Assyrian Archive

Assyrian Archive

First of all, a big thank you to all of the supporters of Assyrian Archive on Twitter and Instagram! Your likes, retweets, and thank you DM’s have encouraged me to turn this small side-project into something much larger. The support I’ve received from Assyrians all over diaspora and across four different languages, has been really inspiring. A special thank you to those individuals from France, Russia, Belgium, and Brazil who reached out and sent me old photos of their families and villages. The Assyrians who live in these countries have their origins in towns and villages that are often overlooked during discussions about Assyrian history in the English-speaking part of the world. Rest assured that the stories from those photos will be told.

What began as a simple quest to learn more about my grandmother’s childhood in the 1930s ended up as a mission of discovery as I could not stop finding books about the near-fanciful livelihood of Assyrians from the 1800s in the mountains and valleys of Hakkari. With an ever-growing list of old and out-of-print books to read, it occurred to me to create a list to keep track. But the rate at which I was finding these books surpassed the rate at which I could read them. And so, what began primarily as an interest in family history morphed into a project of collection, collation, and contextualization.