Of Diyarbekir.3 Very Little Has Been Written About the Syriac Christians of Diyarbekir
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SOME NOTES ON THE SYRIAC CHRISTIANS OF DIYARBEKIR IN THE LATE 19TH CENTURY A PRELIMINARY INVESTIGATION OF SOME PRIMARY SOURCES1 Emrullah Akgündüz Introduction The Syriac Christians are among the oldest communities of Diyarbekir. Quite when and how they first settled and spread in the area is not certain, but it is probable that they came during the period of Early Christianity— in the first four centuries CE, when the city was known as ‘Amida’ (or variants thereof )—as part of the Christianization of Mesopotamia. Most likely they came via the Kingdom of Edessa (Syriac, Orhāy/Ourhoï Kurdish, Riha), today’s Şanlıurfa, around 150km southwest of Diyarbekir and gener- ally recognized as home to the Middle Aramaic dialect, Syriac.2 Indeed, continuing southwest from Diyarbekir/Amida through Urfa/Edessa for another 250km or so, one arrives at the coastal city of Antakya/Antioch, one of the earliest Christian centers and of fundamental importance to the development of the religion. Diyarbekir/Amida became an important Christian center in its own right—the bones of the Apostle (‘Doubting’) Thomas were reputedly brought there for burial, for example—and it is likely that some of the early Christians formed the basis of the nineteenth century Syriac-speaking (Christian) communities of Diyarbekir.3 Very little has been written about the Syriac Christians of Diyarbekir. Most of the literature on Diyarbekir focuses on the Kurdish and Arme- nian populations, while most of the research on the Syriac communi- ties does not address the Syriac Christians of Diyarbekir. Until recently, Syriac scholars have tended to concentrate on the Tur-Abdin region, some 100km to the southeast of Diyarbekir, in modern day eastern Mardin and Şırnak—the monastery of Dayro d-Mor Hananyo / Deyr al-Zaffaran4 just 1 I would like to thank my supervisor Heleen Murre-van den Berg and the editors of this volume Jelle Verheij and Joost Jongerden, as well as my brother Emre Akgündüz and Andy Hilton for their invaluable feedback during the writing of this article. 2 For more on the spread of Christianity in Edessa, see, e.g., Segal 1970: 62–110. 3 Şimşek 2003: 123–126; Gillman and Klimkeit 1999: 24–25. 4 Also Dayro d–Kurkmo / Kurkmo Dayro (Syriac), or Deirulzafran (Arabic). 218 emrullah akgündüz outside Mardin was seat to the Syriac Orthodox Patriarchate for most of the second millennium (until 1933)—or else they have been mostly inter- ested in biblical studies, and unconcerned with more recent history. Based on Ottoman sources, this article aims to make a contribution to our knowledge of the social, cultural, economic and political condition of the Syriac community of Diyarbekir in the latter part of the nineteenth century, when the city still had all the four Syriac (religious) communities within its borders (Orthodox and Catholic, and Church of the East and Chaldeans). The Ottoman sources provide us with a unique viewpoint, which, unlike many of the internal Syriac sources—such as the manu- script colophons—helps us to understand much better the way in which the Syriac Christians dealt with the authorities. Particularly, they shed light on the under-researched disputes between the various communities that belonged to the Syriac group, as well as the relationship between Syriac and Armenian Orthodox Christians. The Syriac Orthodox community, also known as the Jacobites or the Süryani Kadim (Ancient Syriac), were the largest Syriac community in Diyarbekir. The city was also populated by Syriac Catholics, the Catholic counterpart of the Syriac Orthodox, which had developed from 1783, along with communities identified as the ‘Nestorians’ (Nesturi), or the Church of the East (which had broken off from the Orthodox line in 431), and the Catholic counterpart of the Church of the East, the Chaldeans (which developed from 1552).5 From the late seventeenth century onwards, Diyar- bekir became the center of the emerging Chaldean movement, with several patriarchs resident in the city. In the early nineteenth century, however, the Chaldean patriarchate merged with that of Alqosh (in today’s Iraq), a town located thirty kilometers north of Mosul, leading to the shift of the center of the Chaldean Church, first to Alqosh, then to Mosul and later to Baghdad.6 Throughout this contribution, my emphasis will be on the Syriac Orthodox community, primarily because the sources available to 5 See the schemata at http://www.aramnaharaim.org. John Joseph argues that the majority of the native Christians of old Persia and the Mesopotamia were members of the East Syrian Church, and notes that they were also known ‘stigmatically’ as Nestorians. Despite the pejorative connotation of the term among outsiders, however, the Ottomans referred to the Church of the East as ‘Nesturis’ in their official documents and the community also referred to itself similarly. At the end of the nineteenth century, however, due to the heightened awareness of the stigma attached to the name ‘Nestorian’, and particularly because of the close contact with the missionaries of the Church of England, the name ‘Church of the East’ became the preferred designation. See Joseph 1961: 3–6. 6 See more on the Chaldean Patriarchate: Murre-van den Berg 1999; Lampart 1966..