Aramaeans in Turkey
The Aramaeans / Assyrians in Turkey ( Aramaic ܣܘܪ̈ܝܝܐ, Turkish Türkiye Süryanileri ) are members of churches of Syrian-Aramaic-speaking tradition and form a special autochthonous group within Turkish Christians . The Assyrians are also known by the names Aramaeans or Chaldeans . The Syriacs are not recognized as a minority in Turkey . Acquiring ownership, building and maintaining their churches have always been associated with difficulties.
They differ from the Greek and Armenian minorities in their legal status; because, unlike the former, their communities are not protected under international law by the Treaty of Lausanne as a religious and ethnic minority.
The Syrian Christians today belong to three main church organizations: (1) the Syrian Orthodox Church , (2) the Syrian Catholic and (3) of the Chaldean Catholic Church . The Assyrian Church of the East no longer exists as an organization in Turkey; their former center of Qudschanis in Hakkâri (Aramaic Akkare ) is today without Christian inhabitants. A total of 15,000 Arameans live in Turkey today, 12,000 of them in Istanbul .
Settlement areas
Syriacs lived mainly in the southeast and east of Turkey , in Cilicia , Edessa , Mardin , Diyarbakir, in the Tur Abdin and mountains of Hakkari . In 1915 the semi-autonomous hill tribes of the Assyrian Church of the East fled their settlements around Hakkâri and Qudschanis to the Urmia plain , later to Iraq and the diaspora. In the shadow of the Ottoman actions against the Armenians , the other Christians were also persecuted during the First World War. As a result of the genocide of the Assyrians and Aramaeans , numerous members of the Syrian Orthodox and Chaldean Catholic Churches lost their health, homeland or life. B. Addai Scher . Many of the survivors emigrated to Syria and Lebanon in 1922 and 1924. The Syrian Orthodox Patriarch of Antioch, who traditionally resided in the Zafaran Monastery near Mardin, was forced to leave Turkey in 1924 and relocated to Syria.
Today there are hardly more than 2,000 to 3,000 Syrian Orthodox Christians living in southeastern Turkey, especially in some villages in the districts of Midyat , Nusaybin and İdil . Because of the oppression and insecurity, tens of thousands fled abroad, mostly to Syria , Europe and America, or found their new home in Istanbul , where around 12,000 Arameans now live and a Syrian Orthodox diocese was founded ("Patriarchal Vicariate of Istanbul and Ankara"). Further dioceses exist in Mardin (seat: Zafaran monastery ), Midyat (seat: Mor Gabriel monastery ) and Adıyaman (vacant 1925–2006, replacing the twelve lost dioceses Malatya , Elazığ , Adana , Mersin , İskenderun , Antakya , Gaziantep , Urfa , Kâhta , Genger, Venk and Siverek ).
The Chaldean Catholic community has only about 8,000 members in 15 parishes or pastoral care stations. The Archdiocese of Diyarbakir (Amida, founded in 1553), which had been vacant since 1918 , was revived for them in 1966 , now with its seat in Istanbul. There is a patriarchal vicariate in Istanbul for around 2000 Syrian Catholics .
Todays situation
In Turkish, the Syrian Christians are called "Süryaniler" (from Syr. Suryoyo , Syrian Christian). In Tur Abdin is still an Aramaic dialect, which Turoyo spoken. At the Mardin Artuklu Üniversitesi in Mardin , chairs for the Kurdish and Aramaic languages and literature were recently set up at the Institute for Living Languages .
The Christian Arameans suffered for a long time from the clashes between the Turkish military and the Kurdish PKK . The PKK had withdrawn to southeast Turkey, the homeland of the Arameans. The constant attacks by the PKK on the Turkish military and the operations of the Turkish military in the southeast also made Arameans victims of the attacks. So they got caught between the fronts until the end of 2012, when both parties accused the Arameans of supporting each other.
Expropriations
In June 2017 it became known that the Turkish state had confiscated at least 50 early Christian churches, monasteries, cemeteries, extensive land and monuments in an expropriation operation and assigned the churches to the state, Sunni religious office Diyanet as “places of worship” . The buildings may therefore be at the mercy of destruction or conversion into mosques.
In the elections on June 12, 2011, the Aramean Erol Dora was elected to the Turkish parliament as a member of the Kurdish party BDP, as the first Christian member of the Turkish Republic for more than half a century.
See also
literature
- Helga Anschütz : The Syrian Christians from TurʿAbdin. An early Christian population group between persistence, stagnation and dissolution (= The Eastern Christianity. Treatises. NF 34). Augustinus-Verlag, Würzburg 1984, ISBN 3-7613-0128-6 .
- Michel Chevalier: Les montagnards chrétiens du Hakkâri et du Kurdistan septentrional (= Publications du Département de Géographie de l'Université de Paris-Sorbonne. 13). Département de Géographie de l'Université de Paris-Sorbonne, Paris 1985, ISBN 2-901165-13-3 .
- Johannes Roldanus: De Syrian Orthodox in Istanbul. Een folk, uit een ver verleden overgebleven. Kok, Kampen o. J. (approx. 1984), ISBN 90-242-2655-4 .
Web links
swell
- ↑ Svante Lundgren: The Assyrians: From Nineveh to Gütersloh . Lit Verlag, Münster 2016, ISBN 978-3-643-13256-7 , pp. 175 .
- ↑ Arameans: Turkey expropriates churches and monasteries en masse. evangelisch.de, accessed on July 23, 2017
- ^ World Directory of Minorities and Indigenous Peoples - Turkey: Assyrians
- ↑ Christian sites expropriated - Turkey confiscates churches . Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, June 29, 2017
- ↑ Sale of the Christian Heritage fr.de, accessed on July 23, 2017