Sulaymaniyah
— — a city the mountains keep watch over.
Not only on a wall.
“A Kurdish city held between Mount Azmar and Mount Goyzha, founded by Ibrahim Pasha Baban in 1784. Poets keep returning here — Nali, Mawlawi, Piramerd — and the bazaars still open onto streets named for them. In the late afternoon the light comes off the surrounding ridges first, and the city below it goes quiet.
Sulaymaniyah, 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.
Sulaymaniyah sits in a valley of the Zagros range in northeastern Iraq, in the Kurdistan Region, at roughly 850 metres above sea level. The city was founded in 1784 by the Kurdish prince Ibrahim Pasha Baban and named for his father, Sulaiman. It is bordered by Mount Azmar to the east and Mount Goyzha to the north, with Lake Dukan within an hour's drive northwest. Population today is around three quarters of a million, making it the second-largest city of Iraqi Kurdistan after Erbil.
Newroz, the Kurdish new year, falls on 21 March and is marked with bonfires lit on the slopes of Mount Goyzha at dusk. Sulaymaniyah holds this festival with particular weight, as the city has long carried the cultural memory of the Kurdish people through writers like Nali, Mawlawi, and Piramerd. The Sharazoor plain south of the city has been inhabited for millennia; archaeological work at Bestansur has uncovered Neolithic remains dating to roughly 7,700 BCE.
The Slemani Museum, opened in 1961, holds the second-largest antiquities collection in Iraq, including cuneiform tablets recovered from the post-2003 antiquities trade. A short walk away, the Amna Suraka complex preserves the former Ba'athist security prison as a museum of the Anfal campaign, with rooms left as they were found in 1991. Mawlawi Street, the long pedestrian bazaar, runs through the centre of the old city. Most visitors arrive via Sulaymaniyah International Airport, about fifteen kilometres west of the centre.