MHALMOYTO REGION: Suryoyo diaspora plans to restore Saint Simon of the Olives Church in Habses

JÖNKÖPING, Sweden – The Syriac diaspora of the village of Habses has announced this month its intention to fully restore the centuries old Syriac Orthodox Saint Simon of the Olives Church and the Saint Lo’ozor (Lazarus) Monastery in their village in the Mhalmoyto Region, southeast Turkey. In a post on its official Facebook page, the Habsoye Cultural Association in Sweden stated that it has obtained all deeds and permits related to the restoration and that the relevant Turkish authorities have given permission to begin the restoration of the church and the monastery. All permits and documents have been handed over to the board of the administrating heritage foundation (Turkish: Vakıf) of the Saint Gabriel Monastery.

The Habsoye Cultural Association will start a fundraising campaign among Syriacs all over the world to finance the restauration project and preserve this Christian cultural heritage of the Mhalmoyto Region. The association aims to raise 200,000 euros to restore both the church and the monastery.

The Mhalmoyto is the name of the area in the western part of Tur ‘Abdin. Its inhabitants are called Mhalmoye, Mahalmi, or Mhallami. Habses is a former Christian village in this region. Its church, monastery, shrines, wells, and caves still bear witness to this heritage through their Syriac names. Today, the majority of Habses villagers, and of the entire Mhalmoyto Region for that matter, are Muslim Syriacs and the Arabic Mhalmi vernacular predominates. However, the common language in Habses used to be Syriac, regardless of whether the villager was Christian or Muslim.

Exodus of the Christians from Habses

According to Suroyo TV moderator and writer Denho Bar Mourad-Özmen, himself a Habsoyo, younger Muslims from the village radicalized from the early 1960s onwards under the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood and Hezbollah during their period of work in Lebanon. Once back in their native village, they began to influence and incite the Muslims villagers against the Christian villagers.

“In the village of Habses, a tragic event took place in which a radicalized person returning from Lebanon influenced his secularized cousin and together they kidnapped a Mhalmoyto Christian girl from the village under threats and brute force. They shot the girl’s father and aunt. The girl’s aunt, who now lives in Sweden, later identified the one who had been in Lebanon as the one who shot her. This event accelerated the emigration of Christians from Habses. By the late 1980s, all but one of the Christian Mhalmoyto families had left the village. The rest of about 110 families today are divided and live in various Western European countries, the U.S., and Australia.” From Denho Bar Mourad’s article “Common Traditions and Rites between Christian and Muslim Mhalmoye in Habses“

The exodus of the Christian villagers of Habses, who still have family ties with the Muslim villagers of Habses and surrounding villages, came at a time when successive events (the Cyprus War in the 1960s, the war between the Kurdish PKK and the Turkish army in the 1970s-1990s, the militarization of Tur ‘Abdin and its surroundings, unsolved murders, and kidnappings) created an atmosphere of threat, persecution, murder and intimidation by both the Turkish authorities and their Kurdish neighbours. The constant pressure, unrest and insecurity forced almost all Syriacs to leave their towns and cities in Turkey and seek refuge in other countries of the world.

For more articles on Habses and the Mhalmoyto Region, here