Midyat

Midyat
Mor Barsawmo Syriac Orthodox Church. Although now a minority of less than 10% of the population, Assyrians were once the majority until the Assyrian Genocide.
Midyat
Coordinates: 37°25′00″N 41°22′11″E / 37.41667°N 41.36972°E / 37.41667; 41.36972Coordinates: 37°25′00″N 41°22′11″E / 37.41667°N 41.36972°E / 37.41667; 41.36972
Country	Turkey
Province	Mardin
Government
• Mayor	Şehmus Nasıroğlu (AKP)
• Kaymakam	Fatih Akkaya
Area
• District	1,054.25 km2 (407.05 sq mi)
Population (2012)
• Urban	60,425
• District	105,542
• District density	100/km2 (260/sq mi)
Post code	47500
Website	www.midyat.bel.tr

Midyat (Kurdish: Midyad‎, Syriac: ܡܕܝܕ Mëḏyaḏ or Miḏyôyo in the local Turoyo dialect, Arabic: مديات‎‎) is a town in Mardin Province of Turkey. The ancient city is the center of a centuries-old Hurrian/Hurrian town in Southeast-Turkey, widely familiar under its Syriac name Tur Abdin. A cognate of the name Midyat is first encountered in an inscription of the Assyrian king Ashur-nasir-pal II (883-859 B.C.). This royal text depicts how forces conquered the city and its surrounding villages. In its long history, the city of Midyat has been ruled by various different leaders and nations.

The history of Midyat can be traced back to the Hurrians during the 3rd millennium. Ninth century BC Assyrian tablets refer to Midyat as Matiate, or city of caves due to the caves at eleth 3 km away from the city where the earliest inhabitants lived. Many different empires had ruled over Midyat including the Mitannians, Assyrians, Armenians, Medes, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Abbasids, Seljuks and Ottomans.

Midyat is a historic center of the Assyrians in Turkey, and as late as the Syriac Genocide the 1915 took up a majority in the city. During the early 20th century, The Syriac population of the city started to gradually diminish from immigration, but the community was still very large. The Assyrians of Tur Abdin were the only significant population of Christians outside of Istanbul, until 1979, when panic overtook the still Syriac city, because the mayor, a major Syriac figure in the City of kerboran, now named [Dargecit]] was assassinated and replaced with a Kurdish representative. The Syriacs up until then had control over the local government, and could therefore unify and have power in the case of threats. Soon after the takeover, local Mhallami and Kurdish inhabitants started immigrating into the traditionally Syriac areas, causing a demographic imbalance and, along with the start of the Turkey-PKK conflict a few years later in 1984, sounded a death blow to the community not only here, but in all of Tur Abdin. From a population in 1975 of 50,000, taking up 10% of Mardin provinces demographic barely 2,000 were left by the end of the conflict in 1999. Now only around 3-5,000 live in Tur Abdin, with the other 15-17,000 living in Istanbul.