More than 20,000 people are expected at this year's Assyrian New Year Festival on Sunday, March 31 at Fairfield Showground. The festival has grown in recent years with the increase in newly arrived refugees from Syria and Iraq with organisers tipping last year's record crowd of 15,000 to be eclipsed.
Basra Museum opened its doors to the public this week in another step towards restoring the country's cultural heritage damaged in conflicts dating back almost four decades to the war with Iran. The museum in Basra had been closed since 1991, when it was among nine museums looted by mobs opposed to dictator Saddam Hussein at the close of the first Gulf War.
Alabama has officially become the 49th U.S. state to recognize the Armenian Genocide. Governor Kay Ivey issued a powerful proclamation recognizing the Ottoman Turkish Empire's centrally-planned and executed annihilation of close to three million Armenians, Greeks, Assyrians and Syriacs from 1915-1923, according to the Armenian National Committee of America -- Eastern Region (ANCA-ER).
(AFP) -- Over 2,000 artifacts, including about 100 that were looted and found abroad, were unveiled Tuesday in a museum in Basra province on the southern tip of Iraq, authorities said. On Tuesday between 2,000 and 2,500 pieces went on display in the Basra Museum, the second largest in Iraq, said Qahtan al-Obeid, head of archeology and heritage in the province.
To reach her home, Ms Vaic, a 90-year-old woman from Turkey's northeast Black Sea region, must climb a steep hill to the village of Xigoba, where she lives in a traditional wooden house. Here in the hills of Hopa, the traditional language spoken by the people is Homshetsi. It is one of many endangered languages in the country and speaking it is dear to Ms Vaic's heart.
Catholic prelates in Syria, accompanied by Philippine Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle, president of Caritas Internationalis, visited the eastern Ghouta region outside of Damascus and saw "unspeakable suffering". "In every face, mostly the children" was a "very confused" expression, Syriac Catholic Patriarch Ignace Joseph III Younan said.