them into the Catholic Church. The Catholic group chose
Bishop Andrew Akhijan as its patriarch in 1662, but he had
no successor after his death in 1702. A Catholic patriarchate
was permanently established only in 1782, when Syriac Pa-
triarch Michael Jarweh declared himself Catholic and took
refuge in Lebanon. The Orthodox then elected a new patri-
arch of their own, and the two lines have continued into the
twenty-first century.
In the nineteenth century, in the Ottoman Turkish Em-
pire, Kurds assaulted Syriac Christians with large-scale mas-
sacres in 1843, 1846, and 1860. In 1861 the Levant came
under the protection of the French, who worked to strength-
en the Catholics. During and immediately following World
War I, as the Ottoman Empire was collapsing, tens of thou-
sands of Syriac Orthodox died as a result of massacres and
expulsions.
Protestant missionaries in the Middle East since 1819
have also drawn many Syriac Orthodox into their faith com-
munities. Migrations to Europe and the Americas further de-
pleted their numbers, with many of the émigrés joining other
churches, Protestant or Catholic.
MODERN TIMES. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries
were turbulent times for the Syriac Orthodox in the Middle
East, and the struggle for survival became more and more in-
tense. The headquarters of the Patriarchate, which had been
in Antioch until 1034, at Mar Barsauma monastery until
1293, and at Der Zafaran monastery until 1933, moved to
Homs in 1933 and then to Damascus in 1959. Headed in
2003 by Mar Ignatius Zakka I Iwas (b. 1933, elected 1980),
the church has a total of 25 bishops and about 500,000
members. The Syriac Orthodox Church in the twenty-first
century has an established hierarchy in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq,
Jordan, Turkey, India, the United States, Canada, and Aus-
tralia. There is also an Archdiocese of Central Europe and
the Benelux countries based in the Netherlands, an archdio-
cese and patriarchal vicariate within the Metropolitanate of
Sweden and Scandinavia based in Södertälje, Sweden, and
an archdiocese in Germany.
Some theological education is still provided by the
monasteries, but Saint Ephrem Syriac Orthodox Seminary
is the Patriarchate’s major theological school. It was founded
in Zahle, Lebanon, but moved to Mosul, Iraq, in 1939. It
moved back to Zahle in the 1960s and relocated to At-
chaneh, near Beirut, in 1968. The outbreak of civil war in
Lebanon forced the removal of the students to Damascus,
Syria. New facilities for the seminary at Sayedniya, near Da-
mascus, were consecrated by the Syriac patriarch on Septem-
ber 14, 1996.
The Syriac monastic tradition, nearly wiped out by the
invasions of Tamerlane, survives in the Tur Abdin region of
southeastern Turkey. There are two sizable complexes at Der
Mar Gabriel and Der Zafaran with a total of about fifteen
monks and four communities of nuns in the area. There are
monasteries in Jerusalem, near Mosul in Iraq, in the Nether-
lands, in Germany, and in Switzerland. There is also a mon-
astery with about sixty monks connected with the seminary
in Sayedniya, Syria. The Syriac patriarch has also created a
new order of nuns, the Virgins of Saint Jacob Baradeus,
which has about fifteen members. The order’s headquarters
is in Atchaneh, Lebanon, and there are additional communi-
ties in Damascus and Baghdad.
The Syriac Church in India suffered a split in 1912,
when a group composing about half of its members declared
itself autocephalous (independent) of the Syriac Patriarchate
and elected its own catholicos. They and those who had re-
mained loyal to the Patriarchate were reconciled in 1958,
when the Indian Supreme Court declared that only the ca-
tholicos subject to the Syriac patriarch and bishops in com-
munion with him had legal standing. But in 1975, after the
catholicos broke relations with Damascus, the Syriac Patri-
archate excommunicated and deposed him and appointed a
rival, causing the community to split again. In June 1996 the
Supreme Court of India rendered a decision declaring that,
whereas there is only one Orthodox Church in India whose
spiritual head is the Syriac patriarch, the autocephalous ca-
tholicos alone has legal standing as the head of the church
in India. Unfortunately this did not reconcile the two com-
munities, whose dispute has become embittered. In 2003 the
two sides were more or less evenly divided with about one
million adherents each.
ECUMENICAL ACTIVITY. The Syriac Orthodox Church has
been an active participant in the modern ecumenical move-
ment; it has been a member of the World Council of
Churches since 1960 and was a founding member of the
Middle East Council of Churches. In most of the theological
dialogues it has acted in concert with the other Oriental Or-
thodox Churches. It has had a long-standing relationship
with the Anglican Communion in the Middle East and
India; the Oriental Orthodox and Anglicans reached a Chris-
tological agreement in 2002.
The Syriac Orthodox Church also participated in unof-
ficial consultations with the Eastern (Byzantine) Orthodox
Churches from 1964 to 1971 and in an official joint com-
mission from 1985 to 1993. In addition the Syriac Orthodox
patriarch signed a joint statement with the Greek Orthodox
patriarch of Antioch on November 12, 1991, that sanctions
much closer relations between the two churches, including
a substantial level of sacramental sharing.
Relations with the Catholic Church have improved dra-
matically, as was shown by the signing of common declara-
tions by Pope Paul VI and Patriarch Ignatius Jacob III in
1971 and by Pope John Paul II and Patriarch Ignatius Zakka
I Iwas in 1984. The second declaration states that past
schisms and divisions concerning the doctrine of the incarna-
tion “in no way affect or touch the substance of their faith.”
It also authorized their faithful to receive the sacraments of
penance, Eucharist, and anointing of the sick in the other
church when access to their own clergy is materially or mor-
ally impossible and outlined broad areas of pastoral coopera-8940 SYRIAC ORTHODOX CHURCH OF ANTIOCH