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MIDYAT, Turkey, On the day the genies show up,
seemingly everyone in this historic town in
southeastern Turkey heads for the door.
"On Black Wednesdays, you have to go to picnics and
stay outdoors," said Summeyye Saltik, 15, on the
playground of the local primary school where
attendance dipped, as it always does, on the second
Wednesday in March. "If you're indoors, genies will
visit your house."
"Because the houses used to belong to them and they
come to claim them," added a classmate, Bushra Gokce.
"They can be anybody," explained a third girl, Serap
Ceylan. "They can be Muslims or anybody who lived
here before."
That makes the possibilities almost endless in
Midyat, which over the centuries has been inhabited
or visited by people of a vast assortment of faiths,
including the Yazidis, the obscure sect that
introduced the town to the springtime escapes of
Black Wednesday.
But while the Yazidi wariness of house-haunting
genies has spread to many other groups in the area,
the number of Yazidis has dwindled considerably. Of
about 5,600 Yazidis who lived in the area in the
1980s, only 15 are left.
Midyat, a town that predates Christianity and Islam,
once reflected the deep diversity of a region where
faiths overlapped and conquering armies advanced and
retreated. Scholars say its very name may be a mix
of Farsi, Arabic and Assyrian that translates as
"mirror."
But what this town of 57,000 reflects these days is
a growing sameness. The Armenian Christians who
built many of the old city's medieval stone
buildings disappeared in the early 20th-century
conflict that Armenians and many historians have
called genocide. The Assyrian Christians who long
accounted for the majority in Midyat have been
reduced to just 100 families.
As for the Yazidis: "They were not causing any
problems, but it was still better that they left,"
said Nazete Koksal, an ethnic Kurd seated on a sofa
under the arched stone roof of a house her husband,
an Arab, bought from a Yazidi family.
"They're dirty," Koksal said. "Their religion is
dirty. They pray to the devil. We pray to God."
Still, she expressed some nostalgia for the days
before so many groups fled her city. "Before they
left, we used to be friends," she said.
In some ways, present-day Midyat reflects the
founding principles of modern Turkey. Rising from
the ruins of the Ottoman Empire, an Islamic
sultanate that tolerated religious minorities as
second-class citizens, the Turkish republic was
founded on a fierce assertion of national identity.
The concept of Turkishness rooted the new
nation-state firmly in the hills of the Anatolian
peninsula once known as Asia Minor. But it also
denied the notion of any other identity existing
there.
More than 80 years after the republic was formed,
anti-minority feelings can run close to the surface.
Last year, an ultranationalist literally tore to
pieces a human rights report on minorities before
television cameras. In eastern Turkey this month,
unemployed youths were hired to portray Armenians in
a civic skit depicting a conflict with Turks that
was more even-handed than history suggests;
municipal workers reportedly had refused to take
part.
Here in the southeast, official policy meant people
who spoke Kurdish and called themselves Kurds were,
officially, "Mountain Turks." Their eventual
insistence on maintaining their ethnic Kurdish
identity helped spark a separatist war that killed
30,000 people, most of them Kurdish civilians,
during the 1990s.
The conflict took a toll on other minorities as
well.
"We tried to be out of it," said Isa Dogdu, an
Assyrian standing in the doorway of a church that
dates from the 7th century. As a religious minority,
however, the Assyrians felt pressure both from the
Kurdish guerrillas and from Turkish Hezbollah,
radical Islamic guerrillas whom the government
secretly armed as a proxy force. When government
officials showed up at the church, said Dogdu, a
religious instructor, they asked why young people in
its annex were not being taught in Turkish.
Assyrians, who in the 1st century formed the world's
first Christian community, still learn a version of
Aramaic, the language Jesus spoke.
Persecution, Dogdu said, "was not done very openly,
but sometimes it was deliberate. For instance, there
were some murders of prominent persons. If you
murder a prominent person, other people have fear."
Today, about 500 Assyrians live in Midyat. Sunday
services rotate among the four churches that remain
in the medieval splendor of the old city. In recent
months, small groups of Assyrians have begun
returning from abroad to build homes, mostly in
isolated villages. But Dogdu's weary smile suggested
the downward trend would not be easily reversed.
"When you have a majority population and it goes
down to less than 1 percent, what do you think?" he
said.
The exodus of the Yazidis was more stark. By
official count, Turkey had 22,632 members of the
sect in 1985. Fifteen years later, their numbers had
dropped to 423. In the area around Midyat, the
exodus was even more dramatic.
"In the last 20 years, everybody moved," said
Mostafa Demir, 22, whose family left Midyat in 1990.
"Nobody was really telling them to leave, but the
relations were not that warm."
Centuries ago, Muslims slaughtered Yazidis by the
thousands as devil worshipers. Yazidis, whose faith
draws on several sources, including Zoroastrianism,
believe the fallen angel who became Satan later
repented, returning to grace after extinguishing the
fires of Hell. Yazidis envision him as a peacock, a
main symbol of their religion.
In modern Midyat, Demir said, their persecution was
more apt to appear as mockery. Demir recalled
merchants at the town market drawing a circle in the
dirt around Yazidi customers. Yazidis, whose
theology does not allow them to break a circle,
would stand there indefinitely.
But things grew worse when the Kurdish rebellion
erupted. Many Yazidis, who claim to speak the purest
Kurdish, identified with the rebels. That made them
targets of Turkish troops and Hezbollah, who "pushed
the Yazidis out of here to get their lands," said
Fars Bakir, an elderly Yazidi who lives in a
mud-daubed house in a hamlet called Cilesiz, or
"Without Suffering," in a lush valley bordering
Syria.
As a condition for joining the European Union,
Turkey recently passed new legal protections for
minorities. But Bakir, who fled to Germany for
several years, said he and his wife came home
primarily because of homesickness, not faith in new
laws.
Turkey differs with the European Union on the
definition of minority, insisting on its definition
of nationhood grounded in Turkishness. Baskin Oran,
a University of Ankara political scientist active in
minority human rights, discounted the new laws as "a
revolution from above. It's more or less easy to
change laws. But it is much more difficult to change
the mentality of the people."
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