ERBIL, Kurdistan Region – Just across the street from the oldest church in Ainkawa, a Christian neighborhood of Erbil in Iraqi Kurdistan, sits the Syriac Heritage Museum, showcasing snippets of history from the different Christian denominations of Iraq.Regular readers may recall that Erbil is the modern name of the site of the ancient Kingdom of Adiabene, which was ruled by the Jewish convert Queen Helena in the first century C.E. More on the House of Adiabene is here and links
“This museum is one of the most important museums in the Middle East because the Iraqi Christians are a minority and their history is being lost,” the museum’s director, David Nadhir Dinkhan, told Rudaw English. “We must try to preserve our history.”
The three main Christian denominations in Iraq are Chaldean, Catholic and Orthodox.
After receiving permission from the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG)’s Ministry of Culture to open the museum and collect remnants from across Iraq and Kurdistan, construction began on the Syriac Heritage Museum in 2009. It opened its doors in October 2015.
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