The living city of Syriac Christianity — Tur Abdin's ancient monasteries, the finest filigree gold jewellery in Turkey, and mor wine from 2,000-year-old grape varieties
Midyat is a small town in the Tur Abdin plateau of southeastern Turkey — 85km east of Mardin, at 960m on the basalt plateau that forms the northern edge of Mesopotamia. The town is the cultural capital of Tur Abdin ('Mountain of the Servants of God' in Syriac Aramaic), a historically Syriac Christian region that was the heartland of the Syriac Orthodox Church and its distinctive liturgical and artistic tradition. The Syriac communities of Tur Abdin maintained Aramaic (Syriac) as a spoken language through centuries of Arab, Mongol, Kurdish, and Turkish rule — the language of Christ's daily lif…
Tur Abdin was one of the most Christianised regions of the ancient Middle East — the Syriac Orthodox Church (also called the Jacobite Church, after Jacob Baradaeus who organised it in the 6th century) was established here and maintained its patriarchate at Deyrulzafaran for over a thousand years. The Syriac tradition preserved the Aramaic language and an extensive literary corpus (translations of Aristotle into Syriac preceded the Arabic translations that reached medieval Europe). The Seyfo (Syriac Genocide, 1914–1924) — the simultaneous destruction of Syriac, Greek, and Armenian Christian co…