Syrian Aramaic, Turoyo

Lebanon's Syriacs (Suryoye) are Syriac Orthodox and Syriac Catholic Christians whose grandparents fled Tur Abdin, Mardin and the Syrian Jazira during the 1915 Sayfo massacres and the expulsions that followed, joined by earlier Syriac families from Aleppo and Damascus and by refugees from Qamishli and Hasakah after 2011. They are one of Lebanon's 18 recognised communities but hold no seat of their own, sharing a single minorities seat with five other small churches, a grievance their patriarchs and the Syriac League keep raising. The Syriac Catholic patriarch lives at Charfet monastery above Harissa and the Syriac Orthodox patriarch keeps a residence and seminary at Atchaneh near Bikfaya, while the cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul in Beirut's Mousaytbeh dates from 1933. Most Lebanese-born Syriacs now speak Arabic, so Turoyo survives mainly among older people and families who came from Syria in the last decade, though Classical Syriac is still sung in every liturgy.

Syria's Turoyo-speaking Syriacs descend from Christians of Tur Abdin, Mardin and Nusaybin who fled the 1915 Sayfo massacres and later persecution into the Jazira, where in the 1920s they founded Qamishli across the border from Nusaybin and many of the region's early towns. They speak Turoyo, a living Aramaic language, alongside Arabic and often Kurdish, belong mainly to the Syriac Orthodox Church, and call themselves Suryoye, with some identifying as Arameans and others as Assyrians. Qamishli's quarters still carry the names of Tur Abdin villages, and its church schools, scouts and choirs keep the language and the West Syriac chant alive. Waves of emigration to Sweden, Germany and the Netherlands since the 1950s, and above all since 2011, have reduced a people who were once a fifth of the Jazira to a small and ageing community.

The Suryoye, or Syriacs, are the Aramaic-speaking Christians of the Tur Abdin, a limestone plateau around Midyat in south-eastern Türkiye, where their monasteries of Mor Gabriel (397) and Deyrulzafaran have stood for over sixteen centuries. They speak Turoyo, a living form of the Aramaic of Jesus' time, and worship in Classical Syriac in the Syriac Orthodox Church. Massacres in 1915, and village evacuations and killings during the Kurdish conflict of the 1980s and 1990s, emptied most of their villages: today most of the community lives in Istanbul, where it opened Türkiye's first new church of the Republican era at Yeşilköy in 2023, while three to five thousand remain in Tur Abdin. Since the 2010s some families have come back from Germany, Switzerland and Sweden to rebuild stone houses and restore churches in villages such as Ayn Wardo and Midin.

Bethlehem's Syriacs are the grandchildren of Syriac Orthodox Christians who fled the 1915 massacres in the Tur Abdin highlands of south-eastern Turkey, from villages such as Azakh, Isfis and Middo, and found refuge in the town where Jesus was born. Some 400 to 500 families live around their Church of the Virgin Mary, which the refugees built with their own hands between 1927 and 1943 a short walk from the Church of the Nativity, and they still pray in Syriac, the classical form of the Aramaic Jesus spoke. At home they speak Palestinian Arabic, and they see themselves as both Syriac-Aramean and Palestinian. Their church, their St Ephrem society, their club and its scout troop, which runs children's evenings in Bethlehem's Christmas season, keep the community together, while the collapse of pilgrim tourism since 2023 pushes more young families to emigrate.