Citadel of Erbil
— — a city built on top of itself, layer by layer.
Not only on a wall.
“A circular mound at the centre of Erbil, rising about thirty metres above the modern city, its perimeter ringed by Ottoman-era courtyard houses and the line of an older wall. The Qaysari bazaar sits at its foot, copper and tea and saffron. People have lived on this hill, without interruption, for something close to six thousand years. from the studio
Citadel of Erbil, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
The Citadel of Erbil sits at the centre of the city of Erbil, capital of the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, a roughly oval mound about 430 metres across and rising some 32 metres above the surrounding plain. UNESCO inscribed it as a World Heritage Site in 2014, citing continuous habitation going back at least six thousand years and probably longer. The mound is the slow accumulation of mudbrick on mudbrick, generation on generation, a tell in the old archaeological sense, with the modern city wrapped tightly around its base.
What looks from below like a single fortified wall is really the outermost ring of Ottoman-era courtyard houses, their back walls turned outward to make a defensive face. Restoration work led by the High Commission for Erbil Citadel Revitalization has stabilised dozens of these houses since 2007, along with the small Mulla Afandi Mosque near the south gate and the Kurdish Textile Museum that opened in 2004. Beneath them, unexcavated, lie Assyrian, Sassanian, and earlier layers, a vertical archive of six thousand years of building.
Entry to the citadel grounds is free and open during daylight hours, with the south gate the usual approach from Shar Park below. The Textile Museum charges a small fee and is the best single hour on the hill. The Qaysari bazaar at the citadel's foot is busiest in late afternoon, when copper-workers reopen their shops after the heat. Erbil International Airport is about ten kilometres west, with direct flights from Istanbul, Frankfurt, and Doha; Kurdistan Region visas are issued on arrival for most nationalities.