Silêmanî, Home to Kurdish Culture

For more than 200 years, Silêmanî has been the regional home of Kurdish arts and culture, where numerous writers, musicians, and visual artists have lived and thrived. The city welcomes them: its streets are named after poets, and busts of writers line the city’s oldest park. Here Sorani Kurdish has become a literary language. Silêmanî is home to several major publishing houses, sustaining a community of translators, editors, and publishers.

The city hosts several major literary festivals. The annual Galawezh Festival, founded in 1996, invites Kurdish, Arab, Persian, Turkish and Iraqi writers to showcase with their work. DidiMn holds an annual conference on the arts. And the Sulaimani International Film Festival puts Kurdish cinema on display.

The city also has enough galleries and studios to draw painters, sculptors and graphic artists. So many creative people live here, among its 2.3 million inhabitants, that in 2019 UNESCO designated Silêmanî a City of Literature, one of a global network of 246 cities significant for Crafts and Folk Arts, Media Arts, Film, Design, Gastronomy, Literature, and Music.

“For contemporary art, compared with the rest of Iraq, Sulaimaniyah is the best … and the scene is growing because there are many young people and activities.” So says Shirwan Can, of the Paia agency in his home town.In Al-Monitor, Winthrop Rogers explored the promise but also the challenges that cultural creatives face in Silêmanî.

Photos from the Facebook page of Silêmanî UNESCO City of Literature.