Sayfo; Village of Tappa

Village of Tappa

The village of Tappa was a Christian village situated in the Diyarbakir province, within the administrative jurisdiction of the regional center. Ottoman surveys identify the village as an Armenian and Syriac Christian settlement, which functioned as an agricultural center in the hinterlands of the provincial capital. While the regional history of the Tur Abdin plateau and the surrounding plains involved repeated Kurdish and Arab tribal incursions throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, detailed accounts of specific atrocities committed for Tappa during these cycles of violence are not explicitly isolated in the available archives.

During the Hamidian massacres occurring between 1895 and 1897, Tappa was one of the numerous Christian villages on the Diyarbakir plain targeted by Ottoman irregular forces and Kurdish tribes. Documentation identifies Tappa in association with neighboring settlements such as Fum, Shemshem, and Naghle, which together faced a coordinated campaign of pillaging and destruction intended to diminish the Christian demographic footprint in the agricultural regions surrounding Diyarbakir.

During the Sayfo genocide between 1915 and 1924, Tappa was utilized by perpetrators as both a target for direct liquidation and a site for the execution of Christians from other areas. In one documented atrocity, a military platoon of fifty Ottoman soldiers, supported by Kurdish irregulars, intercepted a group of seventy Christian men from the Bsheriyeh area at Tappa. The commander of the military platoon ordered the immediate arrest and execution of these seventy men near a river tunnel; while sixty were killed on-site, twelve initially escaped and fled into the mountains. These survivors were pursued for nine days until they were recaptured and returned to Tappa, where they were subjected to severe torture and execution.

The targeting of religious leadership and the destruction of the local population were central features of the atrocities in Tappa during that time. Rev. Fr. Daoud, a priest from the village of Sa’deyeh, was among those captured and transported to Tappa, where he was persecuted alongside lay captives while exhorting them to maintain their faith. In the surrounding administrative district, other religious leaders faced similar degradation, including the priest of the neighboring village of Fum, who was publicly humiliated and dragged by his beard through the streets by Ottoman soldiers and local youth. The Christian population of Tappa, which included both Armenian and Syriac families, was eliminated through these massacres, with remaining women and children subjected to sexual violence and sold into domestic slavery.