Since late antiquity, northern Mesopotamia had been the cradle of two main Christian communities, namely, the Church of the East and the Syriac Orthodox Church of Antioch. From the late Middle Ages onwards, however, their newly-created...
moreSince late antiquity, northern Mesopotamia had been the cradle of two main Christian communities, namely, the Church of the East and the Syriac Orthodox Church of Antioch. From the late Middle Ages onwards, however, their newly-created Catholic counterparts, as well as Protestant offshoots in the modern period, have further added to this uneasy and often antagonistic mix. Despite these Churches sharing a common Syriac liturgical language, and their members speaking Neo-Aramaic and sharing a common Assyrian ethnicity and heritage, they have time and again found themselves at loggerheads in the historical record over differences in theology, Christology, allegiance and claims to apostolic succession. With this diversification of creeds and loyalties amongst the Syriac Churches, there also came a need for each community to legitimise, consolidate and renew itself as it saw fit in order to be able to remain in competition with its ‘rivals.’ Part of this process was embodied in the appropriation of churches and monasteries belonging to the ‘others’ and their modification to conform to the ecclesiastical norms of the new owners.
In this study, cases of churches which have largely changed hands between the Church of the East, Syriac Orthodox Church, Chaldean Catholic Church and Syriac Catholic Church will be discussed in an effort to illustrate this un-Christian process of control, appropriation and dispossession, as well as the transferral and imposition of one form of Christian expression on an edifice which previously belonged to another denomination. Examples of church buildings in Iraq, Syria, Turkey and Iran will hence be discussed in an effort to understand the way in which this heritage is appropriated and transferred, as well as the method through which one denomination’s own heritage can be transferred to an existing structure built by an opposing one.
