Tur Abdin is a (mountainous) region lying in Mesopotamia to the northeast of the city of Mardin. It is of moderate elevation and has many villages and hamlets. The side overlooking the area known in antiquity as "Beth Arbaye," or the Arab region, is called "Mount Izla," and the Greeks named it "Masius." Mount Tur Abdin lies among the cities of Jazirat Ibn Umar, Mardin, Nisibis, Amid (Diyarbakir), and Siirt. The original inhabitants of this mountain are the Arameans, who used to dwell throughout Mount "Masius," known today as Mount "Karaca Dağ." Shalmaneser I, king of Assyria (between 1276 and 1256 BC), waged war against them, occupied their cities, and demolished their fortresses; at that time they were many tribes and clans ranging between the Tigris, the Balikh, and the Euphrates. It is recorded in the annals of the Assyrian kings found in the cuneiform inscriptions discovered in the ruins of their cities that the king of Assyria called Adad-narari [?] II — who reigned in the year 911 and died in the year 889 BC, son of King Ashur-dan (922–910 BC — waged war against the Arameans of Tur Abdin many times. This region is very beautiful, and its air is pure and healthy. Yet its water is scarce, except for the part near the Tigris River where the city of Dara and the village of Kafarjawsa were built. As for the rest, it relies on rainwater, which the inhabitants store in narrow cisterns. As for how it came to be named Tur Abdin, the following is related in the story of al-Kafani [?]: "When the Persians came, drove the Greeks out of Dara and Nisibis and their environs, and seized the eastern side of the Euphrates, the Christians dwelling in the region of Tur Abdin (Tur Abdin) were scattered and took shelter with [?] the Romans, who settled them in a district known as (Dar al-Rum). Afterward the kings of the Greeks descended upon this region to take revenge on the Persians, and on Assyria, Nineveh, Bahdra (the Zakho region), Bajarmi (the Erbil region), Beth Slokh (the Kirkuk region), and others, and they took captive a great multitude of Magians and pagans and settled them in this region, from Mount Izla to Arzun, and from the village of Fenek to Hasankeyf and Mardin. This mountain was named the Mountain of the Slaves, because they were brought for servitude and bondage; and so the mountain took its name from the days of King Justinian, from the word (servitude), and it was named (Mount Abdin) or (Mount Abdin) (Tur Abdin)."

The motive for the Kurdish uprising, as a Kurdish writer has observed, was the pursuit of an independent Kurdish state and the securing of the national rights of the Kurdish people. The main slogan of the revolt was "achieving the independence of Kurdistan under Turkish guardianship and restoring the sultanate once again." But the Turkish nationalists were determined to crush the uprising, for if "the Kurds were not taught a lesson" at a very early stage, the eastern provinces would always be a source of great danger, forcing the young republic to keep its armies there and to bear the costs of doing so. The Turkish republicans were convinced that the Kurds had received support from the English government in Iraq, where the British mandate administration was inclined to their side. Even more, the Ankara government found in the Kurds an ideological enemy, for they represented a counter-revolution — that is, the old Turkey fighting the new Turkey. When the Kurds occupied, for a short period, Diyarbakir and Harput, they installed Mehmed Selim, the eldest son of Sultan Abdülhamid II, as "king over Kurdistan." The rebels demanded the restoration of the religious laws and institutions that the "atheist" Ankara government had abolished, and they called upon the Muslim Turks to join them in their holy war (jihad) against the new republic.

Not long passed before the heavy fist of the Ankara government came down upon the Kurdish uprising, dismantled it, and seized its leaders. In April 1925 the rebels were driven into the mountains, whereupon Ismet Pasha declared before the Supreme National Assembly "that the mountains would become their graveyard." The Turkish military court, which convened in Diyarbakir, sentenced Sheikh Said and 47 of the Kurdish leaders to death and carried out the sentence in August of 1925. Ghassemlou wrote, saying, "206 villages were destroyed, 7,588 houses were burned, and 20,015 persons were killed." Nearly a thousand Kurdish families of Kurdish notables were transferred to the western sections of Anatolia. As for the Syriac Orthodox, who had been spared during the atrocities to which the Armenians were subjected, they became victims of barbarity and savagery during the crushing of the Kurdish rebellion. Some Syrian Christians had cooperated with the Kurds, and some had given them protection, whether out of fear or out of conviction; therefore the government encircled a number of the Syriac Orthodox and the Chaldeans and expelled them from the Turkish section — which the English government claimed belonged to Iraq — to the north of the "Brussels Line." Some of the people who conducted immediate investigations attributed this expulsion to the desire of the Turkish military government to confiscate the livestock and wheat of the Christian villages to feed its hungry and angry troops. From a political standpoint, the Turkish authorities feared that the loyalty of the Christians lay with the British and Iraqi authorities across the border. General Ladoner, charged by the League of Nations to investigate the expulsion, declared that he was "convinced, beyond doubt," that the Turkish officers first led the operation of occupation, then searched the villages for weapons, and after a short period plundered their inhabitants, looted their homes, and subjected them to the most heinous kinds of torture and killing. The deportation was wholesale. They expelled the Syriac Orthodox patriarch Mar Ignatius Elias III from the Deir al-Zaafaran (Saffron) Monastery and converted the monastery into a Turkish barracks.

Not all the Christian inhabitants left their homes in Anatolia during and after the First World War, for some of those who had crossed the border into Syria or Iraq returned to their villages; and during the conflict the people of Tur Abdin held on to their mountain strongholds and, as in the past, took refuge in their churches and monasteries. Villages such as Qellith, Middo, Bsorino, Azakh, and Hah were among nearly 60 villages most of whose inhabitants were still Christians until the middle of the year 1970. One of the churches in Hah, "the Church of the Virgin," dates back to the days of the Apostles, and its magnificent Byzantine mosaics remain untouched. This church is considered the oldest church in the world still in use, and Gertrude Bell, in describing the fine ornamentation adorning this church, called it the jewel of Tur Abdin.

An American student belonging to one of the Middle Eastern Christian churches, who visited Tur Abdin in 1974, wrote saying: What distinguishes the churches and monasteries of the region from the other remains of the ancient Christians in Asia Minor is the phrase "still in use." During his visit, the student watched the faithful gather in various churches for evening prayer. And in the village of Qellith he saw there a Syriac Protestant church whose membership numbered 20 families, remnants of the Protestant mission's activity, which had once flourished.

The principal site in the region of Tur Abdin is the Deir al-Zaafaran (Saffron) Monastery and its cathedral, that is, the Church of the Forty Martyrs. For many generations this monastery was the summer residence of the Syriac Orthodox patriarchs near Mardin, and the home of nearly 60 monks. There were also 10 other monks serving in other monasteries — such as the Monastery of Mar Gabriel and the Monastery of Mar Yaqub — who spent most of their time maintaining them and attending carefully to the gardens and orchard trees, in addition to contemplation, teaching, and hosting guests, visitors, and the peasants who traveled a long journey to attend the Sunday Mass. The Monastery of Mar Gabriel in the village of Qartmin — which is 20 miles east of Midyat — has been restored, and some new buildings have been added to the old structure in the last few years. It was sometimes called "Deir al-Umr," and it is the most famous and the wealthiest of all the Syriac Orthodox monasteries. Tradition holds that the metropolitan of the monastery, Mar Gabriel, obtained from the caliph Umar ibn al-Khattab the right of guardianship over all the Christians in Tur Abdin when the caliph's forces drove the Byzantines out of that region.

These venerable buildings have been maintained and expanded through the generous donations of the Syriac Orthodox everywhere, and especially of those who emigrated to America. For the Syriac Orthodox, the regions of Tur Abdin and its landmarks — which are more than 70 monastic centers — are considered "sanctified [?] through the ages by the blood of the martyrs and the miraculous intercession of the Holy Spirit." At present, two of these monasteries operate as theological institutes; in the year 1974, the Deir al-Zaafaran Monastery and the Monastery of Mar Gabriel had 50 students, some of them being prepared to enter the priesthood. Perhaps the greatest graduate of Deir al-Zaafaran was Patriarch Mar Ignatius Aphrem I Barsoum, the predecessor of the last metropolitan, who was a graduate of the Monastery of Mar Mattai in northern Iraq.

The city of Midyat remains the capital of central Tur Abdin and a center for most of the Syriac Orthodox metropolitans in Turkey. Midyat has a diocese of nearly 20,000 citizens who live in it and in the neighboring villages, served by 40 priests. In the city there are five churches, each with its own priest, and the city is divided into two districts, each about 2 km from the other — one whose majority is Muslim and the other Christian.

All the Christian denominations of the eastern half of Anatolia were present in Mardin after the events of 1914–1918 that prevailed over that section of Turkey. The Syriac Orthodox were the most important of the Christian groups in the city, for they had taken the place of the Armenians. Their "large flock" in the neighboring countryside, in the 1960s of this era, had its own churches and priests.

At first glance it seems that conditions had returned to the normal state that had prevailed before the First World War. The Eastern Turkey Mission, affiliated with the American Board, opened its schools in Mardin in late 1924. The American missionaries stated, during the Kurdish disturbances of the late 1920s and early 1930s, that the Turkish officials in the city were very friendly and provided the mission with premises along with special guards.

Although Mardin was still, during the period after the Second World War, an Arabic-speaking city, all its inhabitants also spoke Turkish, and part of the religious services still conducted in Arabic among the Syriac Orthodox — such as the Mass and the reading of the Gospels — was transferred during the 1960s into Turkish. Until that time, all the books pertaining to religious rites were written either in Syriac or in Arabic. The city had a metropolitan responsible for all the Syriac Orthodox Christians in Turkey until his death in the late 1960s. After that, Mardin came under the authority of the metropolitanate of the Jazira region in Syria.

Outside the scope of the regions of Tur Abdin and Mardin, Istanbul and its suburbs were the gathering center of the Syriac Orthodox. In Istanbul the community, consisting of about seven thousand souls, built in the year 1963 a complex comprising a school and a church, which they named "the Church of the Mother Mary of the Ancient Syriacs."

As in any other place in the Middle East, the Christian inhabitants of Turkey attained some measure of reassurance and comfort, especially in the large, multi-ethnic cities, where they found better economic opportunities, in addition to the fact that relations between individuals became more cordial than in the past. But the future of the small Christian minorities in Turkey appears obscure, unlike the Christian presence in the Arab world, which is stronger — for the Christians (the Copts in Egypt, and the Greek Orthodox in Syria are the original inhabitants of those countries) tied their fate to that of the Arabs and sympathized as a community with the national aspirations of the Muslim citizens. Therefore the Turkish experience caused the alienation of the Christians, and the future of Tur Abdin became unknown. Horner says that they have no future there, and this is what continually drives them to emigrate from Tur Abdin to Istanbul, Syria, Lebanon, and some to Europe [?], Australia, and America.

In the next issue: The Syriacs in Syria