Erbil Citadel is claimed to be one of the oldest places on Earth where people have never stopped living — a single mound inhabited for at least six thousand years, and by some counts closer to eight thousand. The oval hill is not a natural rise but the debris of that habitation: mudbrick house built directly on mudbrick house, generation over generation, through Assyrian, Babylonian, Persian and Ottoman rule, until the accumulated ruins lifted the town as much as thirty metres above the surrounding plain. In antiquity this was Arbela, a major religious centre of the Assyrian empire, and cuneiform records place a great temple somewhere beneath the streets you walk today. A single grand gateway, flanked by a nineteenth-century clock tower, still marks the only formal way up into the ring of lanes inside. In 2014 UNESCO inscribed the citadel as a World Heritage Site, a living record of a Mesopotamian town.
The mound now rises straight out of the modern city, its foot wrapped by the vaulted Qaysari Bazaar. In 2007 almost all of its residents were moved out so the crumbling interior could be restored, and much of it is still a careful building site: narrow lanes wind past rebuilt Ottoman courtyard houses, a hammam and the Kurdish Textile Museum, with whole sections fenced off as the work goes on. Climb to the ramparts and Erbil opens below — fountains, minarets and the sprawl of the bazaar circling the hill exactly as the city always has. Come in the last hour of daylight, when the tawny brick warms to amber and the lamps of the modern town flicker on beneath you, and the strange fact of the place turns physical: you are standing on the stacked roofs of thousands of years of unbroken life.