page_title: Dioceses of the Church of the East after 1552
section_title: Dioceses of the Qudshanis patriarchate, 1830–1913
hierarchical_section_title: Dioceses of the Church of the East after 1552 / Dioceses of the Qudshanis patriarchate, 1830–1913
caption_attribution_description: Polski: Józef Chnaniszo, biskup Asyryjskiego Kościoła Wschodu.
context_page_description: After the schism of 1552 of the Church of the East, the secessions the Chaldean Catholic Church and the Assyrian Church of the East each had around twelve dioceses each by the end of the 19th century.
context_section_description: Reports made in the 1830s and 1840s by a number of English and American visitors (particularly Perkins, Grant, Ainsworth and Badger) mention at least fourteen dioceses in the Qudshanis patriarchate.  Besides a large diocese in central Kurdistan under the direct control of the patriarch and the diocese of Shemsdin, under the mutran Hnanishoʿ, there were dioceses for Berwari, Gawar and Jilu, whose bishops (Ishoʿyahb, Sliba and Sargis) sat in the villages of Dure, Gagoran and Matha d'Mar Zayʿa respectively.  In the 1840s there was also a short-lived diocese of ʿAqra and Zibar, whose metropolitan Abraham resided in the village of Nerem.  The Gazarta district had a metropolitan, Joseph, who had been obliged to withdraw to the monastery of Isaac of Nineveh near Shakh, where he died in 1846, and in 1850 there were two other Nestorian bishops in the Atel district, Shemʿon and Thomas.  By 1877 the mutran Hnanishoʿ had three suffragan bishops, probably all consecrated some years earlier, responsible for a number of villages in Shemsdin, Tergawar and elsewhere:  Denha of Tis, Yohannan of Tuleki and Sabrishoʿ of Gawar.
  There were also four dioceses in the Urmi region, whose bishops (Yohannan, Joseph, Gabriel and Eliya) resided at Gawilan and ʿAda in the Anzel district, and Ardishai and Gugtapah in the Baranduz district respectively.  (A fifth bishop, Abraham, resided in the village of ʿArmutaghaj and was responsible for a number of villages in the Tergawar district until his death in 1833.)  While the dioceses of Mar Yohannan and Mar Gabriel each contained numerous villages and appear to have been traditional, the other two bishops were responsible only for the large villages where they sat, and their dioceses may also, like the mutran's suffragan dioceses, have been created ad personam.  By this period the bishops of the historic dioceses regularly took a distinctive name associated with their dioceses (Hnanishoʿ of Shemsdin, Ishoʿyahb or Yahballaha of Berwari, Sargis of Jilu, Sliba of Gawar, Yohannan of Anzel and Gabriel of Ardishai), and these dioceses were clearly felt to be different from the ad personam dioceses in the Shemsdin and Urmi districts which existed by their side.
  The Urmi dioceses of ʿAda and Gugtapah lapsed after the death of their bishops, while a new diocese was established for the large Anzel village of Supurghan in 1874, whose bishop, Yonan, joined the Russian Orthodox Church in 1896 and Russian Ecclesiastical Mission in Urmia was formed. The elderly bishop Ishoʿyahb of Berwari died probably not long after 1850, and by 1868 the Berwari district had three bishops (his natar kursyas Ishoʿyahb and Yahballaha, and a third bishop, Yonan, who resided in the village of ʿAqri).  Yahballaha died between 1877 and 1884, and the Qudshanis hierarchy at the end of the 1880s contained twelve bishops: the mutran Isaac Hnanishoʿ (consecrated after the death of his predecessor Joseph in 1884) and the natar kursya Abraham (consecrated in 1883), five bishops in the Hakkari district (Sargis of Jilu, Sliba of Gawar and the mutran’s three suffragans, Yohannan of Tuleki, Denha of Tis and Sabrishoʿ of Gawar), two bishops in the Berwari district (Ishoʿyahb of Dure and Yonan of ʿAqri), and three bishops in the Urmi district (Gabriel of Ardishai, Yohannan of Anzel and Yonan of Supurghan).
  The diocese of Anzel effectively ceased to exist after its bishop Yohannan left for England in 1881, and the other historic Urmi diocese, Ardishai, came to an end with the murder of its bishop Gabriel in 1896.   The (Russian Orthodox) bishop Yonan of Supurghan died in 1908, and in 1913 the Urmi district had three East Syriac bishops, one Russian Orthodox (Eliya of Tergawar) and two dependent on the Qudshanis patriarchate (Denha of Tis and Ephrem of Urmi).  There were also several changes in the Hakkari district in the final decades before the outbreak of the First World War.  The natar kursya Abraham Shemʿonaya converted to Catholicism in 1903 and shortly afterwards joined the Chaldean church as bishop for the ephemeral Chaldean diocese of Hakkari.  The
caption: The mutran Joseph Hnanishoʿ (1893–1977)
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