Cultural Rhythms of The Assyrian Villages of Nahla Valley

The following Research Reflection is part of an ongoing series spotlighting CSWR scholars and their research.

In September 2024, the Assyrian villages of the Nahla Valley in Northern Iraq held the inaugural Khagga D'Nahla festival, “The Pilgrimage to Nahla,” celebrated by Assyrians who gathered from Iraq and traveled there from the diaspora in Europe, the United States, and Australia.

Preserving cultural practices such as chanting, dancing, and traditional attire is essential for politically excluded Indigenous communities such as Assyrians. These practices foster collective identity and cultural solidarity while protecting language, history, and social values.

The Khagga D'Nahla event showcased wedding rituals, poems, music, dances, and the consecration of a new church named after Mar Shimun Bar Sabbae, a fourth-century bishop and martyr of the Church of the East.

Nahla villages are among the few remaining Assyrian communities that preserve the ancient traditions of their ancestors from the Tyareh mountains in Hakkari, Mesopotamia, in present-day Turkey. Historically, Assyrians endured multiple massacres, genocide, and deadly regional conflicts. Nahla carries forward their cultural legacy. 

At the festival, Nahla women performed a call-and-response chant called lilyana, often performed for celebrating wedding rites; the men performed rawe, solo chants with a mountaineer singing style that conveys deep emotion, sharing tales of life, love, and bravery.

Dance serves as a powerful form of communal expression. At the Khagga D'Nahla festival, men, women, and children joined in circle dances accompanied by Assyrian music. With the sounds of the drum and the woodwind zurna, dance rhythms transcended physical movements, guiding participants into a transformative experience of connection and unity. Dancers expressed an aspiration for peace and a celebration of heritage on their ancestral lands, conveying a message of endurance and hope for Assyrians around the world. 

The Khagga D'Nahla celebration has longstanding roots in Assyrian practice, as documented by nineteenth-century English writers. The archaeologist and diplomat Austen Henry Layard (1817-1894) led excavations of the ancient Assyrian cities of Nineveh and Nimrud that uncovered thousands of sculptures and cuneiform tablets that are now celebrated worldwide. Layard also documented the aftermath of the two Beder Khan Beg massacres in 1843 and 1846 against the Assyrian tribes of Diz, Upper and Lower Tyareh, and Tkhoma; he captured horrific scenes widespread in mountain churches and villages.

Following the widespread murder of clergy, Layard recounts, surviving priests traveled from village to village celebrating limited masses with a few rituals, only Bible fragments, and damaged liturgical books. During the violence, an unknown number of precious manuscripts were hidden and buried in the mountains, but they were lost when the priests safeguarding them were killed. 

Assyrian tribes temporarily relocated to Mosul, where many worked on the Nineveh and Nimrud archaeological excavations. Layard observed and documented their daily rituals despite lacking scriptural manuscripts and formal church buildings, noting that “they assembled on the mound or in the trenches, and one of the priests or deacons, several of whom were among the workmen, repeated prayers or led a hymn or chant.”

In April 2024, while visiting Mar Giwargis, an Ancient Church of the East in the village of Lower Hizane in Nahla, I observed the priest and deacons chanting antiphonally from the Khudra liturgical text while the congregation actively participated by reciting lengthy chants and prayers, all memorized in their mother tongue, Syriac, Assyrian language.

At Khagga D'Nahla, Assyrians from Nahla and diaspora visitors demonstrated their commitment to their cultural heritage by wearing vivid Tyareh tribal costumes. These costumes are more than just clothing; they embody a deep sense of community and cultural continuity. Layard describes the men’s headwear from the nineteenth century, still handmade in Nahla: “a conical cap of felt, lightly embroidered at the edges, and adorned with an eagle's feather.” 

General Herbert Henry Austin (1868-1937) observed these same felt caps depicted on “frescoes of Assyrians of thousands of years ago, which has survived to this day.” Austin describes the men’s Tyareh dress of loose, greyish trousers covered with variegated patches, a broadcloth waistband folded around their trunk, and a short, cut-away jacket of amazing colors worn over a thin cotton variegated shirt. Women wear “turban-shaped caps” wound with colored scarves or veils. At weddings, women put on long gowns of velvet, in blue, green, yellow, purple, brown, and other colors, “with huge silver belts round their waists, and their breasts literally smothered with handsome necklaces of silver and gold coins”; their headdresses dripped with circlets of silver sequins.

The same Tyareh costumes are worn at weddings today in the homeland and diaspora, as well as at national and religious celebrations, connecting Assyrians to one another and to their ancient roots. The Nahla people show their cultural dedication through their traditional music, dances, and costumes. Echoing the rhythms of the Tyareh mountains, Khagga D'Nahla reinforces intergenerational values and extends Nahla's cultural legacy to the world.