Big fat Assyrian/Syriac weddings: rituals and marriage traditions among Middle Eastern Christians in Sweden

ABSTRACT

Weddings can be seen as ‘rites of passage’ and also as ‘symbolic struggles’ since their glamour appears to be a new indicator of status for many families, especially migrant ones. A mixture of traditional as well as reinvented wedding customs serves a community searching for ethnic identity markers that can help it to embrace all of its descendants. This article presents a case study of how Assyrian/Syriac wedding rituals and marriage traditions that are being performed and transformed in the migratory context of Sweden over the last 50 years. Among the Middle Eastern Christians, who have been emigrating from Turkey, Syria, Lebanon and Iraq since the 1960s, and which today numbers 120,000 individuals, marriage is a very serious business – a permanent union between spouses and their respective families. The purpose of the article is to analyse Assyrian/Syriac wedding rituals and to discuss how they have shaped the modern Assyrian/Syriac identity. It also explores how local marriages connect and reconnect migrants of this ethno-religious group(s) and how it differentiates them from their peers in the surrounding Swedish society – religiously, socially and even aesthetically.

KEYWORDS:

• Assyrians/Syriacs
• Sweden
• identity
• wedding
• rituals

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank my colleagues Dr Fiona McCallum from St Andrews University, Scotland, Dr Lise Paulsen Galal from Roskilde University, Denmark, as well as the editors Dr Marianne Holm Pedersen from The Danish Folklore Archives, Royal Danish Library, and Dr Mikkel Rytter from Aarhus University, Denmark, for their valuable insights.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 As marriage is a sensitive topic in a migrant community, thus names, professions and a number of siblings have been changed in order to protect respondents’ anonymity.

2 In this paper, I will call the above-mentioned territories a ‘homeland’.

3 The marriage in the Syriac Orthodox Church has no legal effect in Sweden – the couple must also perform a civil ceremony to be considered husband and wife by the Swedish authorities (Rabo 2014, 188–189).

4 The majority of first-generation Assyrians/Syriacs in Sweden know Neo-Aramaic (which they sometimes call Assyrian) and understand some Syriac, which is a liturgical language; many speak Arabic, Turkish or Kurdish – languages of their former Muslim neighbours.

5 Pedersen, Marianne Holm and Mikkel Rytter. 2017. Rituals of Migration: An Introduction … 

6 Assyrian Martyrs Day is held worldwide on 7 August. This date was chosen to commemorate the massacre conducted by the Iraqi Army and Arab and Kurdish irregulars in 1933. Approximately 3000 Assyrians were killed in Simele in the north Iraq.

Additional information

Funding

This project has received funding from the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme for research, technological development and demonstration under grant agreement no 291827. The project Defining and Identifying Middle Eastern Christian Communities in Europe is financially supported by the HERA Joint Research Programme (www.heranet.info) which is co-funded by AHRC, AKA, BMBF via PT-DLR, DASTI, ETAG, FCT, FNR, FNRS, FWF, FWO, HAZU, IRC, LMT, MHEST, NWO, NCN, RANNÍS, RCN, VR and The European Community FP7 2007-2013, under the Socio-economic Sciences and Humanities programme.