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Our Turkish-speaking drivers were taking us through the Fertile Crescent, that crossroads of great civilizations, but it did not appear very fertile. On this visit to eastern Turkey, religious freedom advocate Paul Marshall and I saw little cultivated land and a striking level of depopulation. We met the only two monks remaining in the monastery of the village of Sare (or Sarikoy). They were resigned, calm, and ready for the apocalypse.

Syriac-speaking Christians in this area have persisted through more than a dozen centuries of Muslim, Ottoman, and now Turkish rule. They languish between the secularizing government of the Republic of Turkey and an Islamic culture that views them as heathen outsiders. The government has long given them minimal "freedom of worship" while decisively restricting property rights for local congregations. Nor do authorities allow them any avenues of new growth—communication, speech, normal press freedom, or economic development.

Syriac-Aramaic comes as close as any living language to what Jesus spoke. It is the liturgical and poetic language of these Christians. Yet authorities forbid Christians on Turkey's southeastern border with Syria, Iraq, and Iran to teach that language—nor can their schoolchildren learn any subject in it. Christians in Syria, by contrast, legally teach and worship in that language.

Besides the secular and Islamic opposition, modern forces also threaten. Dams for electric power and irrigation are filling up the great valley of the Tigris, threatening to submerge lands—including churches and monasteries—on which Christian families have lived for more than a millennium. In any case, as in the rest of Turkey, Christians cannot buy property.

In short, the government would be pleased to see the Christian communities quietly disappear altogether. Christians have been caught in the middle of a war between the government and the Kurds. Now it matters little to the government that the Hezbollah as well as the Kurds are harassing them.

Christians abroad, meanwhile, know little of their life-and-death struggle.

The Turkish government has told the Christian villages, in effect: You cannot have seminaries in your language. You cannot repair your churches. Or if you do, you must do it without any help and under local Turkish government surveillance.

Heirs of the ancient Chaldeans and Assyrians, today these Christians affiliate mainly with the Syrian Orthodox Church, with separate church patriarchates in Damascus: one Jacobite, the other Antiochene. The Christian population has dwindled to nearly nothing in villages that have called Christ Lord for well over 15 centuries.

No one doubts that there are viable arguments for continuity between these ethnic Syriac-speaking Christians and the earliest Christian beginnings. Before Christ, there were Jewish communities in this area in which the first generations of Christians eventually grew.

One of the major Christian centers of learning, hymnody, and monasticism during the fourth and fifth centuries a.d. flourished at Urfa, previously called Edessa (the ancient Haran). The fathers of the Edessa churches, along with their scholars, hymn-writers and poets, were lauded and quoted throughout the Christian world. By the seventh century, dozens of monasteries—some of them with up to 700 monks—covered the nearby hills. Few Christian families remain there.

In Nisibis (now Nusaybin), an ancient city in the upper Euphrates valley (on the river Djada), the Christian community dates back to the second century. A fourth-century church there was locked up and abandoned shortly after World War I, when the community fled south into Syria. For 60 years there had been no Christians in this church. Now the Syriac diocese has sent a Christian family from one of the surrounding villages into Nisibis. They live in a little apartment in the church and keep it from falling apart.

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January 2003, Vol. 47, No. 1