Most people spend a week or so in Kurdistan. We had about nine days. Personally, we could easily have spent two weeks, but I don’t think most people would need that. The fact that we could spend longer was largely due to our embarrassingly slow pace of travel (basically, we are lazy) and the fact that Thomas insisted (and, ultimately, I agreed) that hitchhiking a significant portion of the trip was the way to go in terms of seeing the country. As anyone inclined to this form of travel will know, it can be pretty time consuming. That said, Kurdistan is an excellent country for hitchhiking and one never has to wait particularly long for a ride with many gracious people actually going out of their way to take you to your destination, invite you for tea, meet their family, stay at their house, or generally help out.
But, before we got to actually seeing the country, we had one very important agenda item for our first day in Erbil. Yes, we would go see the old citadel (very nice, longest inhabited citadel in the middle east, but not much actually there – aside from a quite excellent textiles/carpets museum if you are that way inclined). Yes, we would go and hang out in the souq (also quite excellent and atmospheric). Yes, we would eat delicious street snacks and participate in the Friday fountain show celebrations. Yes, we would enjoy shisha and tea at one of the oldest coffee houses in town. And, yes, we would visit Teachers Club in Anikawa to enjoy some beer in the Christian hang outs. But first, most importantly (and arguably one of Thomas’s key reasons for visiting Erbil at all), we would go carpet shopping.
This is a dangerous activity when out with Thomas as he enthusiastically wants everything he sets his magpie eyes on (very ironic as shopping generally holds absolutely no appeal for him). This is made even worse by the fact that we were working at the time and therefore not as pressed by budget requirements as on previous forays into carpet weaving territory. And worse still by the fact that the carpets in Kurdistan are actually comparatively very cheap. At any rate, we ended up buying five carpets on our first day in Kurdistan and I am pretty sure the people that saw us wondering out of the shop unable to carry all of them at once must have thought we were somewhat certifiable. If lawyering/wandering about ceases to work out for me, I rest easy in the knowledge that I could probably just set up a carpet shop.
My thoughts on Kurdistan can be described thusly: vibrant towns, excellent historical sites, a lot of different religions, spectacular scenery and some very sad modern history. For those not interested in reading the rest, that pretty much sums it up.
In terms of urban centres, Erbil is the starting point for most tourists and the oldest city in the area. It is also quite conservative in comparison to Sulaymaniyah and even Dohuk. That said, everyone in Kurdistan seems to focus much more on their national identity as Kurds than their specific religion and, as such, even Erbil does not really feel that conservative compared to other areas in the Middle East. Dohuk in the north is a smaller urban centre and Sulimani, Sulaymaniyah or just Sully, was a major hit with an incredibly vibrant market scene and street food that seriously packed a punch. We do like us some good street food. Overall, the food in Kurdistan was not the best ever. However, there were certainly some specific highlights to write home about. Kurdish bread is next level, always freshly made and warm and is kind of like a VERY fluffy naan bread (and is actually called naan in Kurdish). They make an excellent shawarma sandwich for about 50 cents. They eat this fantastic curd that I can only liken to ricotta cheese with walnuts, honey, and their amazing bread for breakfast. I could eat this forever. Finally, the street food in Sully (as mentioned above) is absolutely LEGIT. We basically stayed an extra night just so that we could try more stuff.
While not exactly a secret, most people from the west probably do not picture spectacular scenery when they envisage Iraq. Definitely an error, as Kurdistan is really incredibly lovely. In particular, the Rawanduz gorge is a massive highlight. In typical fashion, Thomas and I (with no information other than staring at maps.me for a bit over tea), determined we would (probably) be able to walk up the gorge from Rawanduz to Beckhal falls. It was admittedly not greatly confidence inspiring that when trying to communicate this idea to a shopkeeper across from where we intended to enter the gorge, he looked at us in bewilderment and suggested we take the road. At any rate, we pushed on into a truly amazing scenic walk. Felt very smug. Sweated copiously. And eventually found ourselves facing a massive drop and a big cliff wall. Crap. Retreating and regrouping (read: arguing about the intelligence of climbing said cliff and whether to just go back), we determined not to climb the cliff, but not to give up just yet. After a lot of backtracking, we managed to find a somewhat less steep wall to shimmy across. A mild panic attack later (me, obviously), we made it across and continued onward, finally making it to Beckhal falls after a sneaky dip in the river. It is definitely somewhat surreal to emerge out of pristine nature to one of the least appealing fun park style tourism structures I have seen set up right across the (probably once quite lovely) falls. It would be somewhat understated to refer to this as aggressive landscaping.
Another very pretty area of the country is the road from Shanidar, through Barzan and up to Amedi. Worth it just for the drive. We hitched our way up this road for a full afternoon and arrived in Amedi well after sunset. As we experienced many times, we were picked up by very helpful locals. These locals, however, did drive at 160km an hour on bad roads and in a car that felt like it was held together with duct tape. I did some serious yoga breathing while the recipient of their kindness (smiles in the picture below a direct reflection of our happiness at not crashing). Amedi itself was a delightful hilltop town, but the “resort” town of Sulav next door had all the requisite tourist tackiness we were coming to expect in any lovely place in Kurdistan.
While the majority of the Kurdish people are Sunni Muslims, there are also Shia Muslims, Assyrian Christians of the Chaldean church, Yazidi, Zoroastrians and Mandaeans. There also used to be a large Jewish population, but the vast majority of this population left for Israel in the 1940s and 1950s. We went to the Dayri Monastery near to Amedi, the Rabban Hermizd Chaldean Monastery at Alqosh and the Yazidi shrine at Lalesh. All of these were interesting for different reasons.
The Rabban Hermizd Monastery is a vast complex that once housed up to 2,000 monks and is situated on a craggy mountainside looking out over the Nineveh plain towards Mosul. As we were shown around by the lovely caretaker, he pointed out the lines to which ISIL had advanced during the war, including a village about five kilometres away from which all the residents (all Christians) had fled shortly before the retreat of the Peshmerga and the arrival of ISIL. Pretty scary stuff.
The Dayri Monastery was not particularly impressive per se. However, as we got speaking with the caretaker, he began telling us the story of his home. He built the first church on the site many years back. It was burnt to the ground, and he rebuilt. During Saddam’s Anfel campaigns, he showed us how the military had come, placed tnt at all corners of the church, and decimated it to rubble once again. He was then taken away in custody to Bagdad to spend time in one of Saddam’s prisons. On his return, he once again rebuilt the church and continued to serve his small parish in his tiny corner of Kurdistan. Now in his 80s and quite frail, he continues to come to the church every day and was happy to tell us the story of his life punctuated by the destruction and reconstruction of his home.
The Yazidi shrine at Lalesh is most known internationally because of the genocide of the Yazidis perpetrated by ISIL and the highly publicized crisis where about 50,000 Yazidi were surrounded by ISIL in the Sinjar mountains whereupon various local and international military forces launched rescue missions and cleared a path for the Yazidi to Syria. The shrine at Lalesh is the most holy place for the Yazidi and a very unassuming affair. Everyone is welcome and they were happy to show us around with very few restrictions (take off your shoes and don’t step on the door frames). That said, the group is very marginalized and local biases remain. Our driver for the day, a Muslim who was happy to accompany us to look around the Rabban Hermizd Monastery, declared quite definitively that he did not want to enter the Yazidi area because they were dirty. Putting aside the clearly ridiculous prejudice, the shrine was very interesting and seriously other worldly with the internal areas being dark and reminiscent of what one may have expected the temples in some underground Roman cult to resemble.
Some of the really excellent things to see in Kurdistan are the Assyrian reliefs and other historical sites that dot the countryside. These are typically not marked on any maps and not discussed in any detail online/in books. Thomas spent a good amount of time trawling the internet to eventually get a vague idea of where some of these were. This culminated in me sitting on the side of a mountain overlooking Dohuk and Mosul peering over a rock face that Thomas had shimmied down a half hour earlier and wondering if my lovely husband would re-emerge at some point or if, in fact, the last I would see of him would be disappearing over a hill in Iraq. Nothing if not dramatic.
But, let’s take a step back. On arriving in Dohuk we realized that there really was not much to do in the town, but there were (supposedly) some Maltai Assyrian reliefs of Sennacherib on a hillside just outside of the centre. Unfortunately, no one seemed to know what we were talking about when we asked about them and no one spoke English (or Arabic) generally. In the end we convinced a taxi driver to take us up the mountain behind town in the thought that maybe it would be obvious once we got there (not so) or at any rate there would be a nice view and we were not really doing much else. Our driver looked at us somewhat incredulously as we exited our vehicle on the arid mountainside. We wandered about a bit and enjoyed the view. We then started discussing where we thought the reliefs may be. Some googling later and we found an incredibly weird site with a geo pin (we could not access the coordinates, but we could see a satellite picture of the hike someone had done to reach the reliefs). Using some very technical comparison of the image to google maps, Thomas decided that the reliefs must be basically just down the hill side from our current location. He went in search of these. And I waited, and waited, and waited. Which basically brings us to the point where I thought I may lose Thomas on a mountainside somewhere between Dohuk and Mosul.
In any event, as you may have realized, Thomas did eventually turn up again and, no less, he had found the reliefs! He did not find me, however. On finding the reliefs, Thomas sent me a location pin and suggested I come join him down the mountain. Not an easy feat wearing flip flops. I clambered over the hill and we eventually located each other using the very technical method of yelling loudly and hoping the other was close enough to hear. The Maltai reliefs were truly quite excellent – and we enjoyed them briefly (Thomas was smug) – before we realised that it would be sunset soon and we had not yet determined how to get off of said mountain. Instead of going up to the road, we decided that it looked possible to just hike down to the bottom and across the river to a settlement from which we would no doubt find a taxi. Easier said than done. We did eventually emerge as planned, but were covered in dirt and sweaty messes after clambering down the mountain through gorse and nettles in flip flops. Happily, there was a bar in town. So, following a quick clean up, we congratulated ourselves on not only finding the reliefs, but making it down the mountain, with a whole lot of beer for dinner.
We also went to Daween Castle (also called Salahaddin’s fortress and stunning), Khanzad castle (nice but not as idyllic), Queskapa (or the tomb of Cyaxeres – more Assyrian reliefs) and Jerwan (the remains of the ancient aqueduct that fed Nineveh, the ruins of which have now been discovered under Mosul). The aqueduct was a bit of a kick because while it was not super impressive in itself, it was amazing for what it was part of. Thomas found it by some googling of satellite photos – no signs here team. While we were impressed, our driver was decidedly less so and could really not understand our desire to visit some old rocks.
And finally, the more recent history. While in Sulaymaniyah, we went out to Halabja (the site of one of the major chemical weapons attacks carried out by Saddam and Chemical Ali) and the Amna Suraka (one of Saddam’s torture prisons, which has now been turned into a museum). Halabja had a small museum and not much else, but what information there was, was enough. They also had Saddam’s death certificate framed on the wall. The Amna Suraka was a well put together museum/memorial and similar to Tuol Sleng in Cambodia, but not as big. It was quite crazy going to these sites as there were parents there showing their kids the cells they were kept in when they had been imprisoned.
On a lighter note, Thomas found more carpets in Sully and we ended up having to hitch back to Erbil, via the Queskapa reliefs (that Mr. Kamel, after finding us on the side of the road, kindly took time out of his morning to accompany us to) and Lake Dokan for an enjoyable fish lunch, with massive carpets in our backpacks. Possibly not our best plan, but a bargain nonetheless.
September 2019