On the first Sunday after the spring equinox, a stretch of Western Avenue fills with the red, white and blue of a flag older than most nations. Men in embroidered vests walk beside floats built by churches and clubs. Girls carry sheaves of wheat and bundled flowers, and the four-pointed star of the god Ashur rides above the crowd. The street sign overhead reads Western Avenue, but for the day, and in the hearts of the people marching, it is King Sargon Boulevard.
The Assyrians in Chicago number close to 100,000 across the metro area, the largest community of their people in the United States. They are the descendants of one of the oldest Christian peoples on earth, and a great many of them live within a few miles of this parade route, in the brick bungalows and two-flats of West Rogers Park.
West Rogers Park: The Place
West Rogers Park, known officially as West Ridge, sits at the far north edge of Chicago, bounded by Howard Street to the north, Ridge and Western to the east, Peterson and Bryn Mawr to the south, and Kedzie and the North Shore Channel to the west. Its housing is classic interwar Chicago: brick bungalows, courtyard apartment buildings, and sturdy two-flats on quiet residential blocks. Devon Avenue is the commercial spine, and Metra trains stop at Peterson and Ridge while CTA buses run the long avenues. Skokie, Lincolnwood and Niles lie just over the city line to the north and west.
How West Rogers Park Became Assyrian
Before the Assyrians
Before it was a destination for Aramaic-speaking Christians, West Ridge was farmland and then a Jewish and Eastern European neighborhood. Devon Avenue grew into a Jewish commercial street, with synagogues, delis and bookshops, and one stretch carries the honorary name Golda Meir Boulevard to this day. By the late twentieth century South Asian merchants had made the eastern blocks of Devon a celebrated Indian and Pakistani bazaar, a story told in the history of other Middle Eastern Christian communities who built their lives along similar immigrant corridors. The Assyrians arrived into this layered, much-traded neighborhood and added a layer of their own.
A word on who the Assyrians are. They are an Aramaic-speaking, indigenous Christian people of northern Mesopotamia, the lands now split among Iraq, Iran, Turkey and Syria. Most of those who settled in Chicago belong to the Assyrian Church of the East, an ancient body whose liturgy is still sung in a dialect close to the language Jesus spoke. They should not be confused with Chaldean Catholics, who share the same ethnic roots but whose ancestors entered communion with Rome in the sixteenth century. The distinction is one of church, not of blood, and the Chaldean story runs parallel in cities like El Cajon, California.
The Assyrians Arrive
The first Assyrians reached Chicago in the closing years of the 1800s. Many were young men educated in the schools that American Presbyterian missionaries had opened on the Urmia plain of northwestern Iran. The missionaries told them about America, and the men came to earn money and send it home, the same calculation that has launched a thousand migrations.
Then came the catastrophe. During the First World War, the Assyrians of the Urmia plain and the Hakkari mountains were caught in the violence that swept the dying Ottoman Empire. The years 1915 to 1918 are remembered as Seyfo, the year of the sword, when massacre and forced flight emptied entire districts. Survivors scattered toward Russia, Europe and the United States, and Chicago, where a small community already had a foothold, became a refuge.
By the mid-1920s the Assyrian population of the city had grown past three thousand, clustered at first around Clark and Huron streets on the near North Side. In 1916 the newcomers founded the Assyrian American Association of Chicago, which would become the oldest Assyrian organization in the country, a place to bury the dead with their own rites and teach children their own alphabet.
West Rogers Park at Its Peak
Through the 1930s the community drifted north, into Lincoln Park, Lakeview and Uptown, and one wartime survey counted roughly five thousand Assyrians in Chicago by 1944, already three times the number in any other American city. The decisive surge came later. From the 1970s through the 1990s, Assyrians poured in from Iraq, Iran, Syria, Lebanon and Turkey, and each new crisis sent another wave: the Iran-Iraq War after 1980, the Gulf War of 1991, the United States invasion of 2003, and the rise of ISIS across the Nineveh Plain a decade after that.
These families settled north of the old core, in West Rogers Park and then over the line into Skokie, Lincolnwood, Niles, Morton Grove and Des Plaines. By the new century more than twenty Assyrian churches and organizations operated in the Chicago area. The honorary designation of Western Avenue between Peterson and Pratt as King Sargon Boulevard, named for the conquering Assyrian king of the eighth century BC, marked the neighborhood as theirs in a way no census form ever could.
The Change
Chicago became, for a time, the very center of the Assyrian world. In 1979 the church’s patriarch, Mar Dinkha IV, commissioned a search for a cathedral, and his synod later sanctioned his residence in the Chicago suburb of Morton Grove. For decades the patriarch of an ancient Eastern church governed his scattered flock from the northern edge of an American city. When Mar Dinkha IV died in March 2015, after thirty-nine years as the 120th patriarch, his successor moved the seat of the church back to the homeland, to Erbil in northern Iraq. The patriarchate had come home, but the people stayed.
The Landmarks of West Rogers Park
Mar Gewargis Cathedral, 7201 N. Ashland Boulevard. The grandest Assyrian landmark in the city began life as a Christian Science temple, built in 1926 with a limestone temple-front and tall Ionic columns. The Assyrian Church of the East bought it in 1979 for four hundred thousand dollars and paid off the debt within two years through the gifts of parishioners. Consecrated in 1981 as the diocese cathedral, it hosted the 2015 funeral of Mar Dinkha IV, when the building filled past capacity and hundreds came to bid farewell.
The Assyrian American Association of Chicago. Founded in 1916, it is the oldest Assyrian organization in the United States, the institution that taught generations to read their own script and dance their own dances. After selling its longtime clubhouse, the association set about acquiring a new home, a reminder that even century-old institutions keep moving with their people.
The Assyrian Universal Alliance Foundation, in Lincolnwood. Established in 1978 to resettle the refugees then flooding in, and now also called the Assyrian Cultural Foundation, it grew into the cultural anchor of the community. For years its president was Senator John Nimrod, and it runs social services for elders under the state aging program, serving Assyrian and non-Assyrian neighbors alike.
The Ashurbanipal Library, housed at the Assyrian Cultural Foundation. Named for the Assyrian king who assembled the famous library at Nineveh, this collection was begun in the 1980s by a handful of Assyrian students determined to save their literature from oblivion. It now holds thousands of volumes in and about the Assyrian language, some more than a century old, an ark of a written culture under threat in its own ancestral lands.
The Assyrian National Council of Illinois, 2450 W. Peterson Avenue. The idea took shape in 1983 and the council was established in 1985 by Issac Toma, conceived as a place where Assyrians in Chicago could find support and belonging. It runs home care, an Assyrian school and a banquet hall, and like the foundation it has kept its doors open to the wider neighborhood.
King Sargon Boulevard, Western Avenue between Peterson and Pratt. Not a building but a street, and arguably the most important landmark of all. Since 1992 the community has marched here every spring for the Assyrian New Year, the parade stepping off near Devon and Western, heading north, and spilling into Warren Park for music, food and speeches that run into the evening.
Where the West Rogers Park Assyrians Came From
The earliest arrivals came overwhelmingly from the Urmia plain of northwestern Iran and the rugged Hakkari mountains of southeastern Turkey, the historic heartland of the Church of the East. The pull of American Presbyterian missionaries in Urmia explains why so many of the first Chicagoans traced their roots to a single corner of Iran. State Senator John Nimrod, born in Chicago in 1922 to parents from the Urmia region, embodied that first chapter of the migration.
The later and larger waves came from Iraq above all, from Baghdad and the Christian towns of the Nineveh Plain near Mosul, along with Assyrians displaced through Syria, Lebanon and Turkey. War and persecution did the choosing. Each conflict in the region, from the 1980s onward, redrew the map of who arrived in West Rogers Park, until the neighborhood held a cross-section of the entire Assyrian world.
West Rogers Park Today
The community is no longer counted easily. There is no Assyrian box on the census form, so most are recorded simply as white, and a 2018 federal survey logged only about 104,000 Assyrians nationwide, a figure community leaders consider far too low for Illinois alone. Groups like Vote Assyrian, led by organizers such as Billy Haido and Mary Oshana, have pushed hard to get their people counted, knowing that an undercount costs the community real money and real representation.
The second generation is stepping forward. Atour Sargon became the first Assyrian elected to the Lincolnwood board of trustees, and young Assyrians are studying their own history in university seminars and carrying it back to the neighborhood. The churches remain full on Sundays, the liturgy still sung in the old tongue, and the bakeries along the Devon corridor still sell the dense, roux-filled pastry called kada and the stuffed vine leaves of dolma.
What gives the community its particular intensity is the knowledge of what is happening to its kin abroad. The same families that march on King Sargon Boulevard send aid and advocacy toward the emptied villages of the Nineveh Plain. In West Rogers Park the Assyrians are not merely preserving a memory. They are keeping a living people alive, on a street that bears the name of their first great king.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Assyrians settle in West Rogers Park, Chicago?
The earliest Assyrians in Chicago arrived in the late 1800s and clustered near Clark and Huron streets, drawn by contacts with American Presbyterian missionaries in Iran. As later waves came after the 1970s, the community moved north into West Rogers Park and the suburbs of Skokie and Lincolnwood, where affordable bungalows and existing Assyrian churches and organizations made settlement easy.
Is West Rogers Park still an Assyrian neighborhood today?
Yes, it remains a heartland for the Assyrians in Chicago, though the community now spreads across Skokie, Lincolnwood, Niles and other suburbs as well. The churches stay full, the Assyrian New Year parade still marches up King Sargon Boulevard each spring, and bakeries and groceries serving Assyrian food line the Devon Avenue corridor.
What are the most famous Assyrian landmarks in Chicago?
Mar Gewargis Cathedral on North Ashland Boulevard is the grandest, a 1926 limestone temple bought by the Assyrian Church of the East in 1979. Other key sites include King Sargon Boulevard on Western Avenue, the Assyrian American Association of Chicago founded in 1916, and the Assyrian Universal Alliance Foundation in Lincolnwood, which houses the Ashurbanipal Library.
Where did Chicago’s Assyrians come from?
The first arrivals came mainly from the Urmia plain of northwestern Iran and the Hakkari mountains of southeastern Turkey. Later and larger waves came from Iraq, including Baghdad and the Christian towns of the Nineveh Plain near Mosul, along with Assyrians displaced through Syria, Lebanon and Turkey by war and persecution.
When did Assyrians first arrive in Chicago?
The first Assyrians in Chicago came in the late nineteenth century, many of them young men educated in American missionary schools in Iran. Their numbers grew sharply after the Seyfo genocide of the First World War, passing three thousand by the mid-1920s, and surged again with refugee waves from the 1970s onward.
If your family’s story passed through the churches and bakeries of West Rogers Park, or through any of the streets where one people put down roots far from home, that history deserves to be remembered and told. The journeys of other peoples who fled the same region show how migration reshapes a city, one neighborhood at a time.