If you live in the relatively obscure city of Södertälje, part of Stockholm county (consult Wikipedia for a geography lesson – let’s just say it’s pretty close to the city of Stockholm) and you happen to follow a local football team, then it is highly likely that you are of non-Swedish ancestry. By that, I mean you are a migrant to Sweden. If not, then your parents most probably were. No, this isn’t some sort of prejudicial assertion, it’s a simple fact inherent in the nature of the demographics & recreational inclinations of the people of Södertälje.
Being only (let's just say not that many) kilometres from the capital of Sweden, Stockholm, home to some gigantic clubs like AIK, Djurgardens and Hammarby, means the average Swede tends to follow one of these clubs. However, to about 40% of people in Södertälje, there are only two teams in town worth supporting – Assyriska Södertälje Foreningen and Syrianska Football Club. Like I said earlier, the vast majority (I would say 98%) of the supporters of these teams are composed of immigrants. To be specific, immigrants from the Middle East (overwhelmingly Christian and members of the Syriac Orthodox church, not to be confused with the unrelated independent nation ‘Syria’ to which there is no connection), all escaping religious and at times even civil persecution as well as the hardships associated with being a minority group in a country whose government is generally indifferent to witnessing your extinction.
A quick history of things:
1960s – wave of migration from Turkey during the Turkish-Cypriot conflicts by Syriac Christians.
1970 – Assyrian association in Soderalje is formed.
1974 – a football club, Assyriska Foreningen, is established in the city of Sodertalje. The name Assyriska is Swedish, and it translates to “Assyrian” in English.
1977 – a rival club is formed in Sodertalje by people from the very same group of migrants as described above. This football club was named “Syrianska”, which translated to “Syriac” in English.
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So, what we have here is a collective group of people, united by their church affiliation, but divided by their nationalistic ideals. That is, Assyriska’s members associate themselves with the Assyrian nationalism movement while Syrianska’s members fight the separatist “Aramean” cause (which, by their questionable reasoning, somehow through history has come to mean “Syriac” – to their own convenience).
It is quite sad that I, myself an Assyrian, have to face the reality that my own people do not even agree on their identity. Thus, we are becoming the architects of our own downfall (this a topic for another place and another time).
You’ll notice that on Syrianska’s jerseys, rather than having a sponsor, they have “Suryoyo” which is a way these people identified themselves for the past hundreds of years in the Middle East. Now, this is a common term used by both sides to describe their ethnicity. It's difficult to comprehend how these two seemingly opposing groups (they save the greatest hatred for each other you see, rather than for, oh let's say the government which oversaw their genocide during the first World War) were in fact one before their mass migrations to Sweden, via Southern Turkey, which was the Western part of the ancient Assyrian Empire.
What subsequently followed was a comically tragic demarcation of opinion on how "Suryoyo" was to be translated from the native language to Swedish and beyond. Ignore the fact that you have referred to yourself with the same name in your native language for hundreds of years, but rather throw into the works a bone of contention rergarding the small matter of your ethnic identity only once you decide to translate this name into another language. Assyriska supporters claim Suryoyo = Assyrian. The exact transformation is difficult to get your head around: Suryoyo = Suroyo (the “y” was added for reasons beyond me, but it is irrelevant since BOTH groups agree on it). Go back in time, and what was called Assur was called by the Greeks Sur, dropping the A, hence the historical transformation of the word Suroyo, which is Suraya in the other Eastern dialect of the language. Quite simple really. The people of the Assyrian empire continued to live even after the empire collapsed, coming under other rules but still maintaining their identity as Suraye/Suroyo (= Assurayeh, also known as Atourayeh) the “ss” is actually a “sh” sound, hence the common name amongst Assyrian of “Ashur”. So, to summarise, Suryoyo = Suroyo = Othoroyo = Assyrian = Assyriska!
And there you have it, a useless piece which will be read by no more than one person and commented on by even less. Hoorah for the internetzzz.
Now, a song which may or may not relate but qualifies for it's sheer awesomeness.
/Chile out
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