Assyrians' participation motivation towards faith tourism: The case of Mardin

Concepts of religious and tourism affect correlatively each other. In fact, it is seen that the first travels are based on religious when examined in historical process. As long as beliefs exist, people will continue to travel due to their spiritual needs. In this context, faith tourism is considered as an alternative type of tourism, which leads individuals to travel on the basis of religious belief and acts as mediator in reaching their spiritual peace and saturation. Mardin, the field of application of the study, has an important potential in terms of national and international belief tourism movements. In the context of religious tourism that visitors leads to Mardin that is a large number in the center of religious, especially being the home of the Syriac people, has common religious centers and religious ceremonies related to the previous period. In the first part of the study, information about the etymological origin and history of the Syriac name, the pry and holy days of Syriacsn, death and death ceremonies in Syriac metropolis center Tur Abidin region. In the second part, the main subject of the study is the definition of motivation, the importance of motivation stated and information about motivation theories are given. Motivation in the field of participation in tourism (push and pull factors) are discussed. In the third part of the study, demographic characteristics, reliability and validity analysis, factor analysis, one way analysis of variance (ANOVA) test and analysis are available. The demographic characteristics of the Syriac tourists arriving in Mardin, the travel motivations of the participants and the frequency and rate percentages of the travel characteristics were given. In addition, some characteristics of the participants were investigated in relation to travel motivations. In addition, the studies conducted in the literature were examined based on the obtained results and the findings were compared.