History "B"

As a result of the genocide, Christians of the Assyrians who lived in the Ottoman Empire lost, according to some estimates, up to 750 thousand people-75 % of their number

Assyrian refugees under the protection of the Russian Consulate in Persia, 1918

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At the age of 15, I first learned that I was not. Once, after the lesson, I was called by a history teacher, behind the strong shoulders of which there was work at the Academy of Public Sciences at the CPSU Central Committee. “They told me here that you were an Assyrian by nationality,” she said in a tone of the OBKhSS inspector. “But this is a historical nonsense!” Assyria disappeared two and a half thousand years ago. All the ancient peoples of Mesopotamia have long mixed up with the Arabs. There is some kind of confusion. You are probably the Syrian, you have ancestors from Syria, there are Arabs ... Well, it’s good, Syria is a country friendly to the Soviet Union, ”the historian ended with a pleased tone.

I did not want to cover this card with something. In the USSR, the wrong answer to the national question could turn over his whole life. Do not argue about this, do not mind, translate everything as a joke - they taught me in the family. In general, "if you need to explain, then do not explain." Well, you can’t say, in fact, the former response of the AOO at the CPSU Central Committee, that the grandmother really read the Bible in the Syrian language, only that was called the dialect of the Aramaic language, which was used in Syria to the Arab conquest, and the Assyrians themselves invented the writing - in the early Middle Ages. That this was the language of the first Christian missionaries, who were immigrants from Mesopotamia. And how could all this be explained at all - after all, it was not supposed to be in the USSR not only to read, even keep the Bible at home.

Or that-to explain to her that my great-grandfather was still at a young age, at the end of the 19th century, he transported to Russia not from Syria, but from the territory of modern Iran, where the Persians and Kurds periodically, in his desire, organized Christians “Sekir-Bashka”, and the exit was one-to run to the north, to the one-handed: the first Assyrian communities appeared on the territory of Russia in the territory years. But in the official Soviet historiography there was no such episode.

The Assyrians in the USSR were called "Aisors", and even more often-"animals", people with a muddy past, worshiping only God-ruble, who were postponed by the entire "workshop business" on cleaning shoes. Even the presence of two heroes of the Soviet Union-the hero-reconnaissance of Lado Davydov and San Sergei Sarkhoshev, did not help to straighten the reputation among the Assyrians. However, few people guessed about their ethnic origin.

Ottoman fun

Until the beginning of the 1920s, when his grandfather and his family moved to Moscow, he served as a deacon in the Crimea, in Simferopol. In 1915, it became clear that the “Iranian” Assyrians, who lived mainly in the Iranian region of Urmia, were still more fortunate than their fellow tribesmen who lived in the Ottoman Empire, in the territory of Western Armenia and other provinces. The first waves of the Assyrian refugees who fell into the Crimea through the Russian Caucasus began to arrive in the church parish, where his grandfather served. And with them - chilling the soul of history about animal inhuman cruelty.

The Assyrians have their own Hatin - Gavar Gorodok, in the region of Hakkyari. In April 1915, the Ottoman punishers invaded here and in three hours they killed the entire population-8 thousand people, and half burned alive, locked someone in barns, whom in the church.

At the end of the same year, Vali (Governor) of Van Jewed, Bay formed the 8,000th “Myasnikov battalion” and gave him an order to destroy everything

The Assyrian population, who lived here in 30 villages for centuries. The first 20 thousand people were destroyed for two days. When the Ottomans ended with bullets or knives and sabers abutted, they bred huge bonfires on the wastelands, drove women with infants here - at first instead of firewood, for roser, they threw babies into the fire, and then went crazy or fainting mothers.

With the old people, the executioners were “amused” by the fact that they cut off the dried hands in parts: at first the phalanx of the fingers, then the brush, then the elbow, then the victim “slightly” cut the throat so that they were tormented another hour ...

The “Assyrian question” in Van's province was solved “completely and finally” in a matter of weeks: about 40 thousand killed, 20 thousand deported. Only a few thousands managed to escape, fleeing to Russia, reaching the advanced patrols of the Russian troops. The surviving “Vanai” - the so -called Assyrians called themselves - settled, including representatives of noble births, mainly in the Russian Caucasus. My mother’s family is one of them. Her grandfather wrote in Aramaic books that were published in Germany. Her memory, like the memory of my father, whose family is from Iranian Urmia, keeps many stories. Mine is already many times less. And this thread is about to interrupt ...

My grandfather Badal (Boris) Junan (OV) with her daughters. A picture of the 20s

Fear of the past

My grandfather in his father honored the Russian king. He knew that all the Assyrians from the Urmia, who found protection from the Russian troops or within the walls of Russian diplomatic agents, were saved - all to one. The Russians gave food and shelter distraught from the grief from the grief, and those who wanted to fight were weapons. Grandfather's cousin entered the corps of the Assyrian general Aga Putra, who fought on the Caucasian front under the Russian command. Rodich was awarded the St. George Cross and rose to the lieutenant. He removed the epaulets only in 1920, when the Reds stormed Perekop. Mikhail Frunze commanded them invited all officers from the Wrangel troops to surrender - and then they will save their lives. “Do not believe them,” my grandfather told his relative, “this is“ tramp ”(Khypia-in Aramaic), they have no honor.” “I can’t,” he answered, “because all my comrades believed it,” and went to give up. He, like other "Nobody", was shot on the same day ...

Another relative of his grandfather abandoned Iranian citizenship and joined the CPSU (b). But he was also shot-in 1937. Grandfather with his parish past was not touched. But he did not want to stay in Soviet Russia. “Here we will be afraid of our past,” he told his wife, that is, my grandmother. In 1920, in Yalta, they bought a steamer ticket to Marseille. Half an hour before sailing, the grandmother went down from the deck exchange some jewelry for food and was lost in the crowd. Grandfather went to look for her, the ship sailed without them ...

In 1937, when at night in the Theological Lane, where my family lived then, the Black Raven began to stop, the grandmother gathered all the family past-letters, photographs, church books-and carried it to the attic. There, the past turned into a rag and dissolved in eternity ... Grandfather, who hid his Iranian citizenship and signed briefly-“b”, died in 1943. Regarding the past, he, of course, was right.

Doom syndrome

increase

Assyrians in Russia, according to various estimates, live 11-13 thousand people. This is a scanty compared to a powerful diaspora in the USA, Syria or Sweden. If there is something in common between the Assyrian, the senator from Illinois John Nimrod and the chairman of the Assyrian collective farm in Urmia (Krasnodar Territory of the Russian Federation), named after that Iranian Urmia, is the scars in historical memory-that people had to survive, unlike Armenians and Jews, now, probably, will never have their own state. And over the people without a state always dominates the syndrome of doom, the cure for which is oblivion.

“We were a great people before,” says a hairdresser from San Francisco, Assyrian Theodore Badal, Hero of William Saroyan’s story “Seventy thousand Assyrians”. “But that was yesterday, the day before yesterday.” Now we are just a section in ancient history. We were washed away as a race, everything is over with us, everything is in the past, so why should I learn to read in the (Assyrian) language? We have no writers, there is no news - except that this: from time to time the British pushes the Arabs to destroy us, that's all. ”

The story was written in 1933. And in 1941, the British for some reason disbanded the Assyrian Corps (Liva)-one of the most combat-ready formations of the British army in the Middle East, which over a quarter century of existence helped them suppress more than one uprising. At the same time, the British army itself made to save the Assyrians from the atrocities of the Turks in the First World War much less Russian officers, diplomats and nurses.

The sadness is that the refugee history of the peoples who survived genocide continues in the form of the tragedy of the Christian population of Syria and Iraq. The control of the militants of the Islamic State passed many places of compact residence of the Assyrians in Northern Iraq, primarily in the Nineveh Valley. The mass exodus of the Assyrian Christian from the country began-almost 100 thousand people left their native foci in the past year. However, the IG will no longer manage to create reprisals against the “Giauers”, as once the youngsters. Something woke up in the Assyrian self-consciousness. In Iraqi Kurdistan, the Assyrian police of Dvekh Nawsha - “sacrificing themselves”, which is replenished by recruits from around the world, has already been created. In the February battles near Karakosh (Iraq), she inflicted losses to the IG militants. The whole world is expanding the campaign of solidarity with the Assyrians in Iraq, who intended to pose a question of autonomy before Baghdad. The centenary of the Ottoman genocide in its own way has been updated by the question of the fate of the Assyrian people: in March, the Genocide of the Assyrians and Greeks recognized the parliament of Armenia, in April-the Netherlands. The Pope Francis made a separate statement.

So, perhaps, Theodore Badal hurried with conclusions.

Photo by ISLAMUNCOVED.info, from the personal archive of Boris Yunanov