerns or even take the time to represent them.

This was the situation for more than four hundred years. In the Crimean War and World War I the Turkish government became very wary of the Christians under their rule, fearing they might side with the Russian Empire. Just before the end of the World War I the Bolsheviks toppled Czar Nicholas II, seized power in Russia, and decided to break their alliance with the Allies and withdraw from Turkey. The Christians, especially the Church of the East, were left vulnerable to the Ottomans and Kurds, and the Church of the East was the only Christian community in the empire that officially declared war on the Ottomans and aligned itself with the Allies. In 1918 Mar Benyamin Shimun 19th, the Church’s patriarch, was assassinated in the Uremia region along with 150 of his guards on orders of the Kurdish chieftain Ismail Agha, as they were leaving what was supposed to be a friendly meeting with Simko.

The Kurds were rising up, and from 1890–91 the Ottomans were either too weak, disorganized, or reluctant to stand in their way. Sultan Abdul Hamid gave semiofficial status to the Kurdish insurgents. They were mainly made up of Kurdish tribes but also some Turks, Yörüks, Arabs, Turkmen, and Circassians. The Ottoman authorities organized them into tribal militias like the Hamidiye Alaylari, well-armed, irregular formations that operated in the southeastern provinces of the empire. Established by and named after Sultan Abdul Hamid II, they were given the task of subduing a perceived Armenian threat, but they went further and committed numerous atrocities against all the Christians.

The violence that virtually eradicated the Christian presence was not a spontaneous eruption. In a region dominated by Kurds for centuries the Christians had coexisted with them reasonably well, but in 1840 severe cracks emerged. In the regions of Tur Abdin and Hakari local Kurds killed many Christians when they pushed back against the government’s attempts to bring the former semi-autonomous region under stricter central control. Till then many of the Christians had lived in remote villages tucked deep into the mountain valleys beyond the reach of the government authorities, where they could manage their own affairs with tolerated autonomy. A few decades later the Kurds were issued modern weapons to battle the Russian forces in the Russo-Turkish War, weapons the Kurds refused to turn in after the war’s end, which would later contribute to future vigilante violence.

Of the claims of a Kurdish hand in the anti-Christian violence, Lutfi Al-Rahawi is adamant

It’s very possible that few Christians were killed at the hands of a Turk. It was mainly the Kurds who were recruited to do the dirty work. Talaat Pasha was a member of the fiercely nationalistic Turkish Union and Progress party in Istanbul. He would often send telegrams to the Turkish forces, ordering them to raid a Chrisian village.

The Turks would tell the people to flee to a neighboring village, but along the way the Kurds were lying in wait. They would rape the women, steal their possessions, and slaughter most of the men.

Once again, scapegoating played a part in the massacres. In the war Christians were directly blamed for Turkish defeats in battles with the Russians, and the result was violent retribution—the regular torching of Christian villages as the Turkish army was forced to retreat. In the towns of Gawa and Bashtadea all of the men were slaughtered, and additional Ottoman soldiers retreating from the front lines killed the surviving women and children. As the war spilled across the border into the Urmia region of Persia some Kurds and Yazidis tried to protect the Christians, but their efforts proved mostly futile against the ferocity of the Kurdish attacks.

As Ottoman losses continued the killing took a more systematic and sinister turn. In one province the Ottomans ordered the Christian men to the village of Hafteran for mandatory military registration. Fearing the outcome if they refused, hundreds complied, but once they arrived they were forced into slavery in the service of the Turkish army. In another incident one thousand Christians were executed in an operation coordinated between the Ottomans and Kurdish irregulars. Again, most of the women who were spared were raped and taken into slavery.

Ottoman battle losses changed this. Diyardat Tahir Bilbeg, governor of Van province, formed his own militia nicknamed the “Butcher Brigade” to patrol Sirt and nearby villages inhabited mainly by Chaldeans. Through the month of June and July 1915 as many as 55,000 Chaldeans, including the Chaldean bishop, were killed and their villages razed in both organized violence led by the Ottoman army and Kurdish vigilante gangs. The surviving women and children were expelled to Mardin but along the way were beaten by local police and robbed of their possessions. Stragglers were shot and women were seized by the police and Kurds and murdered after being raped.

In Diyarbakir, where a new generation of both Kurds and Turks now stroll through the memorialized churches, Mehrad Rashid was named governor. Among his claims for office was his reputation for stoking violence against Armenians. The force he put together was comprised of released Circassian prisoners and volunteer vigilantes from other parts of the province. Over the next few months Rashid’s militiamen destroyed 200 Christian villages and burned Diyarbakir’s central market, where over 1,500 stores and businesses had been owned by Armenians and Syriacs. Again, many Yazidis tried to protect Christians but could not save the Armenian and Syriac clergy, all of whom were victims of the violence.

By the time the violence had spent itself the province of Diyarbakir had lost 85% of its Christian population. Valuables that were not destroyed, in homes, churches, markets, and administrative centers, were carried away by looters.

Prior to 1915 there were other Christian strongholds in southeastern Turkey—or Tur Abdin—besides Diyarbakir. One hour south of Diyarbakir, the city of Mardin hugs a steep hillside with expansive views of the Mesopotamian plain that fans out below it. Rooftop restaurants and cafes offer photo-friendly viewpoints, used to their fullest by weekenders and weeklong visitors from Diyarbakir and faraway parts of the country. One Caddesi, or First Street, winds from north to south parallel to the hillside.

The name of the city dates to the Roman period - Marda, or Merida, it was called, borrowing for the Aramaic word for “fortress.” Looming above the city and extending almost the length of a ragged mountain ridge is Mardin’s massive citadel. Brightly illuminated at night, the citadel is the symbol of Mardin. Built on the site of an ancient fortress that dates to 1000 B.C., the “modern” castle was constructed in the 10th century to guard the city against invasions from the east, and there have been many. The Mongols from Central Asia tore through Anatolia in 1231, 1241, and 1243, and reached the Byzantine territory of Nicea, just west of today’s Ankara, and remained a constant threat. Still standing at the southern end of the ridge are the ruins of the Monastery of St. Nisibis, established in the fourth century and once home to 70 monks.

The climate of southeastern Turkey has always been as harsh as its history. The patchwork of stone streets that crowd the Old Town roast in the summer, when daytime temperatures often top 100 degrees and the tightly packed houses provide little shade. From late morning to early evening the Mesopotamian plain becomes a searing gridle, but it also glows golden yellow as the tall grasses dry bristle crisp. The yield of the land has formed the roots and stems of Mardin’s economy since ancient times—wheat, corn, cotton, and barley— along with its prime revenue producer, also for hundreds of years—sesame. Small family farmers raise goats, and cottage industries still produce cotton and wool. The wealth that the land has generated made Mardin a profitable hub for the trading routes passing from Syria to the south, greater Anatolia to the north, and the rest of Mesopotamia. In winter the climate can turn equally harsh. Occasional rains sweep through on warmer days, wet snow when biting cold descends from the mountain valleys. Thick mists often lay heavy on the plain, turning the fields emerald green.

Unlike Diyarbakir, Mardin receives a fair share of the Turkish tourist trade, and even a few foreigners, but most of the visitors are Turks from nearby regions. With its celebration of local crafts and artisanship, Mardin has become a homespun haven for Turks seeking a taste of their traditional past, which, whether or not they acknowledge it, is profoundly Christian, the Islamic sites being, in historical terms, relative newcomers.

With the arrival of Islam through the Turkish conquest the two religions managed to coexist in a relative and delicate harmony. At the north end of 1 Caddesi stands a mosque and madrassa. A short drop below 1 Caddesi, the minaret of another mosque rises above the mishmash of rooftops and market stalls, where craftsmen still produce cookware and other products by hand and hawk textiles and a rainbow array of soaps and bathing supplies in ways their ancestors—Christian or Muslim—have for centuries.

But the Christian legacy has not been totally erased. Reminders remain, now memorials to a lost era of coexistence. In the middle of lengthy and twisting 1 Caddesi still stands the Chaldean Catholic Church, but the tiny courtyard and arched portico that once served as its entrance is now little more than a photo-op, blocked by an iron fence and locked gate that is rarely open. A short walk down 1 Caddesi signboards in both Turkish and English point the way to the churches of St. Maryamanna, Turkish for the Virgin Mary, and St. Joseph. A steep climb up a series of cleanly swept stone steps leads to both, though at the Church of St. Maryamanna the door is locked even though opening times are posted. It is the same at the Syriac Catholic Church, also a short but steep climb above 1 Caddesi, and a sign in Turkish and English shows the way to the entrance, but a heavy lock secures the door.

Viewing the religious landscape in Turkey today, it would seem uncanny that for a millennia Christianity thrived. As part of the Roman province of Amyrana, Mardin was a bishopric of the Church of the East. It later became the episcopal home of two Armenian churches, two Syriac, along with the Church of the East. In the 16th century a Venetian trader, passing through Anatolia, was impressed by the prosperous Christian and Jewish life in the city.

As strong as the Christian presence had been, it would not survive the Sayfo, the Syriac term for the 1915 genocide. Only reminders remain, but they remain, if only reminders. In Mardin there is the Church of the Forty Martyrs, commemorating those who died from the Cappadocian region of western Turkey. Tucked in the back lanes, a short hike up from 1 Caddesi, it was also built in the light beige stone used throughout the Old Town, linking it, architecturally, with the history and culture of the city. It is open even in winter, and throughout the day visitors trickle in. A group of five pauses to view the Bible on display and prayer books lining the bookshelves for the occasional holiday service, wedding, or baptism. They stroll through the small nave, eye the arched ceiling and tall, wood-framed windows. As in the churches of Diyarbakir, there is an aura of curiosity, studied respect, even puzzlement. It may be first time any of them have entered a church.

Back on 1 Caddesi, fronting the main square, is the Mardin City Museum. Its exhibits summarize the history of the region, beginning in the Bronze Age and working their way through the Greeks and Romans, up through the Byzantines and the Ottoman conquest, with a few sidesteps to address the silverwork and jewelry that once that added to the region’s wealth, but the building itself, despite the minimal Christian representation, is another visible stamp of Christianity on the city. It was built in 1895 by the Syriac Catholic Church of Antioch as an office for religious affairs and occasional services, only to be taken over by the city to be converted into a museum one hundred years later.

A short drive from the city center stands the Syriac monastery of Dayr Zafaran, or Deyrulzafaran, also known as the Monastery of Mor Hanania. In 2000 B.C. an ancient Temple of the Sun stood on the site, and its remnants can still be seen in the corner of the Mor Hananyo Church. When the Romans took control of Anatolia the temple became a citadel for the occupying troops. As the Roman Empire sank into decline it was eventually abandoned, only to be given new life as a monastery when the bones of a few martyred saints were brought to the site by St. Shleimun. Reinventions and reconstruction resulted in a series of name changes, and in 1160 it became the patriarchate of the Syrian Orthodox Church of Antioch and settled on its present name in recognition of the saffron flowers that still bloom on its land and in its garden.

Beginning in the 14th century Dayr Zafaran became the center of the Syriac Orthodox Church and home of its patriarch, a distinction that lasted until 1932, when Patriarch Elias III Shakir was deposed and exiled from Turkey on orders of the president, Kamal Ataturk. He died in exile on a visit to in India, where many of his followers had settled. His successor, Ephrim I Barsoum, was also not allowed to enter Turkey, so Homs, in Syria, became the site of his patriarchate. In 1957 it moved to Damascus. 

On a chilly, wet winter day there are many empty spaces in the monastery’s parking lot, often filled at the peak of the tourist season. In the courtyard beyond the main entrance a circle of shops display the craftwork of a culture that once spread throughout southeastern Turkey, though now museum pieces or reminiscent of family heirlooms.

Even in winter, daily tours accommodate the few visitors. The monastery’s guide, one of the few Syriacs still residing in Mardin, leads them into the underground burial chamber of seven of the church’s patriarchs. In another vaulted room lined in stone stands the octagonal baptismal font, still used for the occasional baptism. Psalms of David are inscribed on the doors, along with a poem by St. Balay. In the Beth Kadishe section, or House of the Saints, Christian motifs carved into the stone serve as reminders of the early Christian culture. Still visible is a bunch of grapes, figures in the form of seashells, and a group of dolphins encircling a cross.

Facing the courtyard, the nearby Church of the Virgin Mary is believed to be the monastery’s first house of prayer, but there is also Daniel’s Church, built in the early sixth century when the emperor Anastasius ruled the Byzantine Empire, Frescoes on the interior walls depict biblical scenes, but they are faded, flaked, and discolored, having failed to hold up to the Anatolian climate.

Little known is that Dayr Zafaran also played a role nudging southeastern Turkey into the modern era. In the 19th century its sixth patriarch, Peter III, traveled to England and returned with a printing press, and for the next one hundred years the monastery produced books in Syriac, Turkish, and Arabic.

Dayr Zafaran and the churches of Mardin are not the only remaining landmarks of the Syriac culture in Anatolia, despite the Sayfo and later attempts to eradicate it. A little over an hour from Mardin, across a patchwork of fertile fields, is the city of Midyat, with a history as old as Mesopotamia itself. Before the Christian era Assyrian tablets recorded the name of the city as Matiate. After Christianity arrived in the region the language of everyday use became Aramaic, Syriac or Suryac, or Suryoyo, as it was locally known. Syriac Christianity was the dominant faith, along with the Syriac rite, but from there the religious pathways diverged into the Church of the East, the Syrian Orthodox Church of Antioch, the Armenian Orthodox Church, the Greek Orthodox Church and its Catholic branches, the Maronites, and the Protestants.

The term Assyrian is a recent invention, attributed to a branch of the Church of the East to give a semblance of recognition to the historic Assyrians. Besides their theological differences, the Syrian Orthodox speaks the western Syriac dialect, while the Church of the East uses the eastern Syriac.

Despite their diversity, throughout the growth of the Ottoman Empire the Christian sects continued to dominate, Midyat becoming the only city within Ottoman-controlled lands to retain a Christian majority.

But this would also not last.

In 1915 word of massacres of Christians spread from village to village, but the question of armed resistance divided the Christians. On June 20, 1915, a roundup of Christians in Midyat led to the arrest of one hundred men who were pressured - one would say tortured - into revealing the names of local resisters. Then they were promptly executed. The rest of the Christian population spun into panic, severed the telegraph connection to Istanbul and other Turkish cities and relied on their inferior weapons to attack Ottoman administrative centers. Reprisal came from the better armed Turks and Kurds, who had been wooed, coaxed, and bribed by the Ottomans to dispatch with the Christians. The events that had taken place in Mardin and Diyarbakir were repeated.

Like Mosul and Mardin, Midyat had been a power center of the Syriac Orthodox Church of Antioch for more than a thousand years. Today a few monasteries and five churches still function. Some of the homes are still in Christian hands, though the families and descendants of the owners have long resettled, most to cities in Europe. Here also the stone houses that crowd the center of the city in summer broil under the Mesopotamian sun, but in winter a clammy damp chill seeps between the narrow lanes. Despite the diminished Christian presence the city retains a landmark that earns it a prominent place on the map of Syriac Orthodoxy.

Stroll from the regional bus stop in the city center through a winding corridor of stone-paved lanes, through a section of the city clustered with stone houses isolated by high stone walls, and after a handful of twists and turns is the entrance gate of the Monastery of Mor Gabriel, also known as Dayro d-Mor Gabriel, also Deyrulumur.

Like Dayr Zafaran, Mor Gabriel is a mish-mash of smooth, stone buildings spread over several hectares. Courtyards separate each section of the compound, ringed with walkways shielded from the sun by colonnaded porticos. The twin belfries of the central church rise above the low-lying cityscape, still affirming Midyat’s Christian history if not its significant presence. Almost all of Midyat’s Christians may be gone, but sectarian friction persists. Some Kurdish residents, backed by local authorities, have disputed the legitimacy of the Mor Gabriel’s location, arguing that it was built on the site of a mosque. But its foundation was laid at the end of the fourth century, almost two hundred years before the arrival of Islam.

The origin of Mor Gabriel has its roots in Christian mythology. It claims that two ascetics, St. Samuel (Mor Shmuel) and his student St. Simon (Mor Shimun), passing through the territory, fell asleep one night and were visited by an angel that ordered the two to build a house of prayer where three blocks of stone had been laid. As soon as they awoke they searched and found the stones the angel had directed them to. Construction of Mor Gabriel began, and Mor Gabriel, or St. Gabriel, is considered the primary patron saint of Tur Abdin.

Over the next hundred years the spread of Christianity brought over a thousand monks into southeastern Anatolia, and Mor Gabriel was granted the support of Roman emperors. For four hundred years the monastery served as the seat of the Episcopal Church, and in 1049 it was granted special status, a designation that lasted until the Sayfo. In 1915 many of the Christians who had sought safety at Mor Gabriel were murdered by Kurdish irregulars who seized control of the buildings and grounds.

Today, as at Dayr Zafaran, tourists and pilgrims are welcomed at Mor Gabriel. A guide leads visitors through a few rooms of the complex, and the main church is open on holy days for Midyat’s few Christians. Throughout the year a dozen or two monks and a handful of nuns take up residence, restoring a faint reminder of the Christian culture.

The establishment of the Turkish republic in 1923 failed to put an end to anti-Christian violence. Harassment and persecution continued, organized by regional political officials, driving many of the surviving Christians across the border into the Syrian town of Qamishli, known as the new Nusaybin, or Nisibis, and other villages throughout the French-controlled territory. Many sought refuge in the larger city of Aleppo.

Wherever atrocities have occurred, what preserves their memory is the stories of their survivors, and the descendants of their survivors. Juliette Yoab is a Syriac Christian from Qamishli whose paternal grandfather, along with the rest of his family, was driven out of Mardin during the Sayfo. Many of his relatives were victims of the Turkish and Kurdish attacks while others simply disappeared. In their haste all they took with them were family records and a book written in Garshuni, an Arabic text written in the Syriac alphabet. Their land and property was abandoned, along with their life savings. Juliette’s name is a homage to the French authorities of Syria that received Christians fleeing Turkey.

The story of Juliette’s maternal grandfather, from Midyat, has been preserved in greater detail:

In the early 1900s, long before the war, persecutions were already driving Christians out of the territory. My grandfather boarded a ship to New York, leaving his wife, children and siblings behind to follow him. He settled in Brooklyn, where he worked in a textile factory. Years later, after setting up his own business, the news reached him that none of his family had survived the killings of 1915. What troubled him even more is that one of his sons had been picked up off a pile of dead bodies that had been thrown into a well. He was injured but somehow missed the shots that killed the rest of the family. Even more disturbing, he had been adopted by Turks and the family had renamed him Mohammed.

My grandfather’s business was thriving but he sold it for a pittance and returned to Midyat. There he learned the awful truth, along with some unsettling details. While sheltering in a church with other Syriacs his sister was buried alive under a pile of sand and gravel, her hands sticking out of the mound, begging to be saved.

People in the local community helped him track down his son and claim him back. By then the boy was six years old. They left for Aleppo, where many orphans and refugees were sheltering in churches under the protection of the French. There he met a young woman who had also fled Turkey and married her. My mother was one of their seven children. They couldn’t return to Turkey so they settled in Qamishli but always hoped to one day resettle in Midyat. Later we learned that all the property records had been burned so that no one who had fled could later claim what they owned.

The atrocities of war are never confined to the generation that experienced them. They are passed on, stains that can never be cleansed from the social fabric. Juliette went on:

When I was seven years old I asked one of my relatives, ‘Why can’t you open your hand? She told me, ‘There’s a bullet in it.’ I was surprised and wanted to see it, but she couldn’t open her hand. She told me why: ‘One day I was breast feeding my baby. The Ottoman army shot at us. I put my hands up to protect it and the bullet went right into my hand. It was never taken out.’

In 1923, the new republican government was less than sympathetic to the Christians’ plight. The refugees who had fled to Syria, Iran, and elsewhere were stripped of their citizenship and their properties were confiscated. Many of the Christians who had managed to remain in Turkey saw their lands and property seized by Kurdish vigilantes and later had to buy them back from the ruling Aghas. Empty former Christian villages were gradually filled with Kurds and Turks.

In Mardin, Christians sought safety either in the nearby monasteries or barricaded themselves in their houses and villages. Much of the business class was rounded up to be deported to Diyarbakir, but most were killed along the way if they refused to convert to Islam. In the city the streets became a battleground and by the time the fighting had ended much of it was a wasteland. Men, women, and children sheltering in churches were killed, many of the women after being raped. The surrounding villages weren’t spared. Eqser was burned to the ground but only after being looted. In Nisibis all of the town’s Christians were slaughtered, their bodies tossed into a ravine. Once again, most of the violence was carried out by Kurdish tribesmen with the cooperation of Arab vigilantes. By the time the violence had ended almost 200 churches and monasteries were completely destroyed, along with most of their libraries.

So ended the Sayfo, though sporadic acts of vengeance persisted like spot fires. After viewing a photo of the effects of the Sayfo, U.S. ambassador Henry Morgenthau wrote,

Scenes like this were common all over the Armenian provinces, in the spring and summer months of 1915. Death in its several forms—massacre, starvation, exhaustion—destroyed the larger part of the refugees. The Turkish policy was that of extermination under the guise of deportation.

Another report on the slaughter of Armenians elaborated more graphically:

The skulls of small children were smashed with rocks, the bodies of girls and women who resisted rape were chopped into pieces live, men were mostly beheaded, and the clergy were skinned or burned alive.

Often the victims of war are losers twice —once at the hands of their persecutors and again by those in the role of rendering justice once any semblance of justice arrives too late. Throughout World War I an estimated 3 million Christians are believed to have been victims. In the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne the Christians of all denominations were denied the status of a minority group, and with it came the denial of self-determination, one of the cardinal principles advocated by U.S. president Woodrow Wilson in bringing an end to trauma of World War I. But the Allies, still colonial powers, favored the mandate system, allotting control of former Ottoman territories to rule by the victors—Palestine and Iraq to the United Kingdom, Syria and Lebanon to France—shelving Wilson’s idealistic concept. A year after the Turkish Republic was established the Syriac Orthodox patriarchate stated his allegiance to the new government but was exiled. Patriarch Mor Ignatius Elias III of Dayr Zafaran was also driven out of Turkey and died in India. His successor, Ignatius Ephraim I, was also prevented from reclaiming the Church headquarters at Dayr Zafaran and had to reestablish his new patriarchate in Homs, Syria. To place a coda on the eradication of the Christians, the sale of land to non-Turks in all of Mardin province was banned. The Christians had been stripped of their Turkish citizenship, denying them the rights of Turkish citizens, and Mardin was the region where most of them would have returned.

Besides the losses of the Syriac-speaking people, a population transfer resulted in the deportation of 1.3 million mainly Greek Orthodox Christians from Turkey to Greece, and 400,000 mainly Turkish Muslims back to Turkey.

If there is any truth in the adage that “there are no winners in war” it is confirmed in the case of undeclared wars—those waged not against a foreign force or legitimate army but a people themselves. The costs of the Sayfo to the Armenian and Syriac-speaking Christians were material in lives and property—both of which can recover, over time, devastating though they were. The cost to Turkey was the loss of the multireligious character that the Ottoman Empire had managed for centuries, unjust and deeply flawed as it was, and one hundred years later it has never recovered.

The physical losses in war have always exceeded any benefit, but the human costs have been forever incalculable. They were in the past, are in the present, and there is no reason to believe the future could be any different.

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Christopher Thornton teaches in the Department of American Literature and Culture at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland. He has also taught at Emerson College and MIT in the Boston area, at the American University in Cairo, and at the European Institute for International Communication in the Netherlands. A book-length travelogue he wrote about Iran (Descendants of Cyrus: Travels Through Everyday Iran) was recently published by Potomac Books. Marielle Patronis Haddoub has over 35 years of teaching experience in tertiary and higher education in the UK and UAE. She is Syrian British, born in Syria to Syrian parents and raised in Syria, and educated at the University of Sheffield. She holds a PhD in Education and a BA in English Language and Literature. She currently lives in London and travels while volunteering as a student mentor.

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