Hannah Stork

Hannah Stork, API’s 2024 John Anthony Farkas Jr. Junior Fellow, helped lead a group of 16 scholars on a travel class through southeastern Turkey last month (July 2024).

The class, titled "Syriac on Site: Literary and Material Geography of the Syriac World," was designed to introduce academic experts on the region's history - known to local Syriac communities as Tur Abdin - to the living traditions and dynamic landscapes that continue to define that region today, highlighting local communities and their stories along the way.

By bringing together the worlds of historical study and human connection, the course aimed to contribute to the development of a new model for writing the region's history—one that can avoid many of the disconnected or orientalist pitfalls that have plagued study of the region in the past.

The scholars who participated in the Syriac on Site course returned to their respective universities with newfound appreciations for the living traditions of Tur Abdin.

The course brought these communities' histories to life in entirely new ways:

📖 students read ancient texts and poetry on the sites at which those texts were written;

🗣 they met and conversed with students and families who still speak dialects of the ancient languages in which these texts were written more than 1,000 years ago;

🥾 they walked local landscapes and explored the monasteries and buildings that have dotted those landscapes for centuries; and

👂 they met with leaders of Tur Abdin communities to hear about how those communities have weathered generations of unrest, natural disasters, and rapid regional change.

Hours spent in American and European libraries are no replacement for the richness of experiential learning and human connection!