Sulaymaniyah

Sulaymaniyah is a planned city with a precise birthday: it was founded in 1784 by Ibrahim Pasha Baban, who moved the seat of the Baban principality here and named it after his father, Sulayman Pasha. The Babans ruled a frontier territory between the Ottoman and Persian empires, playing one against the other, and their court attracted poets and scholars, which set the city's literary reputation early. Nali, Salim and Kurdi, whose writing became the foundation of standard Sorani Kurdish, belonged to this circle. The Ottomans removed the last Baban ruler in 1850 and governed the town directly.

After the First World War, Sheikh Mahmud Barzanji was appointed governor by the British, declared a Kurdish kingdom with Sulaymaniyah as its capital, and rose repeatedly against British and Iraqi authority until 1932, when the Royal Air Force and British-trained Iraqi forces captured him and he was exiled to southern Iraq. The city remained the intellectual centre of Kurdish nationalism, and from the 1970s it was the base of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, founded by Jalal Talabani, later president of Iraq.

The Baʿathist years were brutal here. The security headquarters in the middle of the city, Amna Suraka, held and tortured prisoners; the Anfal campaign of 1988 destroyed villages across the province; and in March 1988 a chemical attack on Halabja, south-east of the city, killed thousands in a day. After the 1991 uprising and the Western no-fly zone the Kurds gained self-rule, though the 1990s brought civil war between the two main Kurdish parties. Since 2003 the city has grown quickly, with new universities, a publishing industry, an airport opened in 2005, and large numbers of people displaced from elsewhere in Iraq.

Sulaymaniyah regards itself as the cultural capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, and the claim is widely accepted. Poetry has been central since the Baban court, and the city produced or sheltered many of the writers who shaped modern Kurdish literature; its bookshops, publishers, newspapers and theatre companies are more numerous than anywhere else in the region. Political argument is a form of public entertainment, conducted in cafés and tea houses, and the city has a tradition of protest and of independent media.

Sorani Kurdish is the language of the street, and the Sulaymaniyah dialect is the one most often heard in Kurdish broadcasting and publishing. Most people are Sunni Muslims, generally relaxed about it; there are also Kaka'i and other minority communities in the province. Politically the city and its province are the stronghold of the Patriotic Union of Kurdistan, in a long rivalry with the Erbil-based Kurdistan Democratic Party.

Newroz on 21 March is the great festival, with bonfires on Goizha and Azmar, dancing and mass picnics; traditional dress comes out, the men in the shal u shapik suit with a sash, the women in long bright dresses. Picnics, mountain outings and weekend drives to lakes and waterfalls are close to a civic habit. The memory of Anfal and Halabja is present in public life — in museums, monuments and annual commemorations — and visitors are expected to treat it seriously.

Several hundred thousand people live in Sulaymaniyah and its immediate surroundings, making it the second city of the Kurdistan Region. It has grown outwards from the bazaar into the mountain slopes and along the western boulevards, with university campuses, hospitals and apartment blocks filling ground that was farmland a generation ago, and villages absorbed into the edges.

Public employment dominates: the regional government, schools, universities, hospitals and the security forces pay a large share of salaries, and the disputes with Baghdad and with Erbil over oil revenue and budget transfers that delay those salaries are a recurring crisis discussed in every tea house. Trade with Iran through the border crossings, construction, small manufacturing, publishing and domestic tourism make up much of the rest.

The rhythm of the day is early: the bazaar opens soon after dawn, business slows in the afternoon heat of summer, and evenings belong to the cafés, parks and the roads up Azmar, where families park to look down on the lights. Winter brings rain, mud and snow on the mountains, and power cuts covered by neighbourhood generators. Water shortages after poor winters, unemployment among graduates and emigration are the standing worries, and protests over unpaid salaries and services are a familiar part of the city's politics.

Kurdish cooking here is home cooking before it is restaurant cooking. Dolma is the dish families make for guests and holidays: vine leaves, aubergines, peppers, onions and courgettes stuffed with spiced rice and meat, packed tight in a pot and cooked in a sour sauce. Quzi, lamb cooked until it falls apart and served over rice with nuts and raisins, is the other celebration dish, and biryani in this region means rice with meat, noodles, almonds and raisins.

Grilled meat is the everyday restaurant meal — minced-lamb kebab, tikka and ribs with flat bread, sumac-dressed onion, tomatoes and yoghurt. Kubba, shells of bulgur or rice filled with spiced meat, come fried or in soup, and shifta, flattened spiced patties, are common. Sawar, wheat that is boiled, dried and pounded, is the old staple of the farming villages, served with stews of beans, okra or aubergine. Bread comes from a clay oven with almost every meal, and breakfast is bread with honey, white cheese, eggs and geymar, thick clotted cream, with date syrup.

The mountains supply the city's best-known products: honey, walnuts, pomegranates, figs and grapes, sold in the bazaar with dried fruit and nut pastes. Man u salwa, a nougat made with manna gathered from oak leaves and studded with nuts, is a speciality of Sulaymaniyah. Tea is drunk all day, strong and very sweet in small waisted glasses; mastaw, salted yoghurt thinned with water, cools a summer meal.