Dioceses of the Syriac Orthodox Church
In the period of its greatest expansion, in the tenth century, the Syriac Orthodox Church had around 20 metropolitan dioceses and a little over a hundred suffragan dioceses. By the seventeenth century, only 20 dioceses remained, reduced in the twentieth century to 10. The seat of Syriac Orthodox Patriarch of Antioch was at Mardin before the First World War, and thereafter in Deir Zaʿfaran, from 1932 in Homs, and finally from 1959 in Damascus.
Syriac Orthodox Church before the Arab invasions[edit]
When the Syriac Orthodox movement began in the sixth century, the Christian world was organised into five patriarchates: Rome, Constantinople, Antioch, Alexandria and Jerusalem.[1] The Syriac Orthodox movement was initially confined to the eastern provinces of the Roman empire, in the territory of the patriarchates of Antioch and Jerusalem. Syriac Orthodox Christians envisaged their church as the legitimate patriarchate of Antioch and appear to have tried to duplicate the hierarchy already existing.
The Syriac Orthodox Church in the nineteenth century[edit]
In 1792 or 1793 a separate Syriac Orthodox diocese was created for Mosul, hitherto under the jurisdiction of the diocese of Mar Mattai, in response to the consecration of a Syriac Catholic bishop for Mosul in 1790.[91]
In the 1840s, shortly after it recovered the ancient monastery of Mar Awgin from the East Syrians, the Syriac Orthodox church revived the old diocese of Nisibis. Four Syriac Orthodox bishops of Nisibis sat in the monastery of Mar Awgin up to the outbreak of the First World War.[92]
Rasal-Ain Church
Syriac Orthodox abbey in Mardin
