Amedi

Amedi, also written Amadiya, is a small town built on the flat top of a steep-sided mesa in the mountains of Duhok governorate, in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq, close to the border with Turkey. The cliffs fall away on every side, so that the houses seem to sit on a stone table above the valleys of the Great Zab basin, and for most of its history the town could only be entered through its gates.

A fortress stood here in antiquity. The town's name is usually linked with Imad al-Din Zengi, the twelfth-century ruler of Mosul, who rebuilt the stronghold. Later Amedi was the seat of the Bahdinan emirate, a Kurdish principality that governed the surrounding mountains from the fourteenth century until the Ottomans brought it under direct rule in the nineteenth. A local tradition, among several in the region, holds that the three Magi who visited the infant Jesus set out from here.

Amedi was home to Muslims, Jews and Christians for centuries; its Jewish community, one of the oldest in Kurdistan, left for Israel in the early 1950s. The town keeps a tall minaret from its old mosque and the Badinan Gate, carved with weathered figures in relief, at the head of steps cut into the rock. From the cliff edge visitors look out over orchards, villages and the mountains along the Turkish border. In recent years the town has become a favourite destination for visitors from across Iraq, who come in summer for the cool mountain air, and work has begun to conserve its old houses, gates and walls.