Istanbul -- A man on a seemingly impossible mission to save the script of his people from becoming extinct, Gabrial Aktas, the last Syriac calligrapher in Turkey, is almost 70.

He is no longer capable of spending hours at his desk copying old Fankitos, the handwritten religious books of Syriacs, who are the oldest indigenous settlers of Mesopotamia in eastern Turkey. He started copying the four Fankitos in 2001. It took him 13 months to finish the first one, whereas the second one was finished in 15 months.

Aktas talks of how he started copying them with a sparkle in his eyes. "When I finished the first Fankito, I looked at it. It was not very good," he said. "My intention was not to become a calligrapher. I wanted to pass them to the future. But then I thought, 'why not better my handwriting?' So people will remember there was Gabriel, from the Bakisyan village of Mardin."

Syriac is one of the three oldest among 6,700 languages currently spoken around the world. Nearly 5,000 of them are expected to disappear by the end of this century. The threat is all too real for Syriac, which is used only by 1 percent of 15,000 Syriacs in Turkey today. However, Syriac has a special place among the thousands of languages that are faced with the threat of extinction. It is one of the few languages that has a written literature. The critical condition of the language is brought to light through a documentary titled "The Light Looks for Its Voice" (Isik Sesini Ariyor) by Hakan Aytekin, a lecturer at Maltepe University's Department of Radio, Television and Cinema.

Wind of yearning:

Aytekin's journey through Syriac culture started with a letter to the Turkish national television channel TRT's music program, sent by Isa Bakir, a Dutch citizen of Turkish origins. Bakir, in 1992, requested a song called Wind of Yearning (Hasret Rüzgari), from renowned folk music artist, Orhan Gencebay. A friend of Aytekin found the letter in a garbage can and gave it to Aytekin. "Isa Bakir's yearning for the lands he had to leave was incredibly impressive," said Aytekin while telling the story of how he felt about Bakir. "I understood that Bakir was a Syriac. It was hidden between the lines of his letter. I realized that how little I know about them. So I started to collect anything I found related to the Syriacs," he said.

After he read the letter, he wrote to Bakir. "But of course there was no answer," said Aytekin emphasizing how closed a community the Syriacs are. His letter had become a subject for the media, therefore famous. An acquaintance of Bakir wrote to him and informed him of Bakir's new address. He wrote to him once again, "but no answer yet again." It took a year for Bakir to reply.

"How you and your letter resemble each other. While you are abandoned, away from your homeland, I see you sharing a common fate with your thrown, corrugated letter," Aytekin had written to Bakir. In the meantime, Aytekin discovered that Syriac, the language of a community that has a 5,500-year history in these lands, also shares a fate with Bakir and his letter. Aytekin and Bakir had become pen friends and kept writing to each other for a long time. Later, Aytekin decided to write a book for those "who have fallen away from their trees."

A culture condemned to die:

"When I finished writing, I realized that without a version in Syriac it was meaningless to publish it," said Aytekin, "But who was going to translate it?" The process to find someone to translate the book into Syriac happened to be harder than Aytekin anticipated. There was nobody to do it in Turkey and the book ended up in Sweden to be translated by Eliyo Dere. But difficulties were not limited to translation. The next question was how to print it. "No computer could recognize Syriac. Thus, I felt the language disappearing in my veins," said Aytekin. "It is not only the language. The culture also is fading away. So I decided to try to help it survive."

This was when Aytekin decided to shoot his documentary, "A Letter for Tomorrow," to attract attention on the issue. It was after that decision, by pure coincidence that Aytekin met Gabriel Aktas, the last living master, who continues a time-honored tradition of Syriacs: Calligraphy.

Letters to come together:

Aytekin visits eastern cities quite often on his endeavor. It was during one of these journeys to the East, when he met Aktas. "A man with a child in his heart," he defined Aktas, the elderly Syriac clergyman and the hero of "A Letter For Tomorrow." The documentary is the first film in Syriac.Neither a word nor the writing solely can define a language, according to Aytekin. So he had to base his story on concrete use of Syriac in daily life to prove it is not only a language that will disappear but a culture, a witness to history will become extinct as well. The film starts with a christening and ends with a funeral, parallel to Aktas's stories from his life. He tells his story in parts, each of which is symbolized with a letter of the Syriac alphabet from "Olaf" to "Tav."

Olaf, the first letter of the Syriac alphabet and the first letter of the name of God, is the letter that symbolizes the christening at the beginning. Tav, the last letter, symbolizes the part in the film, when Aktas says he is not able to write anymore, that he is too old and he is not able to spend time at his desk to copy Fankitos. "I am worried, what will happen to Syriac? What will happen to our old tradition of calligraphy? There is nobody after me to continue," Aktas says at the end. "Nobody will be able to read all those papers written in this language and maybe we will lose many important traces in history," said Aytekin. "So I chose the letters to highlight. A language comes into being, when those letters come together. We have to pass the letters to the future."

Syriacs and their language

Syriacs are the inheritors of a really strong culture of old Mesopotamia peoples, for who they played an important role while building their civilization. Syriac community's roots in Mesopotamia have a history dating back 5,000 years. For over 5,000 years the beliefs and cultural traditions of the Syriacs have continued to live on in their holy land, located in the southeastern Anatolian region of Turkey, as one of the first people to accept Christianity, they played a prominent role in the promulgation of this religion. However, they have lost their strength and operative efficiency compared to the past because of the suppression of those who invaded the lands they lived on. Nowadays Syriacs, apart from the 15,000 in Turkey, continue their lives separately in different parts of the world. And very few of them can speak and fewer still can read and write in their language, Syriac.

Syriac is an eastern Aramaic language that was once spoken across much of the Mesopotamia. It was a major literary language throughout the Middle East from the second to the eighth century. At its broadest definition, Syriac is often used to refer to all eastern Aramaic languages spoken by various Christian groups and at its most specific, it refers to the classical language of Edessa, which became the liturgical language of Syriac Christianity.

Onur Burçak Belli
Turkish Daily News