12.9 The Caucasus
12 · The Assyrians of Urmi: a background · a plain-language guide to Assyrian (Sureth) grammar
The oldest settlement is in Georgia and predates all of this: in 1770 King Iraqli II invited Assyrians to join his army against the Ottomans. More came after Turkmenchay in 1828, and more again during the First World War. The largest and oldest Georgian settlement is the village of Dzveli Canda — about 1,500 people, four-fifths Assyrian, nearly all of Urmi origin; local tradition says the core came from the village of Naze on the northern plain. Another 2,000 or so live in Tbilisi.
In early Soviet years Georgian Assyrian cultural life flourished: a theatre company performing in Urmi Assyrian, a literary journal called Cukhva d-Madenkha ("Star of the East"), Assyrian schools. In 1937 Stalin's regime repressed most of the intellectuals and clergy, publishing stopped and the schools closed; ten years later Assyrians were deported to Siberia and Kazakhstan in huge numbers, many returning only after the rehabilitation of 1954. The literary language is taught in Canda and Tbilisi today.
In Armenia, those who came after 1828 moved several times before settling in Yerevan province in the mid-nineteenth century, led by Alawerd Tumayev, who had served in the Russian army. They made their homes in the villages of Guylasar, Dvin and Arzni and are still there. One detail is worth the whole section: many villagers married Armenians, the Armenians of those villages generally learned Urmi Assyrian, and to this day they often speak it with their Assyrian neighbours.
The Soviet community grew from about 9,000 in 1926 to roughly 25,000 in 1979, but the language held up less well than the numbers: 91% of Soviet Assyrians had Neo-Aramaic as a first language in 1926, and 64% by 1959. Both countries saw a large exodus after independence in the 1990s.
It also produced a second way of writing the language: a Latin alphabet, built in the 1920s on the Urmi dialect, which reflected actual pronunciation far better than the Syriac spelling did and even marked the heavy words. Some 387 books came out in it before printing stopped in 1939.
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