Telkaif: The Village Hanna Shina Comes From

Hanna Shina was born in Telkaif — also spelled Tel Keppe — a historically Chaldean town in northern Iraq near Mosul that is the ancestral home of most Chaldean families in Metro Detroit. He lives today in West Bloomfield, Michigan, where he is a founding board member of the Chaldean Cultural Center and, since 2025, the first Mayor of Shenandoah.

What and Where Telkaif Is

Telkaif sits on the Nineveh Plain in northern Iraq, a short drive from Mosul, in a landscape that has been continuously inhabited for as long as there has been recorded history. The name appears in English in several forms — Telkaif, Tel Keppe, Tel Kaif and Telkeppe are all the same town — because it is transliterated from Arabic and from the Chaldean Neo-Aramaic still spoken there. For centuries it was overwhelmingly Chaldean Catholic: one church calendar, one dialect, one set of family names repeating down the generations.

Why Telkaif Matters to Metro Detroit

The great majority of Chaldean families in the Detroit area trace their origins to this single town. That is unusual, and it explains a great deal about the community here. When a whole diaspora comes from one place, the ties do not thin out across a region — people already know one another’s families, parishes and grandparents before they meet. The result is an unusually tight-knit community, one capable of raising parishes, halls, foundations and eventually a museum out of its own membership.

Growing Up There

Hanna Shina spent his youth in Telkaif, where he went to school and, as a young athlete, received a number of trophies for his participation in sports. He later studied at Baghdad College, the Jesuit-run secondary school in Baghdad. When the Chaldean Cultural Center filmed his oral history in 2023, what he returned to was not an abstraction but a map he still carries in his head: “…and the school in which I studied, and I would walk around all streets of Telkaif, street by street.”

“…and the school in which I studied, and I would walk around all streets of Telkaif, street by street.”

Telkaif in the Museum

The Chaldean Village Life gallery at the Chaldean Cultural Center recreates daily life in Telkaif for visitors who have never seen it — the household objects, the work, the rhythm of a village year. Hanna Shina appears in that gallery himself, as a hologram portraying a grandfather teaching his grandson to use a slingshot. Read more about Hanna Shina’s role at the Chaldean Cultural Center.

From Telkaif to West Bloomfield

From Telkaif he came to the United States, opened a store, a coffee shop and a restaurant in the 7 Mile area of Detroit, and then turned outward to the institutions his community needed. He now lives in West Bloomfield, Michigan, where he serves both institutions most closely associated with him. The full arc is told in the biography of Hanna Shina, from Telkaif to West Bloomfield, and the honors it produced are listed on the honors and recognition page. A note on the name itself: Hanna is the Syriac form of John, so in English his name is John Shina.