Malke was born in Kalat’ül Mara, a village to the east of
Mardin,
Turkey, in the
Ottoman Empire. He leaned towards Eastern Catholicism and subsequently joined the
Syriac Catholic Charafe Monastery school spending four years. He was ordained a priest in
Aleppo on 13 May 1883 and was assigned to various villages in
Tur Abdin. His church and house were sacked and burned in 1895 during the
Hamidian massacres in Diyarbekir Vilayet, during which Father Flavianus' mother and many other members of his parish were murdered. Over the following years he served as a visiting priest in several sacked and burned villages in Tur Abdin, where he helped with rebuilding efforts. Due to his works, Malke was ordained
Chorbishop in 1897 and vice bishop of Mardin and
Gazarta. On 19 Januari 1913, he was consecrated a bishop together with the future
Syriac Catholic Patriarch of Antioch Gabriel Tappuni in
Beirut. In the summer of 1915, during the height of the
Armenian Genocide, in the rural region Tur Abdin, Malke, who was in
Azakh at the time, returned to Gazarta upon hearing news of the impending Assyrian genocide and refused to flee despite being advised so by local Turkish and Kurdish Muslim leaders. He was arrested by Ottoman authorities on 28 August 1915, alongside the
Chaldean bishop of the city,
Philippe-Jacques Abraham. According to Muslim eyewitnesses they were given choice between death or
conversion to Islam. Upon their refusal, Bishop Jacques Abraham was immediately shot dead and Bishop Michael Malke was beaten senseless and then beheaded. == Beatification ==