Culture : Christian Sect Slips Toward Extinction : The Syrian Orthodox community in southeastern Turkey once numbered 80 families. That number has now dwindled to 12. A bleak economy is behind the exodus.

Yakub Guney, a Syrian Orthodox priest, compares this ancient, dwindling community of Christians to a sick old man, “slowly, slowly, slipping away.”

When Guney came in 1944 to the village of Bulbul, huddled in a stony valley of southeastern Turkey, 80 families lived here. Until November, there were 22 families. Now there are 12.

“I tell them, don’t go--but what can we do?” he said with a gesture of hopelessness, standing in front of the 1,000-year-old church of golden stone. “My son is in Germany; all my relatives are there. If the patriarch gave permission, I would go, too.”

It is not just Bulbul (which means nightingale in Turkish) that is singing a swan song. All over these hills on the northern edge of the Fertile Crescent, the community of Syrian Orthodox Christians--also known as Jacobites--is heading toward extinction.

The community here traces its roots to the first century, and as late as 1930, predominately Muslim Turkey was still home to 70,000 members of the sect. Now there are barely 4,000 members, including a dozen monks and nuns in the five monasteries still active in a region that once was the seat of the faith.

The serenity is deceptive in these remote valleys, bare of vegetation except for a few vineyards and fig, mulberry and plum orchards. About 20% of the Syrian Orthodox community fled last year alone, many after 11 murders blamed on Kurdish separatist guerrillas who are active in the area.

The rebels came to the flat-roofed, stone houses of Bulbul one night in November, shortly after villagers had accepted guns and money from the state, which is trying to fortify pro-government militia in the outlying hamlets.

“They asked for food. Then they asked for the local head man. Shooting broke out, and they killed him and three others,” said Circis Unal, nursing an arm broken by a bullet in the gunfight. “Six families left after that.”

Sitting around a charcoal-fired coffee brazier on the thick carpet in the priest’s living room, some of the villagers speculated aloud about the Syrian Orthodox exodus. It’s not due just to the rebel killings, nor to any particular Muslim harassment, they seemed to agree. In fact, the government last year made attendance optional at formerly obligatory Islamic divinity lessons at school.

“Religion has nothing to do with it. Many people have left my village, too,” said Necati Aras, a Muslim shepherd from a nearby settlement. “Men, women and children all have to work from dawn to dusk here just to get by. There (in Europe) a man can earn enough for a car in 15 years, and get some culture, too. We all want that.”

At the biggest Syrian Orthodox monastery in the area--the 1,600-year-old complex of Mar Gabriel, where high walls of carved stone rise from the lonely snow-bound landscape near Midyat--the main subjects of conversation these days are fears that the Persian Gulf War may spill over into this region.

Turkish soldiers are deployed to repel any Iraqi attack just a short drive away, and the monks’ first request is for a gas mask. They have made their own bomb shelter, too, among the bones of 12,000 holy men in the ancient crypt of the monastery’s founders.

The monks say stoically that 38 wars have been fought over this land already. So the Gulf isn’t really why people are leaving either, Archbishop Timotheos Samuel Aktas said with a sigh.

“If it wasn’t for the attraction of social welfare in Sweden and Germany, nobody would go,” he said, trying to warm himself at a wood stove in the thick-walled reception room lined with portraits of Syrian Orthodox patriarchs.

“We preach against leaving, but I think even they don’t know why they go,” Aktas said of the emigres. “Over there, they forget their church and their families break up. They regret it afterwards, but by then it’s too late to return.”

Christians first fled to the highlands around Midyat after the Roman Emperor Titus conquered Jerusalem in 70 AD Pagan stonework can be seen in the foundations of many Syrian Orthodox monasteries, one of which claims to have hosted the Three Wise Men who visited the Christ child in Bethlehem.

These Christians broke away from the Greek-speaking Byzantine Church after the Council of Chalcedon in 451 AD, in a theological dispute over the nature of Christ. The Jacobites, along with the Egyptian (Coptic), Ethiopian and Armenian--known collectively as Monophysite churches--assert the existence of only one nature (divine or divine-human) in Christ, while the Eastern Orthodox recognize two distinct natures (one wholly divine, the other wholly human) in the single person of Christ.

The literary and liturgical language of the ancient Syrian Orthodox Church was Syriac, an Aramaic dialect closely akin to the language said to have been spoken by Jesus Christ. The language is still spoken in a few villages in Syria, Iraq, and Turkey. It is the everyday tongue of the Syrian Orthodox monks, and church congregations use it for their droning liturgy as they prostrate themselves over and over again--an activity so strenuous that even the few novices are left puffing for breath.

The priesthood is in decline, partly due to Turkish legal restrictions on seminaries and partly because so few young “Syriacs” remain. At a refectory for 30 people at one historic teaching monastery, Deir Zafaran, just five youths sat at the table eating bowls of salty porridge and pekmez, a thick, sweet dessert of pressed grapes.

Some still come from far away to drink in the history of this antique but fragmented church, whose biggest concentration is now the 1.8 million-strong Jacobite community in Malabar, India. Other small, Syrian Orthodox communities can still be found in Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, the United States, Germany, and Sweden, but the faith is said to have no more than 2 million adherents worldwide.

One initiate is Dale Johnson, a 40-year-old former Methodist preacher and scholar from Longview, Wash., who converted to the Syriac faith and often visits Mar Gabriel monastery.

“I learned Latin, Greek, Hebrew and then Arabic to get closer to the Bible, but Syriac is the language that Jesus spoke,” Johnson said. “I am amazed at how pure this strain of language is. I now even dream in Syriac.”

Some parchment manuscripts Johnson studied at Mar Gabriel date to 411 AD. Silver-bound Gospels hand-copied in the Aramaic script, a runic hybrid of Hebrew and Arabic, are often more than 200 years old. The monastery’s collection is growing as villagers leave and priests deposit their Bibles.

“There is a sense of hopelessness. The people’s minds are not here, they are already half in Europe,” said Johnson, who plans to act as minister to hundreds of Syrian Orthodox families now in the United States.

“To see this region die, it does break the heart.”