Guide
The monastery of Mor Kiryakus stands at Ayrancı village in the Beşiri district of Batman, at the far edge of Turabdin, the region the Syriac Christians hold sacred. Monks who came from Aleppo to Turabdin in the fourth century to spread Christianity founded a great many monasteries on the hills and rock outcrops overlooking the northern Mesopotamian plain, and Mor Kiryakus, built on the eastern slope of Kira Dağı facing that plain, is significant as one of the first of them. Two Syriac stone inscriptions are set above the arched door that separates the main entrance from the inner courtyard. The first mentions a man named Salibo of Aleppo but says nothing about when the monastery was built; the reasoning offered for a fifth-century date is the absence of a bell tower.
The building has three levels, one of them an underground floor reached through passages. It is rectangular on the outside; inside, two wide square enclosed courtyards are ringed by arched piers with rooms behind them. The finest work is in the room used as the patriarch's bedchamber, where the ceiling is an eight-lobed stone dome carved with starred crosses. The monastery was repaired several times in the Ottoman period. Like dozens of other monasteries and churches scattered across the broken country of Turabdin it was eventually abandoned as its congregation dwindled. It is a registered monument and has been renewed through restoration work.
