Kerkûk

Arrapha was a Hurrian city whose archive-rich neighbour Nuzi told historians much of what they know about the ancient Near East's daily life. The citadel passed through Assyrian, Seleucid ('Karka'), Sasanian and Ottoman hands, its skyline marked by the tomb attributed to the prophet Daniel and the blue-tiled Gök Kümbet. Oil changed everything: the Baba Gurgur gusher of 1927 made Kirkuk the hub of Iraq's northern oilfields, drew workers of every community, and put the city at the centre of the still-unresolved dispute over the territories claimed by both Baghdad and the Kurdistan Region (Article 140 of Iraq's constitution).

Kirkuk is proverbially the city of three languages — Kurdish, Turkmen and Arabic — with a songbook to match: the Turkmen hoyrat sung in its tea houses, Kurdish maqams, and a modern literary school that wrote in all three. Its korsi-warmed winters, citadel weddings and oil-company neighbourhoods have been described by a whole generation of Iraqi writers.

One of the hottest corners of Kurdistan — long summers well above 40 °C, mild winters and under 400 mm of rain on the steppe edge.

Places in Kerkûk

• Qelata Kerkûkê — The walled mound above the Khasa river, layered with four thousand years of the city — Ottoman houses, the Gök Kümbet tomb tower of 1361 and the shrine of the prophet Daniel.
• Qişleya Kerkûkê — The Ottoman barracks of 1863 by the stone bridge, restored as a cultural centre — arcaded courtyards that once drilled soldiers now host book fairs.
• Baba Gurgur — The 'father of flames' — a field where natural gas has burned at the surface for thousands of years, and where the great oil strike of 14 October 1927 began Iraq's petroleum age. Pictured in the 1930s.