Citadel of Erbil
The Citadel of Erbil is not built on a hill — it is the hill. For thousands of years people lived, died and rebuilt on the same spot, until their layered homes raised an artificial mound, a "tell," rising as much as 32 metres above the plain. Dig down and you pass through more than 30 metres of stacked civilisations. Settlement here reaches back to at least the 5th millennium BCE, and possibly far earlier; gazing at it from orbit in 2019, NASA called it possibly the oldest continuously occupied place on Earth.
This was ancient Arbela, a great religious centre where Assyrian kings came to consult the oracle of Ishtar of Arbela, goddess of love and war. What looks today like a fortress wall around the summit is in fact an unbroken ring of about a hundred grand 19th-century mansions, built shoulder to shoulder along the mound's steep edge so that their outer walls form a rampart.
In 2007, to allow careful restoration, the authorities moved the citadel's residents out — but deliberately let one family remain, so that the claim of unbroken habitation, spoken of as up to 8,000 years, would never be broken. Below the mound spreads the bustling Qaysari bazaar, one of the city's oldest markets, and within the walls a textile museum keeps the region's ancient weaving traditions alive. In 2014 UNESCO inscribed the citadel as a World Heritage Site.
6 stops to discover
- 1
The Oval Mound
The whole citadel sits on a tell — a hill built up over millennia from the mud-brick of countless earlier towns. Climbing the ramp to the single gateway, you are walking up through more than sixty centuries of continuous settlement, one of the longest anywhere on earth.
- 2
The Living Tell
The ground beneath you is not a natural hill. It is a tell, an artificial mound raised 25 to 32 metres above the plain by thousands of years of people building, living and rebuilding on the same spot, one settlement atop another. This is one of the longest continuously occupied places on Earth, with traces of habitation reaching back to the Chalcolithic period and perhaps the Neolithic.
- 3
The Old Houses
Inside the gate, lanes wind between restored late-Ottoman courtyard houses with carved doors and shaded balconies. Until recently families still lived here; today they are being conserved as a living museum of old Hawler.
- 4
The 1775 Hammam
This historic public bathhouse was built within the Citadel in 1775, a place where residents of the mound came to wash, gather and pass the time. It stayed in use until the 1970s, then was renovated in 1979, and survives today as one of the Citadel's notable non-residential buildings.
- 5
Views Over Hawler
From the southern edge of the citadel the city of Erbil — Hawler in Kurdish — spreads out below, with the Qeyseri Bazaar and the fountains of Shar Park directly at the foot of the mound.
- 6
Mulla Afandi Mosque
This is the only religious building that still stands on the Citadel today. It was rebuilt on the site of a 19th-century mosque, marking the spiritual heart of a settlement that has been inhabited for thousands of years.
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