Reflections on Midyat and Tur Abdin

Abstract

It is a great pleasure to have been invited to this symposium and it is an honour for me to introduce and moderate this first panel. Until very recently, I would have thought that a symposium like this, which its emphasis on the ethnic and religious diversity of the city and district of Midyat, would be impossible in Turkey, and I am happy to be a witness of important changes in public discourse in Turkey, away from the fiction of a homogenous nation and towards a recognition of diversity as a source of pride.