Abed Mshiho Neman of Qarabash. Sayfo - An Account of the Assyrian Genocide

Translated and annotated by Michael Abdalla and Łukasz Kiczko. — Edinburgh University Press, 2021. — 272 p. — ISBN 978 1 4744 4752 2.The task of determining the geographic location of many of the settlements the author describes has proven to be quite a challenge; some of these towns and villages in particular bear other names today than those that were known when the text was created. It is known that Kemal Atatürk ordered the Turkification of not only Assyrian personal names but also names of places (toponyms), in a process of ‘cultural genocide’. Personal names and place names that were participles or nouns in Syriac (which is quite common among Semitic peoples) were directly translated into Turkish, while others were granted entirely unrelated names from a list drawn up by Turkish officials.
In fact, the author himself uses on more than one occasion various names or notations differing from those used earlier on to describe a specific locality or uses respective parallel declination as compared to forms mentioned previ­ously. Apart from this, the author often provides names of ancient localities, used in Syriac texts, in most cases in the way they were rendered in Greek, which on modern Turkish maps are recorded in altered forms or plainly sound different. Despite tedious searches on available official and unofficial maps, as well as searching various sketches and descriptions, including those drawn up by travellers and missionaries, it was impossible to determine the modern equivalents of names of many localities and, accordingly, to describe their locations on maps of what today is the Republic of Turkey. A great help in this regard was provided by the work of Helga Anschütz (1985).1 One cannot exclude the possibility that certain localities ceased to exist after the slaughters of Christians.