A perishing Aramean (Midyat)

The Syriac Orthodox Church carries an old Aramaic dialect as official Church language through the centuries. A young German member of the Church whose ancestors came from Midyat and who is working for two month in St. Gabriel / Mor Gabriel Monastery (photo above) told me, that the Church often simply calls itself after that language Aramean.

The Syriac Orthodox are spread over the whole world, yet many of them still live here in the region around Midyat and Mardin. The head of the Church is called the Patriarch of Antioch and resided for many years in the monastery St. Ananias / Mor Hananyo in Mardin. After political problems with Turkey in 1933 the Patriarch moved to Syria and resides now in Damascus.

The Aramean language is Jesus’ language. In his time it was lingua franca for wide parts of the region between Egypt and Persia. It is part of the Westsemitic family of languages and thus related to Hebrew and Arab. In Mel Gibson’s Passion Aramean is the language spoken by evrybody except the Romans, a softer, melodic and less guttural version of Hebrew and Arab.

For the Jews the mentioning of Arameans carries memories that reach wide back into the time of Abraham. One of the basic Jewish confessions is written down in Deuteronomy 26,5:

And thou shalt speak and say before JHWH thy God: A perishing Aramean was my father, and he went down to Egypt with a few, and sojourned there, and became there a nation, great, mighty, and populous.


The perishing Aramean is an eternal picture for someone whose life has not yet been touched by God. His national distinction is unclear. He is roaming about, getting lost in the desert, that is what the original arami obed means. Only when he gets even deeper into despair, Egyptian slavery, he calls to JHWH and He listens.

The ancestors of our guide Gabriel in Mor Gabriel lived here for centuries with a clear ethnic and religious distinction. They and the Turks were good neighbors, the Muezzin’s call and the sound of Church bells got along well. The secular governments that came with Atatürk caused problems, the Arameans obviously feel today more comfortable with the Islam-centered government of Erdogan.

The photo below shows a minaret and a Church steeple in Midyat.


An old Armenean from Bern / Switzerland who is visiting his old Church in Mardin recited the Lord's Prayer Our Father in Aramaic to me. I later found a transciption in the internet:

aboon dabashmaya
nethkadash shamak
tetha malkoothak

Hebrew would read:

avinoo b’shamayim
yitkadash shemkha
tetha malkotekhah