Yüksekova Syriac: ܓܒܼܪ; Assyrian: Gawar) is a district of Hakkari Province of Turkey, situated close to the border with Iran. It's location on the trade route between Iranian Azarbaijan and eastern Turkey made it an important juncture for travelers and the location of several ethnic groups that were active in regional trade. Among these was an important community of Aramaic speaking Jews about whom the Israeli author Ora Jacobi has already published a novel called ALMA (in Hebrew). In this novel, soon to be followed by a history of the interrelationship of the two Aramaic speaking ethnic groups of the region - the Assyrians and the Jews - Jacobi describes events around 1915 when the local Kurdish administrators warned the Jewish merchants that ethnic cleansing of the Christians was imminent. The Jewish merchants fled. The Assyrians were massacred if they could not flee to Urmiah (Iran).
Yuksekova used to be the seat of a bishopric of the Church of the East until the events of WWI, as well as a central administrative town for the local Ottoman district. Turkish and Kurdish villages around the town used the central markets. Accounts of the area may be had in American, Swedish and British missionary writings.
Today no trace of ethnic groups other than Kurds exists except in family memories of Kurdish families with Assyrian mothers who were among those abducted/"saved" in WWI.
Famous Assyrians from Yuksekova
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Coordinates: 37°34′00″N 44°17′00″E / 37.5666666667°N 44.2833333333°E
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