Urmia, the capital of Iran’s West Azerbaijan province, has a history of medieval architecture, reform newspapers and Assyrian publishing. War and displacement disrupted these networks; the nearby lake adds a separate environmental history.

Upward view of Se Gonbad’s brick entrance at Urmia, with geometric ornament, an inscription band and recessed vaulting against blue sky
The decorated entrance of Se Gonbad, photographed in Urmia by Toni Afshar on 4 October 2015, CC BY-SA 4.0. This architectural detail is not a view of the whole city. [8] © Toni Afshar · Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 4.0.

City, province and historical names

Urmia, also written Orumiyeh and known in Kurdish as Wirmê, is the administrative centre of West Azerbaijan in northwestern Iran. Wolfram Kleiss records its former name Reza’iya, used before 1979, and warns that modern administrative boundaries do not match the limits of ethnic and tribal areas. [1] A provincial name therefore cannot, by itself, describe every resident’s language or identity. Historical accounts of the surrounding plain also need to be distinguished from accounts of the city itself.

Medieval buildings and older settlement

Kleiss identifies Se Gonbad as a Seljuk-period tomb tower and the Friday Mosque’s thirteenth-century mihrab as an important example of carved stucco. [2] These are specific surviving monuments rather than evidence for an unchanged city across millennia. Archaeological surveys also document Urartian forts and inscriptions around the lake, including Qalʿa Esmaʿil Aqa west of Urmia. [1] Those regional remains do not by themselves establish a derivation of the city’s name from Urartu. The photograph above focuses on the geometric decoration and inscription of Se Gonbad’s entrance. [8]

A newspaper addressing local needs

Nassereddin Parvin’s study identifies the Urmia newspaper Faryad as a reformist publication issued between 6 March and 12 December 1907. Its effective editor was Mirza Mahmud Ghanizadeh Dilmaqani. A regular column addressed the city’s needs; occasional contributions appeared in Azeri Turkish alongside its Persian content. It was typeset at Urmia’s American Press. [3] This evidence gives the city an identifiable civic and publishing history, with named editors and dated issues, rather than a generic reputation for cultural diversity.

Assyrian readers and transregional connections

Lina Yakubova traces Urmia Orthodokseta, the Russian Orthodox mission’s monthly, from 1904 to 1914 with an interruption. Separate Russian and Assyrian Neo-Aramaic editions served different readerships; subscribers extended beyond Urmia and nearby villages to Tbilisi and Yerevan. The editions later diverged in content, with the Neo-Aramaic version becoming more explicitly religious. [4] Their circulation demonstrates connections between readers, churches and migration networks. It does not provide a census of the city’s ethnic composition.

War, violence and lost writings

Martin van Bruinessen places the region’s wartime upheaval within shifting Ottoman, Russian, Iranian and British involvement. He records that Simko invited the Assyrian patriarch Mar Shimun to negotiations and had him and his companions killed, followed by further massacres between Christians and Muslims and the flight of Assyrians southward. [5] Responsibility for such acts belongs to the leaders and forces involved, not to entire present-day communities. David G. Malick’s study supplies a personal consequence: the Assyrian writer Mirza Dawid Malik fled Urmia in July 1918, leaving his writings behind. His surviving refugee manuscripts were written in France and Chicago; his reported History of the City of Urmia is not known to survive. [6]

The city and the changing lake

Lake Urmia is a separate geographical feature whose water coverage changes sharply. NASA’s Landsat comparison documents a nearly dry lakebed on 7 September 2023 after a wetter period several years earlier. It links the longer decline to water withdrawals and drought. [7] That dated observation should not be treated as a measurement of the shoreline today. Reading the city’s history alongside the basin’s water history reveals different kinds of change: administrative boundaries, publishing networks, displacement and environmental pressure.

Sources and further reading

  1. Wolfram Kleiss, Azarbaijan ii. Archaeology, Encyclopaedia Iranica III/2 (1987), 215–221, updated 1 November 2017; administrative geography and regional archaeology.
  2. Wolfram Kleiss, Azarbaijan xii. Monuments, Encyclopaedia Iranica, 20 July 2002, updated 11 October 2016; Se Gonbad and the Friday Mosque.
  3. Nassereddin Parvin, Faryad, Encyclopaedia Iranica IX/4 (1999), 383–384, updated 27 May 2013; Urmia’s 1907 newspaper.
  4. Lina Yakubova, Urmia Orthodokseta, Encyclopaedia Iranica, 25 July 2016, updated 26 July 2016; languages, readership and publication history.
  5. Martin van Bruinessen, A Kurdish Warlord on the Turkish–Persian Frontier: Ismaʿil Agha Simko, in Touraj Atabaki, ed., Iran and the First World War (2006), 69–93; author-uploaded manuscript, opening pages.
  6. David G. Malick, Malik, Dawid Giwargis, Encyclopaedia Iranica, 4 October 2016, updated 14 October 2016; displacement and manuscript survival.
  7. NASA Earth Observatory, Lake Urmia Shrivels Again, 10 October 2023; dated Landsat observations and drying pressures.
  8. Toni Afshar, Segonbad-001, 4 October 2015, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.