Yohannan VIII Hormizd
The feud between Gabriel Dambo and Yohannan Hormizd ended in 1832, when Alqosh was pillaged by Kör Muhammad, chief of the Soran Kurds of Rawanduz. Gabriel Dambo was among the hundreds of East Syrians killed by the Kurds, and was succeeded as superior of the monastery of Rabban Hormizd by Yohannan Gwera. Despite the death of his chief rival, the patriarch's troubles continued throughout the 1830s. The monks of the monastery of Rabban Hormizd still refused to acknowledge his authority, and were supported by the metropolitan Joseph Audo, who now claimed jurisdiction over the monastery on the grounds that it lay within his diocese of Amadiya. Yohannan Hormizd retaliated by suspending Audo and a number of Rabban Hormizd monks, but this action had little effect. A rumour spread that a new Latin apostolic vicar had been appointed in Rome and was now on his way to Mosul, and the patriarch's enemies temporarily came into line to make a good first impression on this important official. But when after two months he had still not arrived, they resumed their duties in flat defiance of Yohannan's orders. One man only, a priest named Stephen, sent in his submission to the patriarch, and was appointed priest of Telkepe.
Yohannan VIII Hormizd
Yohannan Hormizd himself wrote a polemical autobiography in Syriac, a fragment of which (breaking off in 1795) was translated into English by the Anglican missionary George Percy Badger and reproduced in his classic 1852 study of the Church of the East, "The Nestorians and Their Rituals". His opponents responded with an equally intemperate history of the monastery of Rabban Hormizd under the headship of Gabriel Dambo of Mardin (1775–1832), which was published in a French translation by M. Brière in 1910 and 1911. Both texts provide spirited accounts of the intrigues that followed Yohannan's election as patriarch in 1780. Neither can be trusted on matters of interpretation, but if read judiciously they shed valuable light on the politics of the Chaldean Church in the late eighteenth- and early-nineteenth centuries and provide a wealth of factual detail omitted in many accounts of this period.