The first event was organised by the General Directorate of Syriac Culture and Arts at the Chaldean Family Club in Ankawa, Erbil, on Thursday 31 October.

 

The second was a two-day conference in honour of martyr Prof. Ashur Yousuf of Kharput. This was organised by the Assyrian Cultural Centre (المركز الثقافي الآشوري-نوهدرا, المركز الثقافي الآشوري نوهدرا) at their auditorium in Dohuk on Friday 1 and Saturday 2 November. 

This rare academic meeting discussed original research on all aspects concerning Assyrian journalism. These included periodicals published in Iran, Iraq, the Ottoman Empire, former Soviet Union, Argentina, and elsewhere in the world, as well as Assyrian journalism as “alternative media” and focuses on certain Assyrian journalists and periodicals, in addition to analytical studies.

Editors: Jan Bet-Sawoce, Aydin Be-Naqshe Aslan and Abboud Zeitoune

Naum Faiq Palakh is undisputedly regarded as a pioneer of the Assyrian national movement. In his long career as a journalist, writer and activist, he has left behind a great legacy.

His works seemed to have been completely lost since his death in 1930. However, through painstaking work, a large part of his writings have been recovered.

From 16 July 1910, Naum began publishing Kawkab Madënẖo (Eastern Star) as a bi-weekly magazine. Publication ceased with Faiq's forced emigration to the United States in 1912.

The magazine Kawkab Madënẖo was hardly accessible for two reasons: Firstly, a century after its first publication, only microfilm copies of the magazine could be discovered in the New York Public Library. Apparently the journal's subscriber, Gabriel Boyaji, who lived in the United States, had donated the publication to the New York library, and fortunately it was archived on microfilm.

The second reason for its inaccessibility is that the content is mainly in handwritten Garšuni (Ottoman and Arabic) and can therefore only be deciphered by experts. Garšuni has been a favoured method of writing both secular and religious texts among the Assyrians since the spread of Arabic in the northern Mesopotamian region, using the Syriac alphabet.

This second volume, comprising issues 21 to 40 of Kawkab Madënẖo, is the gratifying result of the extensive and time-consuming efforts of a small team that has taken up the challenge of presenting the hitherto barely accessible contents of the first journal of the most famous Assyrian journalist Naum Faiq.