How do you narrate Europe when utopias collapse? Deniz Utlu traces paths of migration, memory, and myth—from Mesopotamia to Stockholm, from Pergamon to Södertälje. A poetic essay on language, belonging, and the invisible maps of memory.
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"I recall a trip in the 2000s to Mesopotamia, to Mardin and Midyat, together with my mother and in the company of a journalist and family friend who had written two reports – one about Yazidis, the other about Assyrians. I remember that he travelled to Sweden for the Assyrians. He had written both pieces as a young journalist in the 1980s, at a time when a large wave of Assyrians emigrated from their northern Mesopotamian homeland in Turkey to Sweden, Germany and the US, and had published these pieces in a slim book, which he gave me thirty years later during that trip. I take it out now: Yezidiler ve Süryanileri [i] by Murat Öztemir – a tall man, whose eyes, always half-closed due to a sensitivity in his eyelids, never miss a thing. That’s how I remember him. And that he smiles impishly, even when recounting something painful. His report on the Assyrians begins with a journey to Sweden, because this is where a fragment of Mesopotamia had found its way. What has become of this fragment nearly half a century later?"
In a collaboration between Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich (LMU) and the University of Baghdad, an ancient Babylonian hymn dating back over two millennia has been rediscovered and fully deciphered.
The new AI tool “Palaeographicum” is revolutionizing research into the cultures of the Ancient Near East: It identifies individual variations of cuneiform signs—a huge step forward for academia.
The Shamash Gate in ancient Nineveh has revealed rare evidence of two violent chapters separated by more than 2,500 years: the fall of the Assyrian capital in 612 B.C. and the battle to free Mosul from ISIS in 2017.
Assyrian News Broadcasting (ANB) has announced that it has temporarily suspended publishing news on its Facebook page due to an ongoing dispute over the platform's media identity and intellectual property rights.
Swiss-Assyrian artist Shamiran Istifan is receiving widespread acclaim for her latest exhibition at the Aargauer Kunsthaus, where her installations explore themes of beauty, migration, identity and censorship through striking visual symbolism.
In a major policy announcement, Iraqi Prime Minister Ali al-Zaidi declared that facilitating the return of Assyrians who fled the country during two decades of conflict is now a "national and government priority."
Deniz Utlu
