Sayfo: the Syriac genocide of 1915

Sayfo (ܣܝܦܐ) is a Syriac word meaning the sword, and it is the name by which Syriac communities know what befell them in and after 1915. These events happened at the same time as the Armenian genocide and in the same regions, but they have remained far less present in public memory and in the historical writing.

Who was affected

The massacres reached Syriac Orthodox, Syriac Catholic, Church of the East and Chaldean communities across Tur Abdin, Diyarbakır, Mardin, Hakkari and Urmia. These regions were the heart of the Syriac world: its monasteries, its schools, its manuscripts — and villages where Syriac had not stopped being an everyday language in two thousand years.

What followed

The consequences were not only in lives lost. The Christian presence ended completely across wide areas, whole dioceses were extinguished, and manuscript libraries were scattered or burned. Those who survived took the road south:

• To Syria, especially the Jazira and Aleppo, where new Syriac villages formed along the Khabur river
• To Iraq, and to the Nineveh Plains and its towns
• To Lebanon, where Syriac and Armenian communities settled in and around Beirut

This displacement is the reason the map of Syriac communities today looks nothing like the map of 1914.

The name, and recognition

Syriac communities use Sayfo much as Armenians use Medz Yeghern. A number of parliaments have in recent decades recognised these events, either within their recognition of the Armenian genocide or alongside it, and the question of recognition remains open.

Why it is less often discussed

The Syriac communities were smaller. They had no state, and no diaspora political movement on the scale available to Armenians, and their sources were in Syriac and Arabic more than in European languages. Much testimony therefore went untranslated for a long time, and some of it still sits in monasteries and church archives.