Last autumn, I took my parents on a drive from Ganzantiep in the south of Turkey to Kars in the north east. It is a culturally rich area of the world with ruins of countless civilisations, from pre-Pottery Neolithic to Ottoman. One area and its people stand out in my memory, however: the Assyrians.
I don't mean the people depicted in stone in the British Museum, with angular beards riding chariots surrounded by lions – although there is an interesting scholarly debate about whether these are their direct descendants – but the few thousand Christians scattered among a few dozen villages in the hills of Tur Abdin in south east Turkey, a stone’s throw from the Syrian border.
