“Layn” means “where to”? in the Mardin dialect, which is from the old city of the same name in Mesopotamia in the south-east of present day Turkey. Its Syriac-orthodox minority were threatened with genocide, in a similar manner as the Armenians were. In 2004, the Lebanese filmmaker travelled to the scattered members of its community and finally to the city of their ancestors. The narrative is woven together by his grandfather’s diary. He was a Syriac priest born in Mardin in 1899 and he died in exile in Lebanon in 1967. Amsih Khbeiz Eddeir, with the official name Abdallah, meticulously chronicles his memories. They lead him to the Mardin of the early 20th century.

Guest: Fadi Yeni Turk
In addition to his work as a cameraman, Fadi Yeni Turk has directed several short and full-length documentaries including Demo, Layn, When the War Sank in, and Monumentum.

Guest: Zeynep Türkyilmaz
Zeynep Türkyilmaz graduated with a doctorate in history in 2009 from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Her dissertation "Anxieties of Conversion: Missionaries, State and Heterodox Communities in the Late Ottoman Empire" involved intensive research into Ottoman, British and American missionary archives. In 2009-2010 she was the post-doc at the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar in UNC-Chapel Hill, then in 2010-2011 she was a EUME (Europe in the Middle East - The Middle East in Europe) fellow. In 2011-2016 she taught history at Dartmouth College. At the moment she is a EUME fellow at the Forum for Transregional Studies in Berlin, with the project "An Archaeology of Today: Tracing the Genealogies of Ezidi Victimhood“ (working title). Zeynep Türkyilmaz works in the field of research and education, focusing on the questions of nation building, gender, nationalism, colonialism, and religious communities, especially in regard to heterodoxy and “mission” in the Middle East from 1800 up to the present day.