[Family Making Butter, Mawana, Persia]

This photograph shows a Syriac Christian family from Persia (modern Iran), perhaps at the end of the 19th century. In this period, Syriac communities (under a variety of names including Assyrian, Aramean, and Chaldean) were widespread across the lands of the Ottoman Empire. Unfortunately the vast majority of these communities have since been destroyed bycatastrophic violence and genocide over the past century. As much as 70% of the Syriac population was massacred, alongside Greeks and Armenians, in the genocides of 1915. Further ethnic and sectarian violence followed as Syriac populations were marginalized during the formation of modern nation states in the Middle East. Yet another wave of violence came after the American invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the genocidal rise of the so-called Islamic State in Syria and Iraq in 2014. Although there are Syriac diaspora communities around the globe, the tragic reality is that the survival of Syriac culture and populations in the Middle East is gravely endangered today.