By Courtney Moushi | March 12, 2024
Many Assyrians have memories of men sitting around a table, drinking tea and boasting of the accomplishments of great Assyrian kings, maliks, war generals and religious and intellectual figures. Typically, these conversations are focused on the great men that built the Assyrian nation.
What’s often missing in this nostalgic reverence are the contributions of women who dedicated their lives to the same nation.
One such figure is Lady Surma d’Bait Mar Shimun.
Also known as Surma Khanum, she was a member of the patriarchal Mar Shimun family and spent her life serving the Assyrian Church of the East. She fought to preserve an Assyrian homeland and later traveled the Western world to rally support for her community during one of its darkest periods.
Born in 1883 in Quchanis, Hakkari (modern-day southeastern Turkey), Lady Surma was the eldest of eight children. Her early life included a rare opportunity for women at the time – an education from W.H. Browne, an Anglican missionary who worked as part of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Assyrian Mission.
Lady Surma took religious vows and was considered an expert in the liturgy and cannons of the Church of the East. She served as advisor to three church Patriarchs (Mar Benyamin Shimun XXI, Mar Polous Shimun XXII, and Mar Eshai Shimun XXIII).
Lady Surma’s life coincided with an Assyrian period filled with upheaval and violence, marked by the First World War and 1915 genocide, where an estimated 1 million Assyrians, Armenians and Greeks were killed. Many Assyrians fled their ancestral villages while under Ottoman rule and settled elsewhere, including modern day Iraq. During the war, reportedly charged with guarding ammunitions received from the Russians, she lived in a home filled with explosives. Soon after the war, she authored the book “Assyrian Church Customs and the Murder of Mar Shimun.”
Following the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire in 1922, Assyrians attempted to resettle in their native Hakkari, only to be chased into Iraq by Turkish forces.
The Turks pursued these groups. In 1924, Ankara planned to reclaim Mosul, at the time under a British Mandate. Lady Surma helped organize a counter-offensive by calling on the Assyrian Levies — a British-established military force in Iraq. She was thanked for her support in the dispute by British air-vice marshal Colonel Herbert Thomas Dobbin.
After the war, Lady Surma attended the Treaty of Versailles and petitioned for a seat in the League of Nations, arguing that Assyrians fought on behalf of the Allies in the war and deserved to live with autonomy in their indigenous lands. She was one of the only Assyrians to attend the international meeting.
Her requests for a homeland were not granted, but she didn’t stop fighting for the land, reasoning that if enough land was bought in present day northern Iraq, Assyrians could purchase their peace. Lady Surma traveled to the U.S. in the 1920s to petition for the land and raise capital. The San Francisco Examiner published a story announcing her arrival: She “brings with her the plea of her country — small ally in the World War — which lost everything in the conflict.”
As the British mandate in Iraq dissolved in 1932, it ushered a period of unrest for Assyrians, including the Simele massacre where thousands of Assyrian genocide survivors had settled. That year, the Mar Shimun family was evacuated from Iraq to Cyprus, then to England, and eventually in the 1960s to the U.S.
Lady Surma continued speaking publicly and worked to support her people until her nephew Mar Eshai Shimun’s assassination in 1975. She died that same year at the age of 92 and is buried in Turlock, Calif.
Like many historical figures, Lady Surma is not without controversy, but she is widely recognized as giving a voice to Assyrians on an international stage at a time of massive global change. For much of the 20th century, she worked as an ambassador for the Assyrian nation, navigating cultures in the East and West. Today, as a growing number of Assyrians live outside of their homeland, they can recall Lady Surma and her efforts to preserve Assyrian culture, heritage and history.
This story is part of a profile series for Women’s History Month titled Lionesses of Assyria. Editing by Mariam Pera.