Author: Sophia Schultz, ARCH

Around Valentine’s Day 2019, I was – surprise – in Iraq! A day or two after February 14 – which by the way is a big deal in Erbil (imagine human-sized white teddy bears in front of stores, and women carrying heart shaped red balloons into parked cars) – I picked up my “date” at the airport. And when I say date, I mean my good friend from high school, Nadya.

Nadya had never been to Iraq and voilà here she was. With her tall hiker’s backpack, already in front of the airport’s main door waiting, not because we were late, but because she got through so fast.

Arriving in Iraq went extremely smoothly, landing in a modern small airport, getting through customs took a few minutes. “It was striking how normal it was, given that only a year or two before, the government shut down the Erbil airport, and it all sounded pretty dramatic in the news.” I had the same experience the two times I arrived, very convenient and speedy transit, easy entry.

How did this trip come about? I was in Iraq for work, as part of my organization ARCH International’s Stand With Nineveh project, two weeks in total. Nadya joined me for 4 days and tagged along to wherever I needed to go or met whomever I needed to meet; it worked out really well.

We recently talked about our trip for this blog post.
My question for Nadya was: What are your main memories?

[ Memory No. 1: The Picnics ] One thing that really stuck out to Nadya was how much Kurdish people LOVE to picnic. A family, or a group of friends, 7-10 people usually, two of them often with a musical instrument in tow, some blankets, and a picnic spread.

Often we would see the group gathering close to the street just outside town, with their cars parked nearby, enjoying the beautiful hills. This was Nadya’s favorite cultural phenomenon – wholesome, and also so inviting because she found the landscape so unique and beautiful. “There’s nothing like the natural beauty of Kurdistan.”

[ Memory No. 2: The Extreme Spontaneity of Booking the Flight ] When I knew I‘d be in Iraq for two weeks, I thought who else could join me? In my head I went through my list of friends to see who could be flexible enough, adventurous enough, and didn’t just give birth to a tiny baby. When I asked Nadya she was in the final stretch of an extensive application for a 5-year-grant, getting all the last documents, making sure all 17 parts of the application were completed, working 60-hour weeks for about 2 months. She barely had time to shower, or even think about what she’d do after the submission deadline. And here I am pinging her, urging her to come to Iraq with me.

The first questions she had – is Iraq safe? What is Kurdistan? I told her about my previous trip and she did some quick research, mainly on a Reddit forum tailored to solo travelers. Nadya then decided, compared to other travels she had embarked on, Tanzania, Kenya, that it looked about as safe as anywhere else. I told her about the usual travel routes, people fly to Erbil from Vienna, Frankfurt, Istanbul, … and within days Nadya booked a multi-stop flight USA-Austria-Iraq. Added cross-cultural bonus: February is ball season in Vienna.

Between Mohammed, our driver, and my work contacts, she learned about Kurdistan’s history, the current state of affairs, and other important things, for example that there are two common Kurdish languages. I love to sit in the passenger seat in a car, but sometimes I generously gave up my preferred seat so that Mohammed and Nadya could chat some more – she had so many questions 😉

[ Memory No. 3: The Cuisine ] In the evenings we would eat these huge Kurdish dinners. Different types of kebabs; stews; freshly baked bread, crispy on the outside, soft in the inside, still steaming; appetizer salads, which are so big, that I often ordered a mix of two appetizers as my entrée (f.ex. tabbouleh & baba ghanoush – yum!). And the Turkish-style coffees are so good, too, usually served with a small Turkish Delight treat and a glass of either water or rosewater.

[Memory No. 4: Our Trip to Alqosh ] Can I just quickly say that this is one of my favorite memories? It was also the first time I stayed overnight in Alqosh.

What amazed Nadya here was the stark contrast with Erbil. Like Alqosh, Erbil is a very old city, but it has a modern feel. Busy streets, cabs, towering modern buildings, compounds, malls, “young hip kids, talking about a movie they filmed and released.” By comparison, Alqosh felt like the ancient world. The fact alone that it represents the Christian community in Nineveh, “an enclave of Christians”, that has its roots in the region that are thousands of years old and still stands to this day, much of it unchanged – it was incredible to see in person, like stepping back in time.

We went to visit the Shrine of the Prophet Nahum of course, and the St. Hormizd Monastery. We ate a nice falafel sandwich, maybe two ☺ (“definitely two.” -Nadya), drank tea with Dan from Alqosh at his father’s tea house, hiked up into the mountains, and Father Araam of Alqosh drove us to Dohuk where he took us out for dinner. We stayed the night at the New Hope Trauma Centre established to treat the people of Alqosh who are living with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, an amazing organization.

Nadya’s eyes had been wide-open from all the new places and things, and they were about to open even wider. Nadya is an academic at heart, an epidemiologist by training, and she had had no exposure to historical site restoration. “I was impressed by the work that ARCH was doing in Nineveh. Heritage reconstruction really is its whole own field of science.” She observed that the restoration project was highly specialized, and the engineers belonged to the same niche field. A lot of expertise and craftsmanship is needed to restore a building back to its original authentic self, and she was there at just the right time: both the old and the newly-renovated structures were existing together, since the renovation was still in its early stages. She was so interested to learn more about how some building materials had to be imported, and how much of it had to be skillfully handled: plaster, tiles, wood, and that a team of experts from abroad moved to Alqosh for the project and lives there for months and months in a row. The Czech team and the local workers we hired were on the site working when we arrived. If it fits into their work schedule they are always happy to take a bit of time to show visitors around, even though timing was everything as there were also phases where it would have been too dangerous to enter the site as it was – and still is – an active construction site.

Nadya talked about the value of the project to the local community which does not have the funds to restore the building or even publicize it to tourists internationally, so turning it into a joint international effort seemed like a brilliant way to connect Nineveh with the resources that it needed to keep its heritage alive.

Just being in Alqosh too you learn so much about the region’s history, about the Assyrians, the Chaldeans who speak Neo-Aramaic, and the many sites one can visit in the area. “People who do not live here, often do not even know that these sites exist.”

The next morning we drove to the hilltop city of Amedy.

[ Memory No. 5: Amedy ] Almost like traveling back in time, Amedy felt even older in Nadya’s memory, a city that looked like it was straight out of Game of Thrones, with only ONE entrance, and a “tiny emergency exit in the back.” The city was built on a hilltop, and is completely surrounded by walls. It was very clearly built for another time. We were there to look for the Cantors’ Tomb and Nadya watched me ask a string of five or six people if they’d heard of the tomb or knew where to find it, and admitted that she would have felt like she’s bugging people too much, but we (our driver, and at this point friend, Mohammed and I) kept on going until we found someone who knew what we are talking about. The persistence paid off…

“It is literally in somebody’s garden.” Once the home of the 13th century Knis Navi Yehezkel Synagogue, the site now consists of a small simple building housing the tomb, in the middle of a neglected garden. This garden is right behind a larger mosque, in a nice location of the town, but its owner holds on to it and is not planning to sell the land because he respects the fact that the tomb is holy for some. The two cantors were part of the first group of Jewish residents to settle in Amedy in the late 9th or early 10th century AD.

Side Note: ARCH International would love to restore the holy site of the Cantors’ Tomb – the last relic of a Jewish community in Amedy. Nadya talked about how it was now the second time that she’d ever been in a shrine, and how moving the experience was, to be connected to such distant history. However, we need to secure funding first. If this sounds interesting to you let us know and we will be happy to send you more information.

[ Memory No. 6: Pizza & Beer ] Back in Erbil, in Ankawa, the Christian district of the city, we went to a place where the hype is pizza and beer; stretching different stories in a slim house, it had a very nice atmosphere. Thomas Koessler took us there, the director of Erbil’s Goethe Institute. He was by far the one who showed me most of the cool places in town and made Erbil feel more accessible. The first time I was on a rooftop in Erbil, for example, was with Thomas.

When we walked in and climbed up the stairs, we heard German coming from a high table in a corner and began talking to two German teachers. Nadya and I met at the German School in Maryland so it felt like a funny coincidence to run into two German school teachers at our sister school in Northern Iraq. The two mainly told us about all the problems they face, how they recently could not renew their visas, how the school ran out of toilet paper, and to sum up the mood they conveyed to us, “no one comes here if they’re not running from something.” Well, we were definitely in the country by choice, and we can’t wait to visit again.

[ Memory No. 7: Flying home ] Nadya did not mention it, but I need to because I love coincidences like this. My flight home from Erbil was cancelled and I spent one more day in the city, and then an extra night in Istanbul before I took off to Washington D.C. Nadya’s flight from Vienna back to the U.S. also went through Istanbul, and guess what – on the same day. We ended up on the same flight! AND we managed to sit next to each other. “After such a destiny-filled trip, it ended on a heavy kismet note.”

[ Conclusion ] In Nadya’s words: “The people are extremely kind and hospitable, the food is amazing, don’t sleep on this area, oh, and hire a driver if you can – it opened up a world.”

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