Petros Karatay is a brave Assyrian intellectual who left the comfort of Paris in 2009 to resettle in a mountainous village with no facilities at all. His home village Herbole in ancient Assyrian Mount Qardu, now called Cudi in Southeastern Turkey, was evacuated when the authorities began coal mining. All the houses, churches, fruit gardens are now under the dust of the mining.
But Persos Karatay managed to secure land to build the new Herbole just a bit from there. He is defying all kind of political and social difficulties in order to create a new opportunity for the villagers to rebuild and resettle in Herbole. A few months ago he was detained for 12 days as a result of false accusations. But he is determined not to give up and leave the valuable land to neighboring Kurdish villages. He has planted 9.000 fruit and pistachio plants in the hills supplied with water from a source in the old village. He has also built a big house which he hopes some day will be a meeting place and a cultural center for Herbolian youth in Diaspora. Unfortunately his financial capacity is now used to the bottom, when the building is half finished.