Sayfo; Village of Ma'dan

Village of Ma'dan

The village of Ma’dan is also recorded in historical and multilingual sources as Argana, Ergani-Maden, and in Turkish as Ergani. Geographically, Ma’dan was a village located within the province of Diyarbekir in southeast Anatolia, situated north of the city of Diyarbekir and historically serving as part of the Maden sub-province or sancak.

The town was characterized by a diverse population that included a Syriac Christian community and a sizable Armenian minority. During earlier historical periods including the fourteenth century, the settlement of Ma’dan was actively populated and served as a center for ecclesiastical activity. In the year 1396, records indicate that a copy of the Gospel containing the biography of Yuhanna was sold to the church of the Monastery of Mor Abel in Ma’dan, attesting to the presence of established Christian religious institutions and preserved manuscripts in the area during this time. Historical registers from the nineteenth century identify the town and its suburbs as possessing a notable Christian population, though distinct from the massive Syriac Orthodox concentrations found in the Tur Abdin region further to the southeast.

During the Hamidian massacres of 1895–1897, Ergani and Ergani-Maden were the scenes of extensive anti-Christian rioting and collective violence. These disturbances occurred primarily during the first half of November 1895 and resulted in the looting and destruction of Christian property. While comprehensive casualty lists for these specific towns are less detailed in available chronicles compared to other districts, historical investigations confirm that the Ottoman authorities punished several gendarmes in Maden for their direct roles and complicity in the anti-Armenian violence during this period.

The events of the Sayfo and the general genocide of 1915 marked the systematic annihilation of the local Christian population and deportees. Ergani-Maden served as a significant processing station for Christian deportees arriving from the northern city of Kharput. In early July 1915, a convoy consisting of approximately 1,500 people arrived in the district after a march of four days. The officer in charge of this convoy selected all adult and adolescent males above the age of eleven, who were then incarcerated in a local caravanserai alongside native Armenian men from Maden. These prisoners were subsequently marched to the Maden cliff and pushed into a deep ravine to their deaths. Eyewitnesses such as Mariza Kejejian reported the presence of heaps of naked corpses in the canyon and along the roads between Maden and Ergani by July 7, 1915. The methods used in these executions included being pushed off cliffs and bludgeoned with blunt instruments to conserve ammunition. The scale of the massacre was so total that foreign observers, including Austrian general Josef Pomiankowski and missionary Mary Riggs, noted that the Argana mines were left abandoned because the entire local Christian labor force had been eliminated.

Following the conclusion of World War I and the atrocities of the genocide, the region remained subject to demographic engineering and political submission. In 1925, the district of Ergani was again identified as a theater of mass violence, this time involving military operations and reprisals against the Kurdish population during the suppression of regional revolts. In 1959, the Turkish Republic implemented a comprehensive program to change non-Turkish place names, resulting in the renaming of approximately 90 percent of the villages in the former Diyarbekir vilayet, including those within the Ergani district, effectively obscuring the historical multi-ethnic geography of the region.