Sayfo; Village of Kerzoyne

Village of Kerzoyne

The village of Kerzoyne is situated in the Nisibin plain within the kaza of Nisibin, south of the Tur Abdin mountain range and Mount Izlo, positioned relatively equidistant between the major urban and regional centers of Mardin, Midyat, Nisibin, and Cizre.

During the period of Ottoman administrative centralization in the nineteenth century, the agrarian population of Kerzoyne maintained its ethno-religious identity under the jurisdiction of the Syriac Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch and the local episcopal sees of the region, though individual village-level demographic census figures for Kerzoyne prior to the end of the nineteenth century are not separately itemized in surviving patriarchal registers.

During the Sayfo or Syriac Genocide from 1915 to 1924, pre-war demographic surveys list Kerzoyne as an inhabited Syriac Orthodox settlement with a population of 100 Christian individuals. Rural Syriac Orthodox settlements across the Nisibin plain, including Kerzoyne, were systematically raided, plundered, and subjected to mass killings and forced evacuations. These violent actions resulted in the destruction of property and the complete eradication or severe depopulation of Kerzoyne's Syriac Christian inhabitants.

In the aftermath of the Sayfo atrocities during the early twentieth century, surviving Syriac Orthodox Christians from Kerzoyne and neighboring rural communities of the Nusaybin plain were permanently displaced. Many survivors migrated southward across the newly established international frontier into the Syrian Jazira region, establishing new communities in towns such as Qamishli and Hasakah, while Kerzoyne itself ceased to function as an active Syriac Orthodox population center.