I am home safe and sound after a long weekend in Iraq. The trip was great, and I was amazed at how safe, secure, and accessible northern Iraq is (although I did spend twenty minutes in the only expat bar Friday night with a longtime worker in Iraq who endless repeated, “You’re here… as a tourist?!”) Kurdistan feels in many ways safer and better organized than many other parts of the Middle East, such as Jordan and the UAE emirates outside Dubai and Abu Dhabi.
I will go through a number of places that I visited while in Erbil, and one was St. Joseph’s church. Situated in Ainkawa, slightly outside of Erbil, this town has a historical Christian population and was the first place that many of the NGOs and aid organizations established operations in northern Iraq.
The gatekeeper was reluctant to let us enter, but we hung around long enough that he did let us in, where I spoke with the Kurdish Christian caretaker who patrolled the grounds with his Kalashnikov AK-47.
The caretaker spoke Arabic, Kurdish, German, and enough English to tell me a little about the church, which is home to Kurdish, Assyrian, Chaldean and Armenian Christians (no mention of Arab congregants). You can read some stories about Iraq’s tiny Christian population here and here.
Iraq’s native Christian population was not so tiny constituting some 7% (over a million people) of the population prior to the American invasion. Since then hundreds of thousands have fled as Christians have been targeted for being presumably pro-Western because of their religion. A shame for Iraq as they are in general well educated and productive.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christianity_in_Iraq
Very fascinating! Chalk this up as yet another place I’d like to visit after I win the lottery. :)
Good to see you back safe. Also good to see Kurdistan as safe and stable now as it was a few years back when Chirol visited.
When you say “is home to Kurdish, Assyrian, Chaldean and Armenian Christians”, do you mean to imply that each has their own liturgy and priesthood – or that these different groups share their worship?
Cant wait to read more posts on this and see more pictures!
A church caretaker wielding an AK-47 is shocking, but only as long as I fail to remember that there are people in slightly less war-torn nations behaving like this:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/26/us/26guns.html
Curzon, did you find out what language the services are done in?
Peter: Kurdish and Arabic.
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