Shamshone: Sun of Assyria: Five Generations of a Family from Iranian Azerbaijan

By Brian Hanson Appleton

This is a biography and family history of five generations of an Assyrian Christian family as told through the eyes of the scion of their family Sam Sarmecanic. It begins with his grandparents generation and the flight to Iraq to escape genocide and covers his father's emigration to Chicago in the early 20th century by himself at age 9, his

• Language: English
• Publisher: Brian H Appleton
• Release date: May 15, 2017
• ISBN: 9780692883358

Brian Hanson Appleton

Brian Hanson Appleton was born in Tokyo, Japan in 1950, he grew up in Greece, Italy and France and worked in Iran for five years in the 1970's. He speaks English, French, Italian, Persian and Greek and graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1972 from George Washington University with a BA in Anthropology and obtained an MA in ancient history from the International University of Fundamental Knowledge/Oxford Network Saint Petersburg, Russian Federation June 24, 2008. His master thesis was on the Hellenistic Greek influence on the Buddhist sculpture of the Ghandahar school in Afghanistan. He was knighted into the Sovereign Orthodox Order of St John Hospitaller of Jerusalem in NYC in 2008. Immorality and Immortality is the author's first venture into fiction. Author was a fine artist in Siena for 3 years 1969 to 1971 and has been a lighting designer and lightin manufacturer's representative for 39 years now. He does freelance journalism for many Iranian American publications.

Book preview

A moving story, beautifully told. Brian Appleton has painted for us an exquisite portrait of the disappearing multi-ethnic society of the Middle East. He captures a reality that unfortunately threatens to vanish under the forces of intolerance and the drive for uniformity.

—John W. Limbert, Distinguished Professor of International Affairs at the US Naval Academy, Ambassador, former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Iran in the US State Department’s Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs.

What a wonderful project Brian has undertaken. I remember the Sarmecanic family well from Golpashan. Their house compound lay across the ruins of WWI houses from our house compound and right across the street from our orchard.

—Dr. Eden Naby Frye

Center for the Study of World Religions at Harvard Divinity School

This is a timely and fast-moving memoir of political change, immigration, and family life among the Assyrians of Rezaiyeh (Urumia), many of whom moved to the United States over the years.

—Hannibal Travis

Associate Professor of Law and Interim Associate Dean for Information Resources Florida International University, College of Law

Shamshone:

SUN OF ASSYRIA

Shamshone: Sun Of Assyria

Copyright © 2013 by Brian H. Appleton. All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any way by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the author except as provided by USA copyright law.

Published by Zirzameen Press

| www.Zirzameen.com

Cover design by Lauro Talibong

Interior design by Mary Jean Archival

Cover Photography by Professor Riccardo Zipoli

Published in the United States of America

ISBN: 978-0-692-87342-7

ISBN: 978-0-692-88335-8 (e-book)

For more information or to order more

books contact Ingram

1. Biography & Autobiography / Cultural Heritage

2. Biography & Autobiography / General 13.02.20

Assyrian Ashur by Sargon

Dedication

I would like to dedicate this book to my dear friend Sam Sarmecanic who patiently told me the story of his family over the course of a year.

And to my mother, Lily Beth Appleton, who has always believed in my dreams.

Contents

Dedication

Preface

Introduction

Golpashin

Nimrud

Adolescence

Tehran

Sam in London

Tehran Revisited

Life in America

Epilogue

Bibliography

Index

Preface

A dream took me to ancient Babylon there where

Hammurabi speaks, also Sargon, Ashurnasirpal,

Ashurbanipal they were all present

greeting me on sunny banks

of that confluence

of Tigris and

Euphrates, loaded me with presents to bring back home

with wine, with wheat, then into a chariot off

I went into lost horizon traveling in time

and at the Arch of Ctesiphon, Khagani

recited to me his Portals of Madain

and followed with this quatrain:

The bird that sings the song of pain is

love; The courier who knows

the tongue of the Unseen

is love; The existence

that calls you

to nonexistence is love

And that which

redeems you

from you

is love.

So here I find myself awake in the cradle

of Western Civilization in the wings

of modern war and death looking

for elusive redemption amidst

archeological sites too

numerous to count

in a land

drawn on a map by now

defunct British Empire

where some speak

Aramaic, the

language

of Jesus.

And though we may not know it

their heritage lives on in us

running through our

veins, like poetry

children recite

by unknown

author

Introduction

One day back in the 1970’s when I was a young man who had started teaching English at what was then the Imperial Iranian Air Force Language School on Damavand Avenue in Tehran, I ran across a fellow teacher with a Russian-sounding name. When I queried him about his ethnic origins he replied that he was Assyrian. I was intrigued. I asked him if he meant the same fellows who had invented the chariot and he said, yes, we still exist.

That is when I began to realize that an entire nation continued to exist without a country of their own. Historically the Assyrian Empire was absorbed into the Achaemenian Empire by Cyrus the Great in 546 Bc. Upon the advent of Islam in the seventh century Ad, many of the Assyrians converted to Islam and were completely assimilated, becoming indistinguishable from the main stream populations; however, the ones who kept to Christianity and the Assyrian language have managed to preserve their identity and with it traditions, some of which are eight thousand years old. What I came to realize is how much the Persians, the Greeks, and the Romans owe to the Assyrians. It is for this reason that I felt compelled to write this biography of a modern Assyrian family, and through my friend Sam’s story tell the tale of the Assyrian people, whose cultural identity is so strong that they have survived without a country all these thousands of years.

This is the story of one Assyrian family in our midst. Their travels began from Golpachin village and the happy days of early childhood despite genocide, Soviet occupation and civil war. It portrays how an agrarian life style was made and maintained. It took the family to Tabriz and Tehran and Chicago and London and through the Iranian Revolution of 1979 and to San Jose, California.

The largest and oldest body of Assyrians in the USA resides in Chicago, where there are about 80,000 ethnic Assyrians. The ones belonging to the Chaldean Catholic Church are known as Chaldeans. Assyrians were one of the earliest adopters of Christianity. The history of their faith is complex. Assyrians in general, and in Chicago in particular, belong to three main sects: the Church of the East (Nestorian), the Chaldean Catholic Church, and the Syrian Orthodox Church. Another recent branch of the Church of the East formed in resistance to certain reforms is called the Ancient Church of the East, which has an active church in Chicago. There are also various Assyrian Protestant branches including the Assyrian Evangelical Church, the Assyrian Evangelical Covenant Church, the Assyrian Pentecostal Church, and the Carter Westminster Presbyterian (Baumer 2006.)

Assyrian identity and awareness inextricably intertwines language, culture, religion, and ethnic heritage. Cultural life-cycle traditions within the community are passed from generation to generation reflecting this awareness. Regardless of church affiliation, most Assyrians commonly celebrate several distinctive life-cycles such as baptism, engagement and weddings (Baumer 2006.) Sam belonged to the Syriac Orthodox Church of St. Mary’s in Golpachin. Assyrians tended to immigrate from the same communities in the old countries to the same communities in the USA. In Turlock, California, there are Assyrians from the same village who were Sam’s classmates in sixth grade.

The Assyrians live in our midst, quietly carrying on traditions—some of which are eight thousand years old in origin from the Mesopotamian Cradle of Western Civilization. The history of ancient Assyria and interaction between Assyria and Persia is interwoven and complex. There were centuries when the Achaemenians paid tribute to the Assyrian Empire followed by centuries when the Assyrians were a satrapy of the Achaemenian Empire and Assyrian soldiers comprised the main heavy infantry of the Achaemenian Army. The Assyrians were subsumed into and contributed to the Persian Empire and still kept their identity (Parpola 2004.)

By allegory, the experience of this one family is the story of how the Assyrian people without a country of their own have persevered to the present day. In particular this is the story of how a family can survive by sticking together. When Sam’s father went to jail and never recovered financially, Sam’s older brother sent every penny he made to his siblings until every one of them had gotten a graduate degree and a profession. He did not marry and father children until he was in his sixties. Because he had been too busy working to engage in politics, the IRI made him a general. This is the story of the wild ups and downs and vicissitudes of life in Iran. It is the story of the effects of super powers interfering in a developing country.

And it is the story of the hopes and aspirations of two ethnic groups, the Azeri and the Kurds, and their short-lived independence in the 1940’s. It is a story of the horrors of ethnic cleansing and also harmonious ethnic relations, and above all it is a story about the humanity of the Iranian people and brave individuals who resisted corruption during the Shah’s era. Their focus on higher education and entrepreneurial spirit helped to form some great companies in the boom economy of Tehran of that era and helped to form a modern nation.

It is the story of individual acts of bravery during the revolution and in its after math. It is a story about the strength of friendship which transcended ethnicity and religion. It is the story of the Iranian culture and character which survives despite invasion and conquest by Macedonians, Timurids, the Ilkhan Mongols, the Abbasid Arabs, the Russians, the British, and the Americans. It survives despite monarchies like the decadent Qajar and the Pahlavis and now the mullahs.

It is the story of a multi-ethnic society and of what it was like growing up Christian in Iran and the determination to gain a higher education. It is my fervent prayer that Iran will maintain its sovereignty and come to know peace, and that the Assyrian culture will always live on.

Golpashin

My name is Sam, which is short for Shamshone, which is Assyrian for Samson. Shamshone means our sun as in the Sun God from ancient pagan times. I was born in February of 1938 in the village of Golpashin, which means scatterer of roses in Urumiyeh, town of water, in Iranian West Azerbaijan.

The earliest recollection I have is from a time that I must have been three years old in our two-story house that was in this village. I was looking down from the second story. It must have been winter because there were people below shoveling snow.

The old-fashioned window glass had irregular, wavy flaws in it so that when I looked through it, the images outside were distorted, which was amusing to my three-year-old mind. I began shifting my head slowly from side to side to purposely make the distorted images of the people working down below move. It made me laugh.

From that scene on that day, I also remember there was a Magpie in the background, and its bold shape and contrasting black and white colors caught my eye as it hopped about the bare branches of the trees in winter.

Magpie by Katie

The other early memory I have from that house is when I heard someone knocking on the door. I must have been three years old still. I opened the door and there stood a very tall man with a baseball cap asking for my father. I ran to my mother and cried out: someone who looks like ‘God the Father’ is at the door.

At the time the town of Urumiyeh’s name had been changed by Reza Shah to Rezaiyeh after himself, but forty-one years later, Ayatollah Khomeini changed the name back to Urumiyeh, as he did with all the names that had any reference to the Pahlavis after the revolution of 1979. Rezaiyeh was just a little town at the time, and like the hub of a wheel, it was surrounded by villages, of which mine was one. My village of Golpashin was six kilometers from town. Each village was comprised of a different ethnic group than the other. There were Assyrian Christian villages, Armenian Christian villages and Muslim Azeri Turkish villages.

Urumia by Sargon

In Golpashin there were about fifty homes and fifty families. Most of these homes had their own orchard in the back yard. They had vineyards spread around the village as well. My village was renowned for having the best raisins. The center of the village had two chai khaneh (teahouses) and two tiny grocery shops. Men would gather in these two teahouses and play backgammon, and most of them would smoke opium. The boys were also allowed to come and play backgammon, have tea, and listen to agshecks (story tellers) who would narrate the old Persian myths from Shahnameh and Koroghi or Shirin and Farhad while playing setars (dulcimers). They sang in Azeri Turkish. Since the nearest Muslim village did not have its own teahouse, the Muslims, including the storytellers, would come to ours. We would have no problem socializing together in the teahouse even though the owner was Azeri Turk. In fact I spoke Azeri Turkish fluently having heard it around me all my life.

Twelve miles to the south of my village was Lake Urumia (Lake Rezaiyeh), which was extremely saline, full of minerals like iodine, and had no living thing in it.

People from the villages would go by ox cart in the summer to camp in tents along the shore of the lake so they could go swimming. The ride from the village to the lake was very scenic and full of gently rolling hills of wheat.

Antique 1885 Ethnographic Print; permission by Iranian Historical Photographs Gallery; Massoud Hosseini, Fouman Co

To the west of Rezaiyeh were foothills covered with a sea of poppies and beyond them were the famous Zagros Mountains, which separate Iran from Turkey and Iraq. We could see these blue mountains from our village, and they were always capped with snow. On their slopes were the Kurdish villages. The Kurds did some farming on the slopes but mostly they were shepherds. From time to time the Kurds would come down to the town of Rezaiyeh to sell their dairy products, like their yogurt and their cheeses. They wore baggy black pants and black turbans hanging with tassels.

The water from the snow of the Zagros Mountains would run into the rivers that fed Lake Rezaiyeh, which has no outlet. This snowmelt is what had kept the lake in existence for many thousands of years. One of the rivers is called Barkeshlou Chai. This river ran a mile from our village and was the joy of our childhood because we boys would fill our pockets with fruits and walk to the river to swim. We would climb the willow trees along its banks and use them like diving boards to jump into the river. The river was often clear and teamed with fish, fresh water crabs, and snakes.

The setting was so pristine with no rubbish or pollution anywhere in sight and so isolated that we boys would swim in the nude. We were twelve year olds and our hormones were starting to rise. Sometimes we would all sit in a row in the sun on the sandy river bank and play with ourselves just because it felt good and good to be alive. We were innocent and knew nothing about sex. For fun we would catch turtles and frogs and snakes. Sometimes we would make straws out of reeds and blow air into the frogs so that they would become so inflated that they were unable to dive under the water.

All the Assyrian Christians made their own wine from the excess grapes, which they hid in underground jars while the Moslem authorities looked the other way. There was one boy my age who was the troublemaker of our village. He used to take a slingshot and shoot village chickens dead and steal them to have secret cookouts, and while he was about it, he would steal from their wine as well.

His nickname was Khouneh, which means brother in Assyrian. Often he would share his ill-gotten gains with other boys his age. One day we tried to bring a slain chicken into our backyard for one of these clandestine cookouts but my father was standing between us and the door to the backyard. We decided to go inside the house and climb the stairs to the roof then shimmy down the trees that grew close to the house to access the backyard. However my mother was downstairs so we decided to toss the chicken to the second floor through the open window so that she wouldn’t see