12.8 Iran, 1923 to now

12 · The Assyrians of Urmi: a background · a plain-language guide to Assyrian (Sureth) grammar

The American missionaries returned in 1923 and picked the schools and clinics back up. In 1934 the government of Reza Khan expelled them and all other foreigners from Azerbaijan, and many mission-educated Assyrians left for jobs in other Iranian cities — Tabriz, Hamadan, and above all Tehran, where a large Urmi-speaking community grew.

The Second World War went badly. Iran lost the north-west to Azerbaijani and Kurdish independence movements backed by the Soviet Union, and there were violent Kurdish uprisings on the plain in which Assyrians were killed. The government regained the region at the end of 1946, and things then improved: in 1949 the Patriarch of the Church of the East — based in the USA since 1940 — won permission for a governing body of the church in Iran, and the Chaldean church a seminary in 1953.

The villages never really recovered. People kept drifting to the town for work and school, sometimes because of floods. By 1970 there were about 19,800 Assyrians in all of Iran. After the 1979 revolution they suffered badly and large numbers left the country. By 2010 about 5,000 were left in the region, effectively all in the town of Urmi.

A language that belonged to two hundred villages now has a very diminished community in one town.

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