50 Fun Facts About Baghdad

On which river does Baghdad stand?

Tigris. Baghdad sits where the river runs closest to the Euphrates, about 40 km away, so canals could join the two and boats brought trade from both.

Which caliph founded Baghdad in 762 AD?

Al-Mansur picked a spot where, by Arab accounts, little stood but a Christian monastery. Its monks are said to have encouraged him to build there.

Which caliphate made Baghdad its capital in the 8th century?

Abbasid caliphs overthrew the Umayyads of Damascus with strong Persian support, so they turned the empire eastward and built their new capital in Iraq, closer to those backers.

What did Baghdad's founder officially name his new capital?

City of Peace, Madinat as-Salam in Arabic, was the official name. People kept using the site's much older name, Baghdad, which in the end replaced it.

Which meaning is most often given for the name Baghdad?

Bestowed by God is the usual reading, from Persian bagh, god, and dad, given, though the origin is disputed. The name is older than Islam, kept from a settlement already on the site.

What shape was the city that Baghdad's founder laid out in 762?

A circle, with the caliph's palace and mosque alone at the centre. The ruler sat at the heart of his capital, and only he was allowed to enter that inner court on horseback.

Which experts chose 30 July 762 as the day to start building Baghdad?

Astrologers. The caliph left the timing of his Islamic capital to Naubakht, a former Zoroastrian, and Mashallah, who was Jewish, and they judged the day auspicious.

A reported 100,000 workers built the caliph's new city of Baghdad out of which material?

Brick. The river plain has no stone quarries and almost no timber, so, like Babylon long before it, the caliph's city rose from sun-dried and kiln-fired mud.

Each of the four gates of Baghdad's original city was named after what?

The place its road led to: Kufa, Basra, Syria and Khurasan. Shops lined the four roads running in from the gates until the caliph moved the markets out of the city.

Which great library and academy made Baghdad the 'Center of Learning'?

House of Wisdom. A later chronicler claimed that Mongol troops threw so many of the city's books into the river in 1258 that the water turned black, though historians now find its libraries soon reopened.

Scholars in ninth-century Baghdad translated the science and philosophy of which ancient civilisation into Arabic?

Greece. Baghdad's translators, many of them Syriac-speaking Christians, put Aristotle, Euclid and Ptolemy into Arabic, and those versions later helped carry Greek learning back to Europe.

Which story collection sets many tales in the Baghdad of the caliphs?

One Thousand and One Nights took its frame story from Persia and India, yet most of the tales themselves are Arabic additions, and a great many of those unfold in the caliphs' capital.

Which Baghdad caliph exchanged gifts and envoys with Charlemagne?

Harun al-Rashid sent the Frankish king silks, perfume, an elephant that reached Aachen in 802, and a water clock that marked the hours by dropping bronze balls into a bowl.

Which Spanish city, seat of a rival caliphate, vied with Baghdad in its golden age?

Córdoba. Its rulers descended from a young Umayyad prince who escaped the massacre of his family and fled across the empire to Spain, where his heirs later declared a caliphate of their own.

To which city did the caliphs move their capital from Baghdad for much of the 9th century?

Samarra. The caliph's Turkish slave-soldiers kept clashing with the people of Baghdad, so in 836 he built a new capital for them, and the court stayed away for over half a century.

When the Seljuks took Baghdad in 1055, real power passed to rulers with which title?

Sultan. Tughril Beg drove out the Buyids, who had controlled Baghdad for a century, and the Seljuk sultans then ruled in the caliph's name, leaving him a respected figurehead.

Hulegu, who sacked Baghdad in 1258, was whose grandson?

Genghis Khan. His grandson Hulegu's capture of Baghdad ended five centuries of caliphs ruling there, and the city never regained its place as the centre of the Islamic world.

Mongols reportedly trampled Baghdad's last caliph after rolling him in what?

A carpet: spilling royal blood was taboo for the Mongols, so they killed him without shedding any. Marco Polo told a different tale, in which the caliph was locked in a tower with his treasure and left to starve.

What did Timur order every one of his soldiers to bring him after storming Baghdad in 1401?

Severed heads: one or two for every soldier, depending on the chronicler. Tens of thousands of townspeople were killed to fill the order.

Which Ottoman ruler first took Baghdad from Persia in the 1530s?

Suleiman the Magnificent took the city without a siege, the shah having given ground instead of fighting, and won over local Sunnis by restoring the tomb of the jurist Abu Hanifa.

Which Persian dynasty seized Baghdad under its founder, Shah Ismail I?

Safavid forces took the city under Shah Ismail I, and for over a century it passed back and forth between Shia Persia and the Sunni Ottomans until a 1639 treaty left it in Ottoman hands for good.

What did Baghdad's reforming Ottoman governor Midhat Pasha tear down around 1870?

The city walls. Midhat Pasha, following the example of European cities, pulled the crumbling ramparts down in a burst of modernising zeal so that the freed land could be used.

Which Baghdad-born merchant family, the 'Rothschilds of the East', built a trading empire across India and China?

The Sassoons. David Sassoon, a leading Baghdad merchant, fled the city and in 1832 settled in Bombay, where he founded the banking and trading firm that made the family's fortune.

The German-financed railway begun towards Baghdad in the 1900s is popularly named after Baghdad and which other city?

Berlin. Germany wanted a route to the Persian Gulf, but money troubles and tunnelling through the Taurus Mountains slowed the line so badly that the first train from Istanbul ran only in 1940.

Britain took Baghdad from the Ottomans in which war?

World War I. General Maude's army marched in on 11 March 1917, ending almost three centuries of unbroken Ottoman rule, and Maude himself died of cholera in the city eight months later.

The 1955 Baghdad Pact joined Iraq, Turkey, Iran, Pakistan and Britain to contain which power?

The Soviet Union. Iraq walked out of its own pact after its monarchy was overthrown, so the headquarters left Baghdad for Ankara and the alliance was renamed CENTO.

Whose 1957 plan for Baghdad included a cultural island and a 300-foot caliph statue?

Frank Lloyd Wright was hired in 1957 to design an opera house and came back with a whole cultural quarter. A year later the monarchy that hired him was overthrown, and none of it was built.

Where in Baghdad was Saddam Hussein's statue toppled in April 2003?

Firdos Square faces the Palestine Hotel, where the foreign press was staying, so the toppling went out live around the world. The statue itself was only a year old, put up for Saddam's 65th birthday.

Baghdad's Victory Arch, two giant fists holding crossed swords, was built to celebrate which war?

Iran–Iraq War. Work on the victory parade ground began in 1986, two years before the fighting ended in stalemate, and the giant fists were modelled on casts of Saddam Hussein's own forearms.

Which colour is the 40-metre split dome of Baghdad's Al-Shaheed Monument?

Turquoise, the colour of the glazed tiles on its two offset half-domes, which shelter an eternal flame. Built for the dead of one war, it is now seen by Iraqis as a memorial to all their fallen.

Which fortified area of Karkh houses Iraq's government and foreign embassies?

The Green Zone had been the closed-off seat of Saddam Hussein's regime, full of palaces and ministries. US forces fortified it further in 2003, so ordinary Baghdadis stayed shut out of the heart of their own capital.

After which 10th-century poet is Baghdad's famous street of bookshops named?

Al-Mutanabbi Street has been the heart of Baghdad's book trade for generations. A car bomb devastated it in March 2007, and it was repaired and officially reopened the following year.

Baghdad's Kadhimiya shrine holds the tombs of two imams revered by which branch of Islam?

Shia Islam. The shrine holds the seventh of the Twelve Imams and his grandson, the ninth; the pair are known as the Kazimayn, the two Kazims, which is why the district around their tombs is called Kadhimiya.

Which Iraqi-born architect designed a Central Bank of Iraq headquarters for Baghdad?

Zaha Hadid, born in Baghdad in 1950, was hired to design the tower in 2010. She died in 2016, before building work in her home city had even begun.

Which international organisation was founded at a conference in Baghdad in September 1960?

OPEC. Iraq, Iran, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela banded together in Baghdad after the big oil companies cut the prices they paid producers; the group's headquarters later settled in Vienna.

An ancient clay jar holding a copper tube and an iron rod is popularly known as the Baghdad what?

Battery. In 1938 a researcher in Baghdad suggested the jar was an electric cell, perhaps for gilding; replicas do produce a small voltage, but no wires or electroplated objects of that age have ever been found.

Which Sasanian capital just downriver, its great arch still standing, was eclipsed by Baghdad?

Ctesiphon had done the same to its own neighbour: it replaced Seleucia, across the river, which had earlier taken the place of Babylon. Baghdad was the latest in a chain of capitals, each supplanting the last.

Which cat word comes from a quarter of medieval Baghdad famed for its watered silk?

Tabby. The Attabiya quarter's watered silk, attabi in Arabic, reached Europe as tabis, and English then borrowed the cloth's name for any cat with a streaked coat.

Which Baghdad institution's antiquities collection was looted during the 2003 invasion?

National Museum of Iraq: looters carried off about 15,000 pieces in April 2003, in the chaos after the city fell. Only some have come back, and the museum did not officially reopen until 2015.

Baghdad's Al-Quwa Al-Jawiya, the oldest football club in Iraq, was founded in 1931 by officers of which service?

The air force. Al-Quwa Al-Jawiya means Air Force: its officers started the club in the very year the service itself was formed, and fans still call the team the Falcons.

Baghdad's summer afternoons average over 40 °C; which climate type does the city have?

Hot desert. Summer rain has almost never been recorded in Baghdad, yet its winters are cool and damp, and on a night or two each year the temperature dips below freezing.

Which branch of mathematics takes its name from a book by the Baghdad scholar al-Khwarizmi?

Algebra comes from al-jabr, 'restoring', in the title of his ninth-century book on solving equations. His own name, mangled in Latin, gave English the word algorithm.

Which animals escaped from Baghdad Zoo during the 2003 battle for the city and inspired a graphic novel?

Lions: four that broke out were shot dead by US soldiers, and the escape became the graphic novel Pride of Baghdad. Of about 650 animals in the zoo, only 35 or so survived the first days of the invasion.

Which Baghdad landmark, opened in 1982, was formerly named Saddam International?

Commercial flights resumed in August 2000 from Jordan, Syria and Lebanon.

Which young king was killed in the July 1958 coup in Baghdad that ended Iraq's monarchy?

Faisal II, aged 23, was killed at his palace with other members of the royal family. The officer who led the coup, Abd al-Karim Qasim, ran the new republic until he was overthrown and killed in 1963.

What name is given to the June 1941 pogrom against the Jews of Baghdad?

The Farhud, Arabic for violent dispossession, broke out in the two-day power vacuum after a pro-Axis government collapsed. It was the turning point for an ancient community, most of which had left Iraq within ten years.

Which British traveller and archaeologist founded Baghdad's museum of antiquities in the 1920s?

Gertrude Bell began gathering finds in a government building in 1922 to stop them leaving Iraq. Her museum opened in June 1926, a few weeks before she died in Baghdad.

Pilgrims of which Indian religion regularly visited Baghdad's Baba Nanak Shrine before 2003?

Sikhism. Its founder, Guru Nanak, is traditionally said to have stopped at Baghdad in the early 1500s on his way home from Mecca, and the shrine marked the spot outside the city where he stayed.

Which crime writer, who kept a house in Baghdad with her archaeologist husband, set a 1951 spy thriller there?

Agatha Christie met her second husband, Max Mallowan, on his dig at Ur in 1930, and the couple kept a Baghdad house for years. She used the city she knew for the thriller They Came to Baghdad.

For more than a thousand years, until the 20th century, what kind of bridge linked the two banks of Baghdad?

Bridges of boats: rows of skiffs roped together and fastened to each bank. A city that once held a million people got no fixed crossing until the British laid an iron one in the 20th century.