The Syriac Orthodox Church

Denomination·Founded 451 CE·est. ~2 million worldwide excluding the Indian archdiocese, which is counted here as the Jacobite Syrian Christian Church; Syrian and Turkish figures have fallen sharply since 2011.

Judaism → Christianity → Oriental Orthodoxy → The Syriac Orthodox Church → 2 branches

Branch
Community of The Syriac Orthodox Church

A church that now lives somewhere else.

Tur Abdin, the mountain of the servants of God, held tens of thousands of Syriac Orthodox families in living memory and now holds a few thousand people and a handful of working monasteries. The centre of gravity has moved to Sweden, Germany, the Netherlands, the United States and Australia.

How you joinBy baptism, usually in infancy, and by the family name that goes with it
Who leadsThe Patriarch of Antioch and All the East, resident in Damascus, with a Holy Synod and a catholicos for India
The unitThe parish; in the diaspora, the parish plus the association that keeps the language going
Understanding it — context, not catechism: how this passage is held

Tur Abdin, in what is now Mardin province in Turkey, is where the monastic tradition of the church was formed; Mor Gabriel, founded in 397, is still inhabited and has spent much of the last two decades in Turkish courts over its land. Emigration ran hard through the 1960s and 1970s to Germany and Sweden, and again after 2011 from Syria. Sodertalje in Sweden now holds one of the largest concentrations of Syriac Orthodox people anywhere, and services there run in Syriac and Swedish. Two archbishops of Aleppo — Mor Gregorios Yohanna Ibrahim of this church and Paul Yazigi of the Greek Orthodox — were abducted outside Aleppo on 22 April 2013 and their fate is still unknown; the patriarchate marks the date every year.

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