Kirkuk

Kirkuk is a working oil city that wears its long past plainly. The citadel sits on a forty-metre mound above the Khasa river, and the climb leads not into a living quarter but through grass and roofless walls — of roughly eight hundred old houses, only a handful escaped demolition in the 1990s. What survives rewards the walk: a run of arcaded Ottoman stonework along the cliff edge, a leaning brick minaret, and the shrine Kirkukis keep as the tomb of the prophet Daniel — a building that served as synagogue, then church, then mosque. Below the mound, the covered qaysari bazaar and the Ottoman Qishla carry on at street level. On the city's edge, inside the oil field, Baba Gurgur burns: natural gas coming straight out of the rock, alight long before the first drill struck oil in 1927. In the bazaar, Kurdish, Arabic, Turkmen and Syriac cross in one lane. That mixing is the city, not a footnote to it.