What do I remember from Urmiyah?  What memories are jogged by the photo albums my mother kept so diligently?  In Philadelphia, these would invariably be pulled out at least once or twice a year, sometimes at extended family gatherings, when, after settling the dispute about who was in what picture and who looked great and who looked like he or she had swallowed a worm, we would flip through a few more pages, recall stories associated with the pictures, and then sigh and put the photographs away.

I remember the day they came to kill my father.  It was winter, yet I am dressed in a light blue dress. So do I remember? Or do I remember the retelling?

I remember hot potatoes in my winter coat pocket as I walked the mile to school with my brother Dante, snow piled high where it had been shoveled off the flat roofs.  The potatoes kept our fingers warm but by recess, when we snacked on them, they were cold and mealy.

Winters around the wood burning stove, on which a kettle of water boiled and our sherva warmed, ready for lunch.  Good hearty "shirva'd qirtope" (that's a Russian word, borrowed from the German "kartoffel, " a wide-traveling word for a new world plant introduced into Russia by Peter the Great, that westward looking absolute monarch of the early18th century.) Served with "lavasha" and "turshiye," it was a good meal that my family relishes here in transplant territory. 

Spring brought picnics, church picnics.  We would line up downriver from a promising site, wait for the dynamite to do its work, and then scoop fish. I would spread my legs for a steady grip on the cold slippery stones, and reach for the silvery fish from the river and put them into the shallow pouch formed as I held the hem of my dress with one hand.  I cannot remember at all where the boys put the fish they scooped up.  Into the pouch formed by the dress of a neighboring girl? Into their tucked in shirts?

Someone would bring out the mandolin just as the first cup of samovar tea had been drunk, and the adults would sing, men and women. Often older matrons who had been members of the choir would join in.  Harmony singing had been the rage.  They would recall the arrangements of English language songs they had learned at the Mission schools and sing those: "There's a church in the valley by the wildwoodЉ" and then giggles over who would perform the alto part of "Oh, Come, ComeЉ" while the sopranos triumphantly sang the sentences of the refrain. 

We played Pala Qishta a lot, and this is the main game I recall other than bchuriy. The girls would play with rag or later, china faced, dolls, and the boys would actually hunt small birds with stone and sling.  A stone and sling shot sparrow meal is one I remember helping my friend Mimi prepare for her brother Milton.  Sparrows and crows used to nest in the willow trees planted by the stream flowing down our street to the river.  No one that I know ever shot a crow, all black and noisy.  But Milton shot a sparrow.  He brought the bloody little bird to Mimi as we played and told her to cook it. We defeathered it, cleaned it out, put it on a spit, and he ate the few bites of meat on its bones. I don't think he offered us any.

We played Pala Qishta in the long alley, gated at the street end, which led to our own yard gate.  Two people or more can play.  One holds a sturdy stick about three feet long, and the other, standing about 10 feet away, holds a shorter stick, about 8 inches long. The object is for the "batter" to hit as far as he can the little stick pitched at him.  Was this a primitive form of baseball introduced by the American missionaries?  Or did it pre-date them, harking back to a time when children practiced war games with a bow "Qishta?" Or is this game so simple that it has been invented by children in every corner of the world?  For us it was mainly a boys' game. But I remember pitching a lot and running to pick up the stick.

Want to know what "bchuriy" was?  I was not allowed to play.  My father frowned on it as a gambling game.  But my mother taught me one boring winter day when we had finished a meal of reesh eqli, which produced two nice lamb ankle joints. She knew the numerical value of each side of the bones as you threw them.  I have no idea if I ever had a chance to learn them. Did they argue about whether the children should learn the equivalent of a dice game?

Urmiyah, at Easter, Urmiyah when the cheese slabs arrived in the fall from our sheep in Anhar, loaded on donkeys jingling their bells as they entered through our gate and trotted over to the bottom of the stairs that led to the kitchen, Urmiyah when the village women came to bake bread and scared me away from the hot "tanura" by saying they would catch me and give me away to whom?

Urmiyah of the mulberry orchards by the river, the family treat of late spring, Urmiyah of the strawberries my mother planted from starter plants she brought from Tabriz.  Urmiyah of the "phaeton" rides to Golpashan, Urmiyah of the many goodbyes. 
 

In 1966 when I returned to Urmiyah while in the Peace Corps in Afghanistan, the house was still standing.  In 1976 when I returned to Iran with my husband, Richard Frye, and we visited Urmiyah, the house had been torn down and replaced with a grey marble palatial structure belonging to a trade baron reputedly of shady character.

Part I. 

Urmiyah Between World War I and World War II

The events of World War I profoundly, and for the rest of the 20th century, changed the ethnic demography of the Iranian province that is now West Azarbaijan. Most people who are aware of the tremendous upheaval that nearly ended the existence of Christians in Turkey, do not realize that the same events occurred in western Azarbaijan.  Assyrians lived throughout this area and the lives of all but those settled in places like Aleppo were shattered by the attempt to drive all Christians out of the path of the Turkish army.

Assyrians and Kurds

For most Assyrians, the direct threat came from Kurds.  As fellow Sunni Muslims, the Ottoman government had attempted to organize the Kurds into paramilitary units, based largely on their feudal tribal formation.  In the eastern part of the Ottoman Empire, these paramilitary units turned on their Christian neighbors to launch many attacks.  They combined the concept of jihad with their traditional propensity to pillage and destroy the Assyrians.  This cycle of aggression began in earnest in late 1914, just months prior to the "Year of the Sword" 1915. 
In the fall of 1914, Kurds began raiding villages on the Urmiyah plain.  The Russian military presence in Urmiyah restrained them somewhat.  But when the Russian army pulled out to meet the Ottoman army in Sari Kamish, the Kurds entered Urmiyah, Salamas, and devastated the countryside.  Iran was neutral in the war, as was the United States until 1917.  Nonetheless, the Ottoman army entered Iranian territory and the Persian government did little to resist the attack and nothing to protect the Assyrians who became the primary victims of the Kurds. 
In the meanwhile, the Kurds had launched major attacks on both the settled Assyrrian villages around Lake Van and on the mountainous Assyrians of the Hakkiari. By the summer of 1915, a bedraggled group of from about 30 to 50,000 Assyrians found their way to the Urmiyah/Salamas area seeking shelter from the Turkish and Kurdish attackers.  They received permission to enter Iran and  settled in villages and in the towns.

Assyrian leadership Problems

In spring 1918 the Kurdish tribal leader, Isma'il Agha Simko (killed 1930), under the pretext of a dinner invitation, assassinated the Patriarch of the Church of the East, Mar Benyamin Shimmun.  This was a turning point in modern Assyrian history.  Assyrians, as a scattered people, have had a very difficult time finding and accepting community leadership.  Most  leadership had come from the religious hierarchy because that is the leadership recognized by the Muslim governments under which Assyrians have lived as Dhimmi people (barely tolerated minorities).  The religious leadership has generally served us well prior to the rapid developments of the 20th century when the chauvinism of local states worked against our cultural and ethnic survival.  Mar Shimmun Benyamin was recognized by the Tsarist regime as the leader of the Assyrians, and to some extent, by the local Persian government in Urmiyah and in Salamas. Even though many Assyrians did not belong to the Church of the East, he was  widely accepted as an 'ethnarch"  or ethnic leader. By killing the Patriarch,  the Kurds dealt a heavy blow to the Assyrians and one that has created a nearly unbreachable gap between these ethnic neighbors.

The Flight of the Assyrians

In August 1918 when Assyrians did not receive the promised aid from the British who had insisted that they remain in Azarbaijan in order to defend Baku from the Ottoman Army, they took flight south to Hamadan.  If they had not listened to the British, they might all have moved to the Transcaucasus to escape the Turkish and Kurdish forces.
My family, both paternal and maternal, fled south.  Almost every Assyrian family that survived that month's trek through the mountains has a tale of horror to tell.  The Ottoman army was giving chase and capturing and dragging back to Urmiyah the stragglers who were then killed. Bands of Kurds were attacking and robbing the caravan of refugees. Women and young girls met terrible ends, with many simply disappearing into Muslim households.  Many families did not survive. Many ended up in the refugee camps across the border in Mesopotamia.

PHOTO  GALLERY

The photo gallery shows examples of Assyrian activities and institutions during the period between the two wars.  These photographs come from our family collection, one that my mother, Lillie, diligently tended for decades.  Some pictures have dates, most don't.  In some I recognize some people, especially close friends of my parents like Maryam Odisho of Golphashan, wife of Yukhanna bruna d-Lutar, a lovely woman whom my parents knew well from the late 1920s onward.  She and her husband were their best man and matron of honor at their wedding in 1941.
I put these pictures on this site to add to the thin body of materials about Assyrians. My history and photographs happen to be of the Urmiyah Assyrians.  I hope that others with roots elsewhere will also share their cultural wealth.

       Urmiyah between the two Wars (I & II)

Part II.

Urmiyah Between World War II and 1953

After World War II, after the collapse of the Demokrat movement in Urmiyah and Azarbaijan (1946), the area became more integrated into the centralized system of Iran. Tehran became a magnet for anyone seeking education, work, and progress.  This centralized system, as much as the continuous pogroms against Assyrian villages (70 pillaged in the winter of 1946), led to accelerated departure of Assyrians from the villages and from Urmiyah itself.

But the post-War II era still had many Assyrians living in the town in the winter and taking care of agricultural lands in the villages in the summers.  Two active churches also functioned in the town - Catholic and Protestant.  A high level of cooperation among them was manifest from the Easter visiting arrangements:  The town was divided into three sections for the three days following Easter.  On each day one section would stay home and entertain while the other two went calling.  Major competition to fill tables with all kinds of sweets and cakes meant the week before had the ladies at the bake stove. If Easter happened late in the spring, our baking stove had to be set up in the yard. Otherwise the built-in Russian style baking oven in the kitchen served the purpose far better.