Village of Bafayya

Bafayya: Sayfo Massacre and Displacement

The village of Bafayya (also spelled Bafawa or Bafova) experienced a particularly brutal and early massacre during the Sayfo in 1915. Bafayya was a Christian village situated approximately 25 kilometers northeast of Mardin in a deep river valley. The village was noted as being inhabited solely by about 500 Syriac Orthodox families before the Sayfo, who had employed Kurdish shepherds. The nahiya (sub-district) of Bafaya also contained 15 Syriac villages with 2,000 Syriacs, in addition to Almedina (the administrative capital of Beshiri) which had 200 Syriacs, and other surrounding villages. 

Prior to 1915, there was an incident where Kurds occupied a church in Bafayya, and a Kurdish imam began chanting "Allahu Akbar" to declare it a Muslim place of worship. In response, a man named Gawro, brother of the priest Saliba, killed the chanter and seven Kurds. This act of violence forced Priest Saliba and his brothers to flee the village due to fears of retaliation; Saliba went to Hazakh, Gawro to Upper Kafro, and another brother to Sa’irt.

On June 4, 1915, the village was attacked led by Hussein Bakro, a Kurdish chieftain and his men. During the assault, the Syriac Orthodox priest was burned alive, and the village headman was murdered. Only a handful of men managed to escape to Benebil, with two of them eventually reaching the Za’faran monastery after a week-long journey. Bafayya is listed among the villages surrounding Hazakh that "suffered immensely" during the Sayfo, where many Christians were killed or forced to convert, and their villages were "usurped by the Kurds" and renamed, leading to a loss of cultural, historical, and religious identity. This event is recorded as one of the earliest massacres in the region