Beliefs Endure as Believers Move On

MIDYAT, Turkey

"On the day the genies show up, seemingly everyone in this historic town in southeastern Turkey heads for the door.

"On Black Wednesdays, you have to go to picnics and stay outdoors," said Summeyye Saltik, 15, on the playground of the local primary school where attendance dipped, as it always does, on the second Wednesday in March. "If you're indoors, genies will visit your house."

" "Because the houses used to belong to them and they come to claim them," added a classmate, Bushra Gokce.

"They can be anybody," explained a third girl, Serap Ceylan. "They can be Muslims or anybody who lived here before."

That makes the possibilities almost endless in Midyat, which over the centuries has been inhabited or visited by people of a vast assortment of faiths, including the Yazidis, the obscure sect that introduced the town to the springtime escapes of Black Wednesday."

" Midyat, a town that predates Christianity and Islam, once reflected the deep diversity of a region where faiths overlapped and conquering armies advanced and retreated. Scholars say its very name may be a mix of Farsi, Arabic and Assyrian that translates as "mirror."

But what this town of 57,000 reflects these days is a growing sameness. The Armenian Christians who built many of the old city's medieval stone buildings disappeared in the early 20th-century conflict that Armenians and many historians have called genocide. The Assyrian Christians who long accounted for the majority in Midyat have been reduced to just 100 families.

As for the Yazidis: "They were not causing any problems, but it was still better that they left," said Nazete Koksal, an ethnic Kurd seated on a sofa under the arched stone roof of a house her husband, an Arab, bought from a Yazidi family.

"They're dirty," Koksal said. "Their religion is dirty. They pray to the devil. We pray to God."

" Persecution, Dogdu said, "was not done very openly, but sometimes it was deliberate. For instance, there were some murders of prominent persons. If you murder a prominent person, other people have fear."

Today, about 500 Assyrians live in Midyat. Sunday services rotate among the four churches that remain in the medieval splendor of the old city. In recent months, small groups of Assyrians have begun returning from abroad to build homes, mostly in isolated villages. But Dogdu's weary smile suggested the downward trend would not be easily reversed.

"When you have a majority population and it goes down to less than 1 percent, what do you think?" he said."

"Centuries ago, Muslims slaughtered Yazidis by the thousands as devil worshipers. Yazidis, whose faith draws on several sources, including Zoroastrianism, believe the fallen angel who became Satan later repented, returning to grace after extinguishing the fires of Hell. Yazidis envision him as a peacock, a main symbol of their religion."

"Turkey differs with the European Union on the definition of minority, insisting on its definition of nationhood grounded in Turkishness. Baskin Oran, a University of Ankara political scientist active in minority human rights, discounted the new laws as "a revolution from above. It's more or less easy to change laws. But it is much more difficult to change the mentality of the people."
Beliefs Endure as Believers Move On (washingtonpost.com)