Shemsdin (East Syrian Ecclesiastical Province)

The metropolitan province of Shemsdin, created after the 1552 schism in the Church of the East, was the second most important ecclesiastical province of the Qudshanis patriarchate after the province of the patriarch himself. The metropolitans or mutrans of Shemsdin traditionally took the name Hnanishoʿ and lived in the Shemsdin village of Mar Ishoʿin the sub-district of Rustaqa. There were around twelve metropolitans of Shemsdin between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries, most of whom were chosen by hereditary succession. The last metropolitan of Shemsdin, Mar Yosip Khnanisho (also known as Mar Joseph Hnanisho) died in Iraq in 1977, and the office of mutran lapsed on his death.

After the schism of 1552 most of the East Syrian Christians living the Hakkari and Urmi regions gave their loyalty to the Shemʿon line of patriarchs, who fixed their seat in the seventeenth century in the Hakkari village of Qudshanis, a few miles to the northeast of Julamerk. The Nestorian population of these regions was estimated by the Anglican missionary Lewes Cutts in 1877 at 10,638 families (about 75,000 individuals). There was also a large Chaldean Catholic community in the Salmas district, perhaps 10,000 strong.

Whereas the Mosul patriarchs were simply religious leaders, whose succession depended on the agreement of the Ottoman authorities, the Qudshanis patriarchs were also quasi-independent tribal chiefs, enjoying a certain freedom of manoeuvre to balance between the Ottoman authorities and their nominally-subject Kurdish emirs. This dual position gave the Qudshanis patriarchate a unique character. Nineteenth-century visitors to Qudshanis described a patriarchal rule which resembled that of a medieval baron. The patriarch derived an income from the farm produce of his parishioners, and took a share of church collections. His rule ultimately rested on the prestige of the patriarchal family, which was recognized by all the East Syrians in the patriarchate, and it was common for them to swear an oath 'by the head of Mar Shemʿon'. As in the Mosul patriarchate, hereditary succession was customary by the nineteenth century, and each patriarch would consecrate a 'guardian of the throne' (natar kursya), normally a nephew, from a pool of younger relations, who lived an ascetic communal existence as 'Nazirites'.

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