History
The town of Midyat and the villages of Hah, Bequsyone, Dayro da-Slibo, Salah (with the old monastery of Mor Yaqub), `Aynwardo (with Mor Huschabo), Anhel, Kafro, Arkah (Harabale, with Dayro Mor Malke), Beth Sbirino, Middo (Miden), Kerburan, Binkelbe with Mor Samun Zayte and Azech were all important Syriac Orthodox places among with countless other villages. Hah has the ancient `Idto d'Yoldath-Aloho, the Church of the Mother of God.
During the First World War, 500,000 Assyrian/Syriac people were killed in the Assyrian Genocide (called in Syriac Sayfo, simply 'the sword') and died alongside their coreligionists. In the last few decades, caught between Turks assimilation policies against Kurds, and Kurdish resistance, many Assyrians/Syriacs have fled the region or been killed. Today there are only 5000, a quarter of the Christian population thirty years ago. Most have fled to Syria, Europe (particularly Sweden, Germany, the UK and the Netherlands), Australia and the USA. However, in the past few years, a few families have begun to return to Tur Abdin.
Read more about this topic: Tur Abdin
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“History, as an entirety, could only exist in the eyes of an observer outside it and outside the world. History only exists, in the final analysis, for God.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)
“Postmodernism is, almost by definition, a transitional cusp of social, cultural, economic and ideological history when modernism’s high-minded principles and preoccupations have ceased to function, but before they have been replaced with a totally new system of values. It represents a moment of suspension before the batteries are recharged for the new millennium, an acknowledgment that preceding the future is a strange and hybrid interregnum that might be called the last gasp of the past.”
—Gilbert Adair, British author, critic. Sunday Times: Books (London, April 21, 1991)
“I am ashamed to see what a shallow village tale our so-called History is. How many times must we say Rome, and Paris, and Constantinople! What does Rome know of rat and lizard? What are Olympiads and Consulates to these neighboring systems of being? Nay, what food or experience or succor have they for the Esquimaux seal-hunter, or the Kanaka in his canoe, for the fisherman, the stevedore, the porter?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)