Siirt

History

Previously known as Saird, in pre-Islamic times Siirt was a diocese of the Eastern Orthodox Church (Sirte, Σίρτη in Byzantine Greek). In the medieval times, Arzen was the main city and it competed with Hasankeyf over the control the region, Siirt was only to become a center of the region in the 14th century. But it was still dependent from Hasankeyf until the 17th century. An illuminated manuscript known as the Syriac Bible of Paris might have originated from the Bishop of Siirt's library, Siirt's Christians would have worshipped in Syriac, a liturgical language descended from Aramaic still in use by the Syriac Rite, Chaldean Rite, other Eastern Christians in India, and the Nestorians along the Silk Road as far as China. The Chronicle of Seert was preserved in the city; it describes the ecclesiastical history of the Persian realm through to the middle of the seventh century. From 1858 to 1915 the city was the seat of a bishop of the Chaldean Catholic Church. Most of the city's Assyrians, including Addai Scher their archbishop were murdered during the Assyrian genocide along with the loss of artefacts such as the Syriac manuscript of Theodore of Mopsuestia's . Also during World War I, the Armenian population of Siirt became a victim of the Armenian genocide. Kurdish regions such as Siirt have been under martial law for most periods since 1927 and were included in the OHAL (state of emergency) zone in 1983, prior to the start of the PKK’s armed campaign. During the early stages of the Kurdish–Turkish conflict in the 1990s, former Turkish President Turgut Özal advocated transforming cities like Siirt into “centers of attraction” for the rural Kurdish population, while simultaneously supporting the eviction and destruction of Kurdish villages and hamlets in the…