Chaldeans In Europe - Part VI
By Adhid Miri, PhD
The Chaldean people, once dispersed, fled to the corners of the world; the numbers tell the story. Intertwined with their story is the Assyrian story.
Georgia
Georgia, located at the southwestern tip of the former USSR, has attracted indigenous Iraqi Catholics since the middle of the 18th century. Tbilisi, the largest city in the Republic of Georgia is situated on the banks of the Kura River directly north of Baghdad.
According to the Soviet Census in 1939, there were some 20,000 Assyro-Chaldeans, most of them postwar refugees, living in what is now called the Republic of Georgia. In 1990, that figure fell to 7,000. According to the Census in 2001, only 3,000 people living there at that time identified themselves as Assyrian or Chaldean.
The Catholic Assyrian Chaldean Mission in Georgia was instituted in 1995 under Vatican jurisdiction. It was only in 2004 that a growing number of Chaldean parishioners prompted the construction of the Church of Saint Simon (Simon Bar Sabbae).
Pope Francis visited Tbilisi in September of 2016 and described the Caucasus nation as, “a blessed land, a place of encounter and vital exchange among cultures and civilizations which, since the 4th century, discovered in Christianity its deepest identity and the solid foundation of its values.”
Russia
Catholic Church in Moscow
Assyrians and Chaldeans came to Russia in three main waves. The first wave was after the Treaty of Turkmenchay in 1828; an agreement that delineated a border between Russia and Persia. Many Chaldeans and Assyrians found themselves suddenly under Russian sovereignty, and thousands of relatives crossed the border to join them.
The second wave was a result of the repression and violence during and after World War I. Most of Russia’s tiny Assyrian minority are descendants of refugees who fled the Ottoman Empire and supported the allied Christian powers of Britain, France and Imperial Russia, hoping for the establishment of an Assyrian homeland.
The Turks and their Kurdish allies responded violently, murdering tens of thousands of Assyrian men, women and children. Some observers claim that more than one third of the Assyrian population was killed between 1914 and 1918.
In 1924, in the southern Russian region of Krasnodar, Assyrians founded a village and named it after Urmiya, an important Assyrian center in Iran. This village, which has survived famine, the excesses of totalitarianism, World War II and the unraveling of the Soviet Union, remains the only exclusively Assyrian settlement in Russia.
The third wave of immigrants came after World War II, when Moscow unsuccessfully tried to establish a satellite state in Iran. Soviet troops withdrew in 1946, and left the Assyrians and Chaldeans exposed to the same kind of retaliation that they had suffered from the Turks thirty years earlier. Again, many Chaldeans found refuge in the Soviet Union, this time mainly in the cities.
From 1937 to 1959, the Chaldean and Assyrian population in USSR grew significantly.
The events surrounding the collapse of the Soviet Union led to new internal migrations. The interethnic conflicts in Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia in the late 1980s and early 1990s, combined with the severe economic climate, forced many Assyrians to migrate to Russia.
The disintegration of the Soviet Union ended the isolation of the Russian Assyrian community. They gained the opportunity to renew ties with their fellow Assyrians abroad, including the hierarchy of the Church of the East. In 1982 and again in 1988 (the year of the celebration of the millennium of Christianity in the Eastern Slav lands), Catholicos Patriarch Mar Dinkha IV visited his flock scattered in Russia.
In 1994, the Holy Synod of the Church of the East placed the Assyrian community of the former Soviet Union under the pastoral protection of Mar Gheevarghese, Metropolitan of Iraq. A community of the Assyrian Church of the East was registered in Moscow early in the year.
On May 15, 1996, the foundation stone for a new parish church, dedicated to Mart Mariam (the Virgin Mary), was ceremonially laid in Moscow.
Russia was one of the first countries to provide concrete assistance for Iraqi war refugees; Russia’s Emergency Situations Ministry began preparing two sites for refugee camps in western Iran in April of 2003.
Chaldeans have tended to assimilate within the Armenian community within the Soviet Union, but their cultural and ethnic identity, strengthened through centuries of hardships, found new expression under glasnost. They adopted Russian Orthodoxy, while retaining the use of Aramaic for the celebration of the liturgy.
Despite centuries of isolation, poverty and persecution, Russia’s Assyrian Church of the East, one of the most ancient of Christian churches, remains alive and ready to prosper into the next millennium. Some estimate 70,000 Assyrians and Chaldeans live in the country today.
Finland
Keep travelling north from Georgia through Russia and you could eventually end up in Finland, where about 32,778 Iraqis live—the fourth largest resettlement in Europe; after Sweden, Germany, and the UK. For reference, in 2015 there were only 300 Chaldeans listed as living in Finland.
Assyrians in number began arriving in Finland for the first time around 1991. In 2001, there were only 115 Assyrians in Finland. Within six years, the number tripled. Most of them living in Oulu, while other smaller communities are seen in the Finnish capital, Helsinki, and as well in Turku and Jyyaskyla.
They are mostly refugees from Iraq and Iran; this contrasts with the Assyrian and Chaldean population in neighboring Sweden, where the majority are from Turkey, Iraq and Syria. All are required to attend language classes for three to six months.
The population is split religiously between Church of the East and Chaldean Catholic members. Chaldean Catholics attend a Catholic church in Oulu where the services are conducted by an Italian priest in the Finnish language. Church of the East members attend their services in Lutheran churches.
Spain & Italy
Along the southern coast of Europe, we travel to Spain. The current population of Iraqis living there is unknown; however, there are roughly 3,700 asylum seekers in Spain, and a further 642 Iraqis hold residency permits. Iraqi immigration to Spain accounted for 1,706 permanent residents in the year 2006.
The current population of Iraqi Christians in Italy stands at around 1,300, or approximately 50 families. Most of these are priests, nuns and seminarians who have come to pursue their studies in Italy. The majority are residents of Rome.
Greece
The first Chaldean migrants in Greece came in 1934, and settled in the areas of Makronisos (today uninhabited), Keratsini (Pireus), Egaleo and Kalamata. There are five Christian Chaldean marriages recorded at St. Paul’s Anglican Church in Athens in the years 1924-25. The transcripts can be viewed on the church’s website; the record indicates the beginning of the appearance of refugees at that time. The absence of further marriages at St. Paul’s possibly could be due to the arrival of a Nestorian clergyman in Athens shortly after 1925.
The current population of Iraqi Chaldeans in Greece is estimated at 2,000, with the vast majority of Chaldeans living in Peristeri, a suburb of Athens.
Greece: Ongoing Immigration
Iraqis who want to reach Europe today are left with two options. They can either access the UN resettlement program by arriving in Damascus or Amman and wait indefinitely before being resettled; or they can try to reach Europe illegally and hope for the best once they get there.
Greece is the most common entry point for Iraqis into the European Union (EU). Many enter the country after a treacherous journey across the quasi-border separating central and southern Iraq from the northern regions, where they cross the mountains into Turkey. Thereafter, they continue along the same routes as thousands of other migrants, arriving at one of the Greek Islands by speedboat or crossing the Greek–Turkish land border.
Once in Greece, the majority travel to northern European countries and apply for refugee status from there. The estimated cost of this second and illegal option is around $10,000, an expensive alternative that only those with financial means can afford.
Strict EU policies which force many Iraqis to undertake long, dangerous, and expensive journeys to find refuge in Europe result in a small number of asylum petitions. Out of the many hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who sought resettlement through Greece from 2003 to 2007, only 60,000 had applied for asylum in the EU.
Whether driven by war, by persecution, or by economic opportunity, we see the spread of Chaldeans and Assyrians across the European Union, and we celebrate their strength and tenacity to survive in a world that often makes it all too easy to be a martyr.