Hertevin Language

Hertevin, officially Ekindüzü, (, ) is a village in the Pervari District of Siirt Province in Turkey.

It was one of the last Assyrian villages in the country prior to Sayfo. The village is now populated by Kurds of the Şakiran tribe and had a population of 315 in 2021.

The hamlet of Yukarı Ekindüzü is attached to the village.

Name

There is no single correct spelling for the name of the village. Spellings used by sources include ''Artuvin'',Ekinduzu, Turkey Page
— www.fallingrain.com ''Hartiv'', ''Artevna'',Some Remarks on Modern Aramaic of Hertevin
, Yoshiyuki Takashina, Journal of Asian and African Studies n°40, 1990 — repository.tufs.ac.jp ''Hertevina'', ''Hertvin'', ''Hertivin'', ''Hertivinler'' and ''Ertevın''.

Other Armenian sources call it ''Artoun'', ''Ertun'' or ''Arton''.Keldanice: Yok olmaya yüz tutmuş bir dilin hikayesi
— bbc.com

In Armenian, the village is called ''Artvan.''
— www.rbenninghaus.de

Location

The village is located on a mountainous plateau, in the Turkish region of Southeast Anatolia. It is 30 km west of Pervari, 60 km southwest of Lake Van, 70 km north of the Iranian border, and 68 km north of the Syrian border.

The village is split in two parts.

History

Ancient history

The Assyrian king Sennacherib conquered the region in 697 BC, then in the hands of the Urartians.Macht op de kale berg
— shlama.be

Assyrian and Armenian era

There were four Chaldean Catholic churches in the village, including that of Mar Ishak (Saint Isaac) and Mar Giorgis (Saint George). The churches were part of the diocese of Siirt (in ) until 1915. In the village of Rabanokan, there was an Armenian Church,
— team-aow.discuforum.info known as Surp Asdvadzadzin (en , in English ''Saint Mother of God''), also called Surp Sargis (en , in English ''Saint Serge'').

During the Ottoman Empire, Ottoman era, the villagers of Hartevin were Rayats of the principality of Bhotan under the authority of the local Kurdish agha,Un village chaldéen: Ischy
— ischy.fr which was somewhat independent of the central government in Constantinople because of the isolation and mountainous nature of the region. The agha owed the residents protection in exchange for the half of the products of their labor. Administratively, the village was in the Sanjak of Siirt in the ancient province of Bitlis Vilayet.

Hartevin was surrounded by many Kurdish villages. Many of these villages had been of Assyrian or Armenian origins and were replaced by Kurdish populations after massacres, and in many cases, the names were changed. The population suffered under the Hamidian massacres committed against Christians in 1895.

In 1909, Rabanok was population by 20 Armenian families. In 1915, Hartevin had a population of 200, in addition to five Armenian families of 45 people in Rabanok, but the village was destroyed during the Armenian Genocide. The Chaldean Catholic bishop of the village was assassinated, and the Venezuelan soldier Rafael de Nogales Méndez witnessed the extermination of tens of thousands of Armenians around Siirt.

The fall of 1928 saw the final expulsion of the remaining Armenians to Syria.

With a population of 500 in the 1970s, the population of Hertevin and other Assyrian villages left Turkey from the 1970s into the 1990s, due to violence and discrimination in the region. In 1982, three Christian families remained in the village. Today, most of these people live in the Paris region, mostly in Seine-Saint-Denis, and mainly in Clichy-sous-Bois.), with smaller numbers in Germany and Sweden. No Assyrians remain in the village.

Kurdish era

At the end of 1994, the village was attacked and partially destroyed by the Turkish army (it was one of 6,000 villages destroyed in the 1990s1-08-1999 - Kurdistan Lib. - Mazlum: BURNED VILLAGES [LIST : 1995
— www.mesopotamia-ita.com), in its conflict against the PKK