Medieval book of prayer that ISIS tried to destroy returns to its historic home
When Father Ammar Yako set foot in Qaraqosh for the first time since ISIS overran his home town in 2014, he rushed to the priests’ house in the hope that the extremists had not destroyed everything.
“It was a mess. All the documents, like marriage contracts, scattered on the ground,” Mr Yako told The National of his 2016 return to the town.
“I rushed upstairs when I remembered that the old manuscripts were stored in one of the rooms,” he said. “They were in a very bad state.”
The militants had removed them from the shelves and strewn them on the floor, with pages torn from some.
Among them was a gem: an Aramaic prayer book, known as a Sidra in Syriac, which is at least 500 years old.
After ISIS militants took over the city of Mosul, they headed east to capture the towns of the religiously mixed Nineveh plain, forcing out at least 120,000 Christians. For more than three years, they persecuted minorities and demolished places of worship, archaeological sites and artefacts they considered to be heretical.
Mr Yako is haunted by the images of destruction he saw in Qaraqosh, the biggest Christian city on the plain.
“Qaraqosh was eerily empty,” he said. “The scenes were painful, the devastation was massive. Every beautiful thing in the town was either burnt down or damaged.”
He gathered the nearly 100 manuscripts and took them to nearby Erbil, the capital of the northern Kurdish region.
As Christian families began to trickle back when reconstruction began in 2017, the manuscripts returned to Qaraqosh. An Italian organisation offered to help to restore them.
“I picked [the Sidra] because it was heavily damaged and contains details, mainly prayers for the whole year, that give it a religious value,” Mr Yako said.
The 116-page book once belonged to Great Al Tahira Immaculate Conception Cathedral in Qaraqosh, the largest Syriac-Catholic church in the Middle East.
It was sent to Italy in 2018, where its restoration was funded by the Italian Ministry of Cultural Heritage. The coronavirus pandemic has delayed its return to Iraq by a year.
Last month, the book was presented to Pope Francis to return to Qaraqosh.
Ivana Borsotto, the leader of the Federation of Christian Organisations in International Voluntary Service, said the book’s final pages remain badly damaged. But she said its prayers will “still be sung by the people of the Nineveh plain, reminding everyone that another future is still possible”.