Sulaimaniyah is considered the cultural capital of the Iraqi Kurdistan region. It was there that celebrated poets such as Nali and Salim wrote in the Sorani dialect of Kurdish in the early 19th century. It is one of the most liberal cities in the country, boasting music halls, bookstores, historic tea houses and public parks with busts of popular authors.

By the end of the summer, the city will unveil a new cultural and art space in the historical tobacco factory, a huge derelict industrial complex that looms over central Salim Street, one of the city’s main arteries.

The Sulaimaniyah Tobacco Factory was built in the mid-1950s and was operational by 1961. In its early years, the factory produced over 700 million Al-Jamhuriya cigarettes per year. An independent documentary produced by Taher Abdulwahid in 2010 quotes Mahmud Abdulrahman, Sulaimaniyah’s general director for industry until 2013, that in its heyday in the 1980s, the factory produced 23-24 million packs of cigarettes annually and provided income for 3,000 families.

Production, however, ground to a halt in 1990 when the United Nations Security Council placed a near-total embargo on Baathist Iraq after its invasion of Kuwait. The following year, Kurds rose up against Saddam Hussein’s regime, quickly leading to semi-autonomy.