Keeping the Faith

Indigenous Christian communities in Turkey and the Middle East have declined dramatically in recent years, with large numbers emigrating in the face of violence, war and conflict. Keeping the Faith explores the impact of historical persecution and mass migration on the Suryoye, Syriac Orthodox Christians, from Turkey. Victims of genocide in 1915-16, subjugated by state nationalism in the Turkish Republic, part of the Turkish exodus of guest workers to Europe post 1960 and hemmed in by the Turkish-Kurdish conflict in the last decades of the twentieth century, they dispersed globally from eastern Anatolia. Only a few now remain in Turkey. This book argues that these experiences migrated with those who re-settled abroad and became incorporated into their life story. Heidi Armbruster's ethnographic fieldwork both in rural villages and a monastery in their Anatolian homeland, and with migrants and their families in Berlin and Vienna, allows her to investigate a number of contexts in which Syriac Christians create identities for themselves, contested through the potent symbolic resources of the Aramaic language, Christian religion, and Assyrian and Aramean ethnicity. Suryoye personal relationships to a collective history are not accessed through historians' accounts or institutional narratives, but through the intimate social worlds the author sensitively observes, in which experience and memories are formed, and in which individuals articulate their stake in a larger and more collective story. This discourse centres on 'community endangerment' and lies at the heart of negotiations of identity, family and group membership that are key to the spatial and historical processes of migration and diaspora. This account delineates with wonderful clarity how 'keeping the faith', has both imperilled and formed the foundations of continuity and community, for this fascinating group.