By Jamie Watt
By mid-afternoon this week the thermometer was close to forty degrees, and Erbil did what it always does in June. The streets emptied, the shutters came down, and the city waited for the evening. You can feel one of these hot days coming before any screen confirms it. And every year the heat points to the same thing: Erbil has been dealing with the sun for a very long time, and it is doing it better now than ever before.
The oldest answer is built into the Citadel itself. The people who raised it knew the sun well. The walls are thick, holding the cool of the night until late in the afternoon. The lanes are narrow and shade one another. The houses turn inward, around courtyards that stay still and quiet through the worst of the heat. The covered Qaysari Bazaar does the same, turning a blazing street into a corridor of shade where merchants have traded for centuries. That was hard-won knowledge, handed down over generations, and the city is putting it to use today as it grows.
I feel it most in Sami Abdulrahman Park after dark. Anyone who lives here knows it. You come in off the hot street and within a few steps the air turns. The heat leaves your shoulders, the temperature drops into the mid-twenties, and you see that half the city has had the same idea. Families lay blankets on the grass. Children run around in the half-light. Tea appears, and people stay talking well past midnight. A generation ago this land held painful memories. Now it is green and full of life on a summer night, and to me it shows plainly how far Erbil has come.
I do not want to pretend the heat is easy. For an elderly resident, for the men working all day under an open sky, for a family in a home that never really cools down, a Kurdish summer is hard, and the worst afternoons can wear a person down. I say this because it is true, and because it is the whole point of the work. In a climate like this, shade and water and green space matter more than people often realize. They are how ordinary people get through the season.
And the work is real. Five new parks are going in across the city center, adding more than forty thousand trees between them. One of the largest is rising on the old Rashkin village site along 120-Meter Street, and another is replacing a former market in Krekaran. Around the city as a whole, the Erbil Green Belt, an eighty-three-kilometer ring of greenery launched by Prime Minister Masrour Barzani, will plant seven million olive and pistachio trees in its first phase and aims to raise the capital’s green cover toward twenty-five percent. “This project will absorb carbon dioxide and release oxygen back into Erbil’s atmosphere,” the Prime Minister said at the launch, “creating cleaner air and a better quality of life for our people.” Once finished, it is expected to remove around 210,000 tons of carbon from the air every year, hold back the dust storms, and give thousands of young Kurds work. This is the kind of development Kurdistan can be proud of.
What gives me the most hope is that Erbil is building for the summers the next generation will face: shade in the public squares, lighter rooftops that reflect the sun, more fountains and trees in the places where people actually gather. None of this is the work of a single season, and it should not be. At the launch of the Green Belt, Prime Minister Barzani quoted Mawlana Jalaluddin Rumi: “The flower blooms because of the rain, not because of the thunder.” Erbil’s summers will stay hot. But the city is slowly becoming a cooler and greener one, and a more generous one, and I am glad to be here to see it grow.