Erbil

The tell of Erbil — the vast oval mound on which the citadel sits, accumulated from six thousand years of continuous human settlement — rises about thirty meters above the surrounding city. From below, standing in the Qaysari bazaar where fabric merchants drape bolts of cotton in doorways and tea-sellers move through the crowd with small glasses on trays, the citadel’s mud-brick houses pile up above you in a way that feels both urban and geological, as if the city grew the hill it sits on and then kept growing upward. Which is almost exactly what happened. The earth of that mound is made of compressed centuries of human habitation: hearths, pottery sherds, animal bones, collapsed walls, rebuilt walls, new floors over old floors, life over life over life since at least 5000 BCE.

Kurdistan in northern Iraq is its own register of the country, distinct enough in atmosphere, language, and security that arriving here from Baghdad involves a shift that isn’t merely geographical. The checkpoints are Kurdish Peshmerga rather than Federal Police. The signs are in Sorani Kurdish, Arabic, and English. The restaurants serve different food — grilled meats, Kurdish-style flatbreads called naan, a rice dish called palaw perfumed with cardamom and fried onion. The city is orderly and, by Iraqi standards, prosperous; the oil economy has built apartment towers around the citadel’s perimeter that do nothing to diminish the ancient mound’s authority.

The citadel itself was mostly evacuated in 2006 for restoration — one family was kept as symbolic occupants, a condition of the UNESCO World Heritage listing — and the restoration work is ongoing and frankly uneven, some houses beautifully revived, others in mid-collapse behind scaffolding. But walking the lanes in the early morning, before the daily visitors and restoration workers arrive, the place achieves a particular silence that feels archaeological: the sounds of the bazaar below rising faintly, the mud-brick walls warm from yesterday’s sun, a cat sitting on a window ledge that has probably had a cat sitting on it for several thousand years.

The Erbil Civilization Museum, at the citadel’s base, holds finds from the tell itself — Assyrian and Bronze Age pottery, cuneiform tablets, objects from the Hellenistic period when Erbil was known as Arbela. A 2,000-year-old diorite head of a bearded man stares from a glass case with an expression of composed authority. The museum director told me that new excavations in the lower mound consistently produce material that pushes the occupation date earlier; they are no longer surprised to find evidence of 8000 BCE settlement.

The Qaysari bazaar below the citadel is among the most functional — as opposed to touristified — markets I’ve visited anywhere in the region. Textile merchants, gunsmiths, ironmongers, spice dealers, bread bakers: all organized by trade in the traditional way, each craft occupying its own section. The smell in the spice section is extraordinary — cardamom and fenugreek and dried limes, the dried limes that go into Iraqi and Kurdish stews, sour and mineral and utterly unlike anything in a supermarket.

When to go: April through June and September through November. Kurdistan’s climate is more moderate than the rest of Iraq — Erbil sits at 415 meters and gets real winters with cold nights and occasional snow. Spring is magnificent: the surrounding foothills of the Zagros go green, almond trees bloom, and the city is at its most hospitable.