The Global Church Era · 1915-present · Tur Abdin, Urmia, then global
The Sayfo & the Syriac Diaspora
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About This Movement
In 1915 the Syriac Christians of eastern Anatolia and the surrounding regions were massacred and driven out — the Sayfo, the sword. Tur Abdin, the Syriac Orthodox heartland, and Urmia, where the Church of the East had its own communities, were emptied by killing and flight. Survivors testified almost at once: Joseph Naayem published Shall This Nation Die? in 1921, and an Assyro-Chaldean delegation put its case at the Paris peace conference in 1919. What followed was a century of relocation. The Syriac Orthodox patriarchate moved to Homs in 1933 and to Damascus in 1959; Church of the East exile communities gathered in Chicago and elsewhere; European diaspora parish registers now record families whose villages no longer have them. The Assyrian side of the story has its own twentieth century, including the assassination of Mar Shimun XXIII in 1975, a split in 1968, and a Common Christological Declaration with Rome in 1994.
Sources
- Survivor testimony and contemporary documentation: oral histories (incl. Gaunt's appendices); Joseph Naayem, Shall This Nation Die? (1921); the Assyro-Chaldean delegation documents (Paris 1919); missionary/consular eyewitness records (primary) — Some of this material was recorded by missionaries and consular officials rather than survivors themselves.
- Diaspora church archives: Syriac Orthodox patriarchal records through displacement (Homs 1933, Damascus 1959); Church of the East exile records (Chicago); Tur Abdin records; European diaspora parish registers (primary) — The communities' own institutional records, tracing their continuation through displacement.
- David Gaunt, Massacres, Resistance, Protectors: Muslim-Christian Relations in Eastern Anatolia During World War I (2006) (secondary) — The seminal study, drawing on Russian, Ottoman and Western archives together with oral histories.
- Gaunt, Atto & Barthoma (eds.), Let Them Not Return: Sayfo (Berghahn, War and Genocide 26, 2017) (secondary) — The first scholarly edited collection on the Sayfo, marking the topic's arrival in mainstream academic scholarship.
- Naures Atto, Hostages in the Homeland, Orphans in the Diaspora (2011); Brock et al., The Hidden Pearl (2001); 2015 centenary commemoration records; CHC vol. 9 (reference)