Midyat

 town, district center

• Belediye / Municipality:
www.midyat.bel.tr
• Kaymakamlık / District-Governorate:
www.midyat.gov.tr

Midyat (Kurdish: Midyad, Syriac: ܡܕܝܕ Mëḏyaḏ or Miḏyôyo in the local Turoyo dialect, Arabic: مديات‎) is a town in Mardin Province of Turkey. The ancient city is the center of a centuries-old Hurrian/Hurrian town in Southeast-Turkey, widely familiar under its Syriac name Tur Abdin. A cognate of the name Midyat is first encountered in an inscription of the Neo-Assyrian king Ashur-nasir-pal II (883-859 B.C.). This royal text depicts how Assyrian forces conquered the city and its surrounding villages. In its long history, the city of Midyat has remained politically subjected by various rulers - from the Assyrian Empire to the modern Turks. The city has a population of 60,425, mostly kurdish people.
Midyat is an historic center of the Assyrians in Turkey, and as late as the Assyrian genocide in 1915 they constituted the majority of the city's population. During the early 20th century, the Assyrian population of the city started to gradually diminish due to emigration, but the community was still very large. The Assyrians of Tur Abdin were the only significant population of Christians outside of Istanbul, until 1979, when panic ensued over an act war and an exodus of local Christians overtook the city as a result, because a Mayor and major Syriac figure in Turabdin of the city of Kerboran, now named Dargecit, was assassinated and replaced with a Kurdish representative against the peoples will. The Syriacs up until then had control over the local government, and could therefore unify to resist threats. Panic ensued as the local Muslim population made a symbolic declaration of war against the Syriac people and soon after the takeover, local Mhallami and Kurdish inhabitants started immigrating into the traditionally Syriac areas, causing a demographic shift which - along with the start of the Turkey-PKK conflict a few years later in 1984 - sounded a death toll to the community not only here, but in all of Tur Abdin. From a 1975 population of 50,000 comprising 10% of Mardin Province's demographic structure: barely 2,000 were left by the end of the conflict in 1999. Now only around 3-5,000 live in Tur Abdin, with the other 15-17,000 living in Istanbul and other still functioning Syriac Diocese like Adiyaman, Harput, and Diyarbakir.
The churches and houses belonging to the Christians have been preserved although many of them are empty, with their owners living away in Europe. At present 500 Syriac Christians live in Midyat, and they have been joined by 1-300 Assyrian refugees fleeing the Syrian Civil War who have settled in the city and region according to different estimates, and comprise 1% of the population of Midyat. There are 5 Churches in the city, and all are Syriac.