An Ancient Citadel Is Still Occupied
ERBIL, Iraq — Erbil citadel, a mound 30 meters above this city of one million, is one of the oldest continuously occupied human settlements on earth.
It is a Unesco World Heritage Site, and Kurdish officials have tried to restore and preserve it despite a financial crisis.
The warren of alleyways had become an overcrowded slum, but in 2006 the authorites relocated more than 500 families in one of the Middle East’s most ambitious preservation projects.
Six thousand years or more of human civilization have come to this: In the citadel’s central square is a tall pole with a large Kurdish flag. Down in the new city, smoke belches from rooftop diesel gen- erators during daily power cuts. Hanging over it all is the pungent smell of burning plastic from a nearby trash dump.
Because of the regional Kurdish government’s ban on tall buildings around the citadel, it retains a commanding aspect over the city. Even today, much of the road system in Erbil, the capital of Iraq’s Kurdish region, is arranged like the spokes of a wheel, with the citadel as the hub.
May Shaer, an architect who was Unesco’s project director on the citadel, said that there were other sites as ancient, and fortified cities as big, but that few combined a living city on top of an enormous archaeological mound, connecting ancient and modern history in an unbroken stream.
“It is really very rare,” she said, “really interesting.”
To hold on to the citadel’s “con- tinuously occupied” title after the evictions, Kurdish officials arranged for one family to remain in their ancestral home in the old town.
The director of the citadel, Dara al-Yaqoobi, said other evidence of continuity were the citadel’s ancient Grand Mosque, which is still in use, and the museum of Kurdish textiles, the ceramics museum and the antiques store, all of which are new but open for business. “This is life,” he said.
And that flag? “Yes, it’s the flag of Kurdistan,” said Mr. Yaqoobi, whose office is in a restored Ottoman merchants’ house near the flagpole square. “You can put in some new things in harmony with the overall environment.”
The last man living in the citadel, Rebwar Mohammed Qader, 32, showed visitors around his old tworoom brick house, similar to the house nearby where he grew up.
Being the corporeal embodiment of six millenniums of human history isn’t easy, Mr. Qader said. For one thing, he has to bring groceries in by handcart from the new city, up the steep entrance ramp. There’s no parking for visitors, and his children have a 25-minute hike to school.
“It’s really boring to stay alone in this house with no neighbors, but I really love the Qalat,” Mr. Qader said, using the local name for the citadel. “I’m showing my respect for all those generations of 5,000, 6,000 years gone by.”