Turkish Mayor Protests Monolingualism

The mayor of a city in southeastern Turkey is protesting the Turkish government's hypocritical attacks on his efforts to provide government services not only in Turkish, spoken by a minority in the area, but also in Armenian, Assyrian, and Kurdish, which collectively are spoken by a large majority of the city's residents. More here.

Assyrian Patriarch Visits Canada

Catholicos-Patriarch Mar Dinkha IV (Khananya) of the Assyrian Church of the East has begun a pastoral visit to the Church of the East in Toronto, concelebrating the Divine Liturgy at the city's Cathedral of St. Mary with Bishop Mar Ammanuel (Yosip) of Toronto and afterwards exhorting the cathedral's parishioners to remain strong in their faith and their Assyrian culture. Patriarch Mar Dinkha will also be visiting several other Assyrian parishes in Ontario while in Canada. More here.

"Christ...Has Drawn Us Closer to Him"

Three parishes of the Assyrian Church of the East in Baghdad have gathered to celebrate the Divine Liturgy together and encourage one another as Iraqi Christians continue to live daily with the threats of Islamists seeking to purge the country of its non-Muslim minorities. More here.

Turkish Writer Apologizes for Ottoman Turkish Genocides

A Turkish writer, Kemal Yalcin, has apologized to Armenians, Assyrians, and ethnic Syrians around the world for the Armenian Genocide and the Seyfo (the Assyrian/Syrian Genocide) undertaken by the Ottoman Turks and Kurds. Yalcin noted that had the Genocide not taken place Turkey today would have some 15 million additional Armenian, Assyrian, and Syrian residents (instead of a paltry 108,000). More here.

Iraqi Christians Seek to Immigrate

Iraqi Christians are still seeking to immigrate rather than remain in Iraq. More here.

Assyrian Coalition Seeking Solutions to Iraqi Security, Economic Issues

As Assyrians worldwide celebrate the New Year a coalition of Assyrian, Chaldean, and ethnic Syrian political parties have sponsored a fact-finding mission in northern Iraq to determine the current state of the Assyrian nation in the region and gather data to help the coalition find and propose solutions to the security and economic issues faced by Iraq's Assyrians. More here.

Armenian President Greets Assyrians with New Year

Armenian President Serzh Serzh Sargsian has greeted his country's small Assyrian minority with their New Year, which began today. In addition to wishing them the best in the New Year, President Serzh Sargsian also wished that Armenia's Assyrians would see "new success and new achievements...so that the inheritors of the ancient and great Assyrian cultural heritage in Armenia not only preserve it, but also further develop and enrich their native tongue and culture." More here.

Assyrian New Year

Happy New Year! ;-)

"Defying Deletion"

An excellent review of a new documentary on the ongoing ethnic cleansing of Iraq's Assyrians can be found here.

Chicago Assyrian Priest Made Corbishop

Priest Paulus Benjamin has been elevated to the rank of corbishop (a priestly rank in the East and West Syrian Rites as opposed to an episcopal one in the Byzantine Rite) by Bishop Mar Awa (Royel) of California of the Assyrian Church of the East in Chicago's Mar Gewargis Cathedral. More here.

Upcoming Armenian Genocide/Seyfo Commemoration in NYC

This coming 6 April the World War II-era Armenian, Assyrian, and Greek Genocides by the Ottoman Turks and Kurds will be commemorated in New York (not to mention worldwide). More here.

Iraqi Kurdistan Offers Christians Refuge, Not Work

Many of Iraq's Christians have taken up Iraqi Kurdistan's offer of refuge and have found personal security, but no work or way to make a living. More here.

Assyrians and Armenians Protest Removal of Genocide Reference on Swedish Government Website

Assyrians and Armenians in Sweden are expressing their outrage over the removal from an official Swedish website of a reference in a recent speech of Minister for Integration Erik Ullenhag to the Seyfo, the Armenian and Assyrian Genocide by the Turks and Kurds that resulted in the death of 1.5 million Armenians, 750,000 Assyrians and Syrians, and 500,000 Greeks. The reference is said to have been removed due to pressure from the Turkish government. More here.

Metropolitan Mar Meelis Visits Lebanon, UAE

Metropolitan Mar Meelis (Zaia) of Sydney has concluded a month-long visit to the Assyrian faithful in Lebanon, who since the repose of Metropolitan Mar Narsai (D'Baz) a year ago have been under the Archdiocese of Australia, New Zealand, and Lebanon of the Assyrian Church of the East.

During the course of his stay Metropolitan Mar Meelis supervised the efforts of the Church of the East in Lebanon to care for incoming refugees from Iraq and met with Metropolitan Mar Thephilos (Saliba) of Mount Lebanon of the Syriac Orthodox Church to discuss the common heritage of the two churches. More on his time in Lebanon can be found here.

On his way back to Australia from Lebanon Metropolitan Mar Meelis visited the faithful of the Church of the East in the United Arab Emirates. His flock there consists of both Assyrians and Indians who remained faithful to the Church of the East following the arrival of Roman Catholicism and Syriac Orthodoxy in Kerala. More on that visit here.

Assyrian Genocide Memorial Planned for Yerevan

With the support of the government of Yerevan the Assyrian community in Armenia hopes to erect an Assyrian Genocide memorial in the city in the near future. The Armenian and Assyrian Genocides were undertaken by the Turks and Kurds simultaneously during World War I and devastated both nations, wiping them out in most of their historic homelands and scattered most of the survivors across the globe. More here.

Hierarchs of the Assyrian and Ancient Churches of the East Meet

At the recent anniversary celebrations of the Assyrian National Council in Chicago, Illinois, Catholicos-Patriarch Mar Dinkha IV of the Assyrian Church of the East met with a hierarch of the Ancient Church of the East, Metropolitan Mar Nursai (Thomas) of Kirkuk. The two parts of the Church of the East split over the secular marriage of a past catholicos-patriarch and his switch of the church from the old calendar to the Gregorian one. In recent years, however, relations have become increasingly warm between the two factions, with the Ancient Church of the East also switching to the Gregorian calendar. More here.

Assyrian Metropolitan Meets with Iraqi Ambassador to Lebanon

Metropolitan Mar Meelis (Zaia) of Sydney of the Assyrian Church of the East met with the Iraqi ambassador to Lebanon this week in Beirut to discuss the situation of Assyrian Christians in Iraq and the Diaspora and the efforts of the Iraqi government to protect them in the Iraqi-occupied regions of their homeland, which also in the past included parts of what is today southeastern Turkey and eastern Syria. More here.

Assyrian Center in Baghdad Attacked

The Ashurbanipal Cultural Association in Baghdad was recently raided by armed gunmen who told its staff that they were criminals and did not belong in Iraq. The incident is the latest in a string of attacks, generally ending in murder, against Iraqi Christians. Christianity predates Islam in the region by centuries, but Islamists either unaware of this or insecure because of it are continuing to demand that the region's Christians leave. The Assyrians predate Christianity itself in Iraq and once ruled a great empire dominating most of Mesopotamia and the Levant. More on the attack and the Association here.

Iraqi Christians to Petition for Autonomous Assyrian Province

Leaders of sixteen Iraqi Christian parties have met in the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan to prepare a petition to the Iraqi government for the creation of an autonomous Assyrian province on the territory of two largely Assyrian districts on the plains of Nineveh in the heart of ancient Assyria in northern Iraq.

Long after their empire ceased to exist Assyrians continued to live in their heartlands on the plains and in the mountains of what today are northern Iraq, western Iran, southeastern Turkey, and northeastern Syria. Along with the Armenians the Assyrians suffered the first modern genocide at the hands of the Turks and the Kurds in the early 1900s during World War I as payback for their support for invading Russian armies, which they had hoped would liberate their homeland from Arab Muslim rule for the first time in over a millennium. Between 500,000 and 750,000 Assyrians were murdered in the Genocide, which eventually forced most into the Diaspora, among them the patriarch of the Church of the East (who now resides in the Chicago area). More information on the national tragedy of the Seyfo, the Assyrian Genocide, can be found here.

More on the petition and the prospects for an Assyrian province can be found here.

Pictured is the memorial to the Assyrian Genocide in Kiev, Ukraine.

Christian Exodus from Iraq Continues

Officials in Iraqi Kurdistan report that over 1,000 Iraqi Christian families have taken refuge in the region as violence in Baghdad, a large center of Christianity in Iraq under Saddam Hussein, has worsened. The United Nations also reports that the number of Iraqi Christian refugees being registered in neighboring Syria, Jordan, and Lebanon is also significantly up. More here.