Sayfo; City of Batman

City of Batman

The Syriac name for Batman is Eliha. The city is defined by its proximity to the Batman River, which flows into the Tigris River. The administrative center of the local district or kaza was Elmedin, also known as Almedina, which was situated on the eastern bank of the Batman River before its eventual inundation.

Historical records for the settlement during the first chronological period from 1500 to 1717 do not provide specific details regarding atrocities in Eliha. The region was affected by the initial massacres conducted by the Kurdish emir Badr Khan, who targeted Christian populations in Tur Abdin and surrounding districts between 1839 and 1841. During the Bedir Khan massacres from 1842 to 1846, thousands of Church of the East adherents were murdered or sold into slavery as Kurdish forces destroyed villages that had previously been overlooked. In subsequent years, it is documented that the village housed Syriac Orthodox and Armenian communities.

During the Hamidian massacres from 1895 to 1897, the Batman region experienced severe persecution. Documentation from the Syriac Orthodox Church identifies fifteen villages in the Batman area where the Christian inhabitants were subjected to forced conversion to Islam. This policy of forced conversion was utilized to spare populations from the total destruction visited upon other Christian communities in the Diyarbekir province. The massacres in the surrounding district were incited by local urban elites, such as Arif Pirincccizade, who encouraged the looting and killing of Christian subjects.

The Sayfo genocide from 1915 to 1924 marks the most intensive phase of atrocities in Batman. The Ottoman Army and local Kurdish tribes, specifically the Rama tribe based between the Tigris and the town of Batman, played central roles in the extermination of Christians. Chieftains Omer and Mustafa of the Rama band were recruited by local officials to massacre Christian convoys in exchange for loot and amnesty. On May 30, 1915, a massacre occurred at the Reman gorge, where 674 Christians were stripped of their valuables and executed by militia and tribesmen. The victims, including Armenian and Syriac families, were thrown into the river, and the Armenian Bishop Tchilgadian was forced to witness the event before being taken back to Diyarbekir.

The clerical and ecclesiastical infrastructure was a specific target of the perpetrators during the Sayfo. The Mor Kiryakos church in Kabiye, a village in the Batman region, was used as a refuge for 160 families before they were discovered and Dynamic text indicates they were massacred with axes by the Reman tribe. Inside the church, women and girls were subjected to mass rape before the villagers were hacked to death or burned alive in haylofts. At Elmedin, the church, school, and their contents were seized by the government. Manuscripts and liturgical vessels were frequently looted, as seen in the village of Sine, where an archdeacon who converted to Islam revealed the hiding place of church treasures to Muslim attackers.

The fate of the population after the cessation of atrocities was marked by displacement and forced assimilation. Before the genocide, the Syriac population in the wider Diyarbekir province exceeded 102,000, but by the end of 1916, approximately 86,000 had disappeared. Survivors who remained in the Batman region were often those who had undergone forced religious conversion. These descendants are currently referred to as bafilla, identifying them as children of Christian fathers. Some surviving children under the age of five were separated from their families and relocated to other Syriac Orthodox villages like Enhel to be raised by the remaining community members.