Kirmaşan
کرماشان
Kermanshah · Great city of the southern Zagros. Sasanian rock arches and the largest Kurdish-majority city.
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- Region
- Rojhilat
- English name
- Kermanshah
- Kurdish name
- Kirmaşan
- Sorani name
- کرماشان
- Population
- 946,681 (2016, city)
- Elevation
- 1,350 m
- Founded/origin
- A Sasanian royal foundation, commonly dated to the 4th century AD, in a landscape carved with far older monuments — Darius's Bisotun inscription stands just up the royal road.
Kermanshah sat on the great road from Baghdad to the Iranian plateau, and the Sasanian kings chose the spring-fed cliff at its edge for their hunting reliefs — the arches of Taq-e Bostan. A provincial capital under successive Persian empires with a strong Kurdish tribal hinterland (Kelhur, Guran, Sencabî), it prospered in the 19th century on the Baghdad trade. The city was devastated in the Iran–Iraq war and rebuilt; it remains Rojhilat's biggest urban centre and one of Iran's major cities.
Kermanshah is the capital of Southern Kurdish (Kelhurî) speech and of the Yarsan (Ahl-e Haqq) faith, whose sacred tanbur music was born in the villages around it. Famous for nan-e berenji sweets, giant-plane-tree courtyards and the tilework theatre of Tekyeh Moaven ol-Molk, it has produced a run of celebrated musicians and writers in both Kurdish and Persian.
Highland climate: hot dry summers, cold winters with snow on the Zagros above the city, and around 450 mm of yearly rain.
Places in Kirmaşan
- Taqwesan — Sasanian rock arches at a spring on the city's edge — the armoured knight of Khosrow II, boar-hunt friezes and royal investitures carved in the 4th–7th centuries.
- Tekyeh Moaven ol-Molk — Qajar-era mourning house (1892–1917) whose walls are a picture-book of glazed tiles — Karbala, Persian kings and even the cities of the hajj, room after room.
- Bêstûn — The cliff where Darius I carved his trilingual inscription (c. 520 BC) — the key that unlocked cuneiform, a UNESCO World Heritage Site 35 km up the old royal road.