I don't mean the people depicted in stone in the British Museum, with angular beards riding chariots surrounded by lions -- although there is an interesting scholarly debate about whether these are their direct descendants -- but the few thousand Christians scattered among a few dozen villages in the hills of Tur Abdin in south east Turkey, a stone's throw from the Syrian border.
The area was majority Christian by the 4th century, and the oldest surviving monasteries were founded then. Most Assyrians in Tur Abdin belong to the Syriac Orthodox Church, an Oriental Orthodox church in communion with the Copts in Egypt and the Armenians. They celebrate the Divine Liturgy of St James in Classical Aramaic, the language of Jesus -- from which their vernacular language, Surayt, descends.
In the dying years of the Ottoman Empire, under the cover of the First World War, the Ottomans pursued three genocides against its ancient Christian populations: the Pontic Greeks, the Armenians and the Assyrians. Alongside the killings, Greeks fled west to Greece and Armenians east -- to a much-truncated Armenia. Some Assyrians escaped to the south, but hundreds of thousands were killed in what they call the Sayfo.
A small number of Assyrians survived the Sayfo in Turkey. In the late 20th century this population suffered another exodus as it was caught up in violence between the Turkish state and Kurdish insurgents. Many thousands more Assyrians left and received asylum abroad, mainly in Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, Australia and the United States.
Related: St. Gabriel Assyrian Monastery Photo Album
A decisive battle in the Assyrian genocide was fought in 1915, in the village of Ainwardo. Thousands of Assyrians from across Tur Abdin and beyond had sought sanctuary behind its walls and in its fortress-church. The mass of Assyrians gathered here was able to resist Ottoman forces and halt the killing, leaving an uneasy peace where a few dozen villages in Tur Abdin were allowed to remain Christian.
We met some German-Assyrian teenagers on their first visit to their ancestral home, who translated the priest's explanation of the battle as he gesticulated at the bullets still embedded in the walls. One young man told me his dream was to save enough money in Germany to return to his homeland and build a house for his family. Over the past few decades perhaps a few thousand Assyrians have returned to Tur Abdin from abroad; we didn't meet many who didn't hold Dutch or German passports -- an encouraging sign when compared to the flow of Christian refugees in other parts of the Middle East.
In the church of another village we were greeted by a scholar who prided himself on his time spent studying ancient Syriac bibles in the British Library. He was enthusiastic about the power of the internet which let him continue to study these codices in PDF format on his computer. I asked if there were any manuscripts in the local churches, "No," he replied. "They are all in London or the Vatican, and I am glad. When they come to kill Christians they don't just want us dead, they burn our libraries to destroy our culture. In Europe the peshitta [Syriac Bible] is safe."
In another village we saw two churches: one fortified and locked; another less well-defended and open. The latter was reaching the end of a refurbishment by a German-Assyrian in his fifties, whom we found removing bubble wrap from a new font. He was talkative and sent us up the hill to see the fortified church. On the flat roof stood a veiled woman, understandably suspicious of outsiders. She did not seem to have any languages in common with us. We were unsure what she was shouting but the meaning of her hand gestures was clear.
The city of Nusaybin once had a mid-4th century cathedral. Now only the baptistry survives ,but it boasts that this is the oldest surviving purpose-built baptistry in the world. The door was locked, with no one around when we arrived. After hanging about for a few minutes, a tour group of Dutch-Assyrians arrived and adopted us. A lecture was given in Surayt and they kindly translated it into English for us. We were told of a 4th-century centre of learning at the church, and taken down to the crypt to venerate the shrine of Saint Jacob of Nisibis.
Further north, we visited the ruins of the mediaeval Armenian city of Ani, which began to decline after an earthquake in 1319 and was abandoned in the 18th century. The cathedral is an imposing half-crumbling former seat of the Catholicos of All Armenians, with pointed arches that pre-date European Gothic architecture. The site overlooks a deep ravine, which marks the modern Turkish-Armenian border. It benefits from UNESCO world heritage status but the Armenian government across the barbed wire and no-man's-land beyond accuses Ani's Turkish custodians of neglect.
We found better news of Armenian ruins at the Cathedral of the Holy Cross on Akdamar Island in Lake Van. All four sides of the square church were decorated with remarkable bas-reliefs of biblical scenes. Restored by the Turkish state in 2006, albeit as a museum, a cross was erected on the dome in 2010 and the Armenian Church holds a licence to celebrate one liturgy per year. There's also some good news for the Assyrians further west in Istanbul: in 2023 a new church was consecrated, dedicated to St Ephrem (also of Nisibis). It was built with the encouragement of the Turkish government, and President Erdoğan laid the foundation stone himself. It was the first church raised since the founding of the republic a hundred years before, and acts as a glimmer of hope for the Syriac Orthodox Assyrians in Turkey and across the Middle East.
As for the Pontic Greeks and the Armenians themselves, I'm afraid I've nothing to report; I couldn't find any to tell their stories. Though I'm told there are crypto-Armenians in the Highlands around Lake Van and crypto-Greeks in the Pontic Mountains along the Black Sea's southern coast. Perhaps I'll go and look for them next.
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