Blessed Flavien Michel Melki

Flavien Mikhaiel Melki, baptised Giacomo, was born in 1858 at Kalaat Mara near Mardin into a Syriac Orthodox family. At ten his parents sent him to the monastery of Zaafarane, where he studied liturgy, Arabic, Syriac and Turkish, and as a deacon served as instructor of novices and archivist. Reading the Eastern Fathers led him to seek communion with the Catholic Church, and in 1879, against the wishes of his relatives and confreres, he went to the seminary of Charfé in Lebanon. He professed in 1883 in the Community of the Brothers of Saint Ephrem, founded to bring the Syriac Orthodox into the Catholic Church, and was ordained at Aleppo that May. He taught at the seminary of Mardin and served the outlying villages, and after the Kurdish attacks of 1895 laboured to feed and shelter the survivors.

Named Patriarchal Vicar of Mardin in 1910, he was consecrated Bishop of Djézireh in 1913. During the First World War he could have fled but stayed with his people. Arrested in the summer of 1915, tortured and refusing to convert to Islam, he was shot on 29 August.