Assyrians of Iran

On the plain around Lake Urmia, among vineyards and orchards, stand the old churches of a people who still speak a form of Aramaic, the language of much of the ancient Near East. The Assyrians call themselves Suraye or Atureh, and are known in Persian as Āshuri. They are among the indigenous peoples of the region and among the oldest Christian communities in Iran; their churches in Urmia, among them the Church of St Mary, are held by tradition to be among the oldest in the world.

Language and church

Iranian Assyrians speak Assyrian Neo-Aramaic, and the Urmia dialect became the basis of the modern written language when American Presbyterian missionaries, arriving in the 1830s, printed the first books in it. Urmia became a centre of printing and schooling, and the missionary press there began the first Neo-Aramaic newspaper, Zahrire d-Bahra (‘Rays of Light’), in 1849. Most belong to the Assyrian Church of the East, whose patriarchs once sat at the Sasanian capital, Seleucia-Ctesiphon, and whose missionaries carried Christianity across Iran and along the Silk Road to China. Others are Chaldean Catholics, Presbyterians or members of other churches, and liturgy is still sung in classical Syriac.

Catastrophe and survival

The First World War was a catastrophe for the Assyrians of Urmia. Between 1914 and 1918 Ottoman forces, Kurdish irregulars and others killed many thousands, part of the wider violence against Christians that Assyrians call Sayfo, ‘the sword’. In March 1918 the patriarch Mar Shimun XIX Benyamin was murdered near Salmas by the Kurdish chief Simko, and that summer a great column of refugees fled south to Hamadan and on to a British camp at Baqubah in Iraq. Many never returned.

What is kept

The community regrouped in Urmia and, in the twentieth century, in Tehran, where Assyrian schools, clubs and churches remain. The Assyrian new year, Kha b-Nisan, on 1 April, is celebrated with parades, music and the circle dance to the dawola drum and zurna, and Easter and Christmas are kept with the Syriac liturgy. Assyrian village food, from dolma to sweet kada bread, shares much with that of its Azerbaijani and Kurdish neighbours. Iran’s constitution recognises Assyrians and Chaldeans together as a religious minority with one reserved seat in parliament.

Many Assyrians have emigrated since the 1970s, and large Assyrian communities with Iranian roots now live in the United States, Europe and Australia, from Chicago to Fairfield in Sydney. Like other recognised Christian communities, Iranian Assyrian churches may worship in their own language but, according to the US Commission on International Religious Freedom, are barred from holding services in Persian or receiving converts. For those who remain, the bells of Urmia are a thread to a past older than the Sasanians.