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SAMARRA (Iraq): The name means “happy is he who sees it” but few people do these days.
Samarra, on the banks of the Tigris river some 100 km north of Baghdad, was once the relaxed centre of a world empire stretching from Morocco to China.
Wary of the growing power of the Turkish slave soldiers he had imported into the capital of the Abbasid Islamic empire, Caliph Mutasim moved his court in its entirety in AD 833 to a new city in the calmer climes of Iraq’s central plains.
The garden city, with its huge mosque, minaret, and 25-km -long central street, was a return to the spacious and simple style of the Arabs who had conquered the region 200 years before, and a contrast to Persian-influenced Baghdad.
But international isolation under United Nations sanctions imposed during the 1990-1 Gulf crisis, when Iraq invaded Kuwait, has kept the tourists away.
With only a few European tour groups passing through the country, religious tourism from neighbouring Iran has formed the main interest in recent years. Iraq opened its borders to pilgrims visiting Shia shrines in 2000.
The modern town of Samarra houses a shrine to three of the 12 Imams revered by Shias.
One of the three is the 12th Imam, who, according to Shia theology, disappeared here to return one day as a Messiah figure.
MONUMENTS NEGLECTED: Isolation has also had its consequences for the upkeep of Iraq’s wealth of antiquities which suffered during the 1991 fighting, said Donny Youkhanna, an Iraqi archaeologist.
“After the war we counted 400 machinegun shots on the walls of the remains of the city of Ur. At the ancient remains of Hatra in the north an arch collapsed from the effects of nearby bombings,” he said. There is no money to restore them.
The last year has seen improvements, with the return of French, Italian, Austrian and German missions to up to 25 sites that have been excavated in the last 10 years.
In April, a delegation of six Iraqi experts was able to take part in a conference on north Iraq’s Assyrian culture organised by the British Museum, Youkhanna said.
Shut off from the world and other scholars of Mesopotamian history, Youkhanna and his colleagues have furthered their ideas about Iraq’s early history.
He believes that Iraq’s first inhabitants around 10,000 BC were the same Sumerian people who formed Iraq’s first great empire in the south around 3,000 BC, at the time the Pharaohs united Egypt.
The Sumerians, who invented writing, remain a mystery to scholars since they were ethnically and linguistically distinct from the Semitic peoples, including the Arabs and the Babylonians, who subsequently populated Iraq.
“We believe strongly that the Sumerians are the (first) real people of the country,” Youkhanna said.
MONGOL TERROR: Iraq’s long history has given its people long memories.
Samarrans — today, Sunni Muslims — sit drinking tea in the late afternoon, detached from the fervour of the pilgrims, and talk of the city’s demise as if it happened yesterday.
“When the caliphs went back to Baghdad, the place went to ruins. It went from ‘happy is he who sees it’ to ‘unfortunate is he who sees it’,” said Khaldoun, a guard at some sites.—Reuters
