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Illustration: Erbil Citadel
Single-line illustration from the museum’s identity guide.

Landmark 09 / 10

Erbil Citadel

  • Erbil · UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2014
  • Settled for at least six thousand years · standing fabric Ottoman
  • The tell rises about 25–32 m above the plain · area about 102,000 m²

Engineering story

A city built on a city

Why it matters

A mound of accumulated layers of habitation, its flanks sloping at about 45 degrees. The citadel’s wall is itself the façades of roughly a hundred houses built against one another and braced by buttresses: the house became the rampart. Lanes one to two and a half metres wide branch from the southern gate like the limbs of a tree, and the Ottoman house has a raised arcade over its courtyard, a flat roof and a bent-access entrance that keeps it private.

In the documentary series19. Ilkhanid, Jalayirid, Turkmen, Safavid and Ottoman PeriodsSix centuries of variety under one banner after another
On the map