Tomas Beth-Avdalla sits in a cluttered room near his home in Gothenburg, Sweden, surrounded by aging Assyrian photographs, books, audiocassettes, videos, and periodicals — often piled to the ceiling.
From this small office, he has built a global footprint. His work to document and preserve modern Assyrian history stretches around the world.
As a co-founder of the Modern Assyrian Research Archive (MARA) and Nineveh Press, Tomas has helped shape two of the most comprehensive repositories of modern Assyrian materials. MARA has archived thousands of items, while Nineveh Press has published 15 Assyrian-related books.
“For the last one hundred years, our community has had a lot of writers,” he said. “They have been writing and struggling and offering a lot of their time, but in the end, for many of them it ended with not having their work published.”
Early interest in publishing
Tomas was born in Augsburg, Germany, and raised in Gothenburg. He studied the Syriac language, church liturgy, and Assyrian history at Mar Gabriel Monastery in Turkey’s Tur Abdin region, later attending the Poppius Journalism School in Sweden.
Later studying at Uppsala University, he then traveled to the Assyrian monastery of Deir Zafaran outside Mardin, Turkey, where he helped launch bilingual magazine, Kurkmo, printed in Turkish and Assyrian.
“We had to find out a way to do it all by ourselves,” he recalled. “We wrote articles, did interviews, and took pictures. We built up an editorial plan and I was responsible for the Assyrian portion.”
He returned to Sweden in 2007 to work for the Assyrian Federation of Sweden, helping digitize its physical archive before becoming an administrator with the Assyrian Youth Federation.
Stepping onto the international stage
It was around 2008 that Tomas helped co-found MARA.
“The proposal of MARA was to build up an archive based on source materials about Assyrians in modern times,” he said. Splitting his time between MARA and the Youth Federation, he traveled all over the world collecting materials.
By 2010, MARA had become large enough to establish a Swedish-registered foundation with an executive board. But when funding dried up in 2012, all work shifted to volunteer labor.
A major breakthrough came earlier this year when the Mor Afrem Foundation in Germany agreed to fund MARA’s digitization, cataloging, and ongoing global collection efforts — turning the archive into one of its key initiatives.
Reading through MARA’s collection, Tomas realized much of the material had never been published or was only available in old, difficult-to-access Assyrian magazines. He decided to begin with the writings of David B. Perley, an author who devoted his life to writing on Assyrians. Starting in 2010, Tomas spent six years gathering Perley’s work.
In early 2016, he submitted a manuscript to an Assyrian publisher in Sweden. He waited months for a response.
“When I saw that they weren’t going to publish my manuscript, I told them that if you don’t have the aid or if you don’t have the time to publish, I will do it myself,” he said. “When you have worked on a book for many years, you really want to come to an ending.”
Tomas researched print-on-demand methods and designed the book himself.
“A Collection of Writings on Assyrians by David B. Perley” was published in August 2016 — the first official title under his new publishing company Nineveh Press, which Tomas rolled into his graphic design company, TBA Form.
“When I was getting ready to publish this book, I didn’t have the idea yet to establish Nineveh Press,” he said. “It was more that when I saw that nobody else would publish, I thought I should publish the book.”
The future of Assyrian publishing
Today, Nineveh Press has published 15 titles. Tomas focuses on Assyrian themes and accepts submissions in any language. He is also considering publishing books not specifically about Assyrians but written by Assyrians.
Last month, he introduced the option for supporters to sponsor an entire book. Individuals can also donate directly to Nineveh Press through his website, either as a one-time contribution or recurring monthly support.
“The more time I spend on Nineveh Press, I’ll be able to publish books at a more frequent pace,” he said.
His greatest challenge, he admits, is visibility. Beyond social media, he sets up booths at local Assyrian events and encourages Assyrian writers to publish with Nineveh Press. Publishing Assyrian literature and having these works reach around the world is essential, he says, in preserving Assyrian culture.
“With knowledge about history, about culture, about our previous challenges, if we learn about these things, we can get strong as a people,” he said. “If we don’t have that information digitized or in published books, it’s very difficult to find this information or to obtain it.”