Yohannan Sulaqa was monk of the Rabban Hormizd Monastery before his travel to Rome to become the first Patriarch of the Chaldean Catholic Church.

In 1808, the Assyrian Gabriel Dambo (1775-1832) revived the abandoned monastery, rebuilt it, collected a number of pupils vowed to poverty and celibacy, and installed there a seminary.

At first this initiative was opposed by Yohannan VIII Hormizd, then Archbishop of Mosul, even if it was supported by the patriarchal administrator Augustine Hindi.

In 1838, the monastery of Rabban Hormizd and the town of Alqosh were attacked by the Kurds of Soran and hundreds of Assyrian Chaldeans died[5]: 32  and in the 1843 the Kurds started to collect as much money as they could from Christian villages, killing those who refused: more than ten thousand Christians were killed and the icons of the Rabban Hormizd monastery defaced.

In the hills round about the church and buildings of the monastery are rows of caves hewn out of the solid rock, in which the stern ascetics of former generations lived and died.They have neither doors nor any protection from the inclemency of the weather, and the chill which they strike into the visitor gives an idea of what those who lived in them must have suffered from the frosts of winter and the drifting rain.

Some cells have a second small cave hewn out behind the larger one which is entered through an opening just large enough for a man of average size to crawl through.