Hopes to Revive the Christian Area of Turkey IDIL, TURKEY - Clambering over the rubble of what was once his hometown, Robert Tutus pointed to a spot just up the road from where his family's house had stood. "This is where my father was assassinated," he said. Two men walked up to him as he was returning home one evening, and killed him with a bullet to his head. His father, Sukru Tutus, was the last Christian mayor of Azeh, known as Idil in Turkish, a town in southeastern Anatolia that traces its Christianity back to the time of the Apostles. Within a month of his killing, which happened on June 17, 1994, Mr. Tutus recalled last month, the remaining Christian population of the town, several hundred people at the time, had gathered their belongings and fled to asylum in Western Europe. The departure marked the end of the Christian era of Azeh, which had been a bishop's seat as early as the second century and home to a Christian population of several thousand until the late 1970s. Only ruins scattered about the hillside remain of their town today, while above it shabby concrete buildings rise to form the new town of Idil, inhabited by local Kurds and Arabs as well as a few Turkish administrators on temporary postings to the east. And then there is Mr. Tutus, 42, camped out in an apartment in one of those buildings while he tries to reclaim his father's properties and rebuild his parental home among the ruins on the hillside. "This is our home, the home of the Syriac people," Mr. Tutus said. We will not give it up. The plateau of Tur Abdin, upon which Idil lies nestled between the Syrian plain and the mountain ranges of southeastern Turkey, is the historical heartland of the Syriac Orthodox Church, whose patriarchate resided here until tensions with the Turkish republic pushed it to move to Syria in 1933. The region is still dotted with Syriac churches like Mor Gabriel, which was founded in the year 397 and is one of the oldest active monasteries in the world today. But apart from the monks, very few Syriacs remain. A century ago, they numbered 200,000 here, according to the European Syriac Union, a diaspora organization. Some 50,000 survived the massacres of Anatolian Christians during World War I, in which the Syriac people shared the fate of the Armenians. Today, no more than 4,500 Syriac Christians, who speak a local dialect of the Aramaic language as well as Arabic, Turkish and Kurdish, remain in Tur Abdin. In Azeh, which held out against a siege by surrounding Kurdish villages for months in 1915, the final push in the age-old power struggle over the town began in 1977, when Mayor Sukru Tutus was deposed by the Turkish authorities in what his successor, Abdurrahman Abay, today freely acknowledges was a rigged election. "The military commander, the judge, the district governor - they encouraged me to run and they helped me" to win, Mr. Abay, chief of the powerful Kurdish Kecan tribe, said last month over a glass of tea in Idil. After the election, I received a telegram from Egypt, from Anwar el-Sadat. It read: "I congratulate you on the Muslim conquest of Idil."" The takeover brought the dramatic shift in the town's demographics that was completed in 1994, with Kurds from the surrounding villages moving in as Syriac families sold up and joined the rising flow of Christian migration from the Tur Abdin to Europe. Today, 80,000 Syriacs from the Tur Abdin live in Germany, 60,000 in Sweden, and 10,000 each in Belgium, Switzerland and the Netherlands, according to estimates from the European Syriac Union. Mr. Tutus found political asylum in Germany, together with his mother, six sisters and three brothers, all but one of whom have since acquired German citizenship and settled there. A decade later, he was one of the first exiles to accept the Turkish government's public invitation to Syriacs to return home. It was issued in 2001 under pressure from the European Union and repeated on several occasions. Although he carries a German passport, Mr. Tutus spends much of his time in Idil, where he has overseen the restoration of the Church of St. Mary and last year founded an Association for Syriac Culture. "Our aim is to keep the Syriac language and culture alive in Idil, and to remind people that this is the home of the Syriacs," Mr. Tutus said. Although the association's office was fire-bombed this year, Mr. Tutus remains undeterred. "We want the world to see that Syriacs still live here," he said.