Baghdad's culture runs on two currents: the Abbasid brickwork of Mustansiriya and Khan Murjan, and the 20th-century modernism of Jawad Salim and the Baghdad Group. Three days of museums, theatres, coppersmith souqs and studio openings.
Iraq's national collection of 20th-century painting and sculpture, rebuilt after the 2003 looting stripped some 8,000 works. Jawad Salim, Faeq Hassan and the Baghdad Modern Art Group hang in the Gulbenkian galleries. Open Sun–Thu 09:00–14:00.
Built 1227–1234 by the Abbasid caliph al-Mustansir, one of the oldest surviving universities on earth. The brick facade carries kufic banding and muqarnas hoods; the courtyard still holds the water-clock niche and the iwan lecture halls.
A 12th–13th-century brick complex on the Tigris bank, long argued to be a madrasa of caliph al-Nasir. Two storeys of pointed arcades ring the court, and the muqarnas vaulting over the great iwan is the finest surviving Abbasid brickwork in the city.
Jawad Salim's 50-metre bronze frieze of 1961 reads right to left like Arabic script: fourteen cast figures carrying the 1958 revolution from prison and mourning through to freedom, floated on a travertine beam above the square.
Iraq's main stage and home of the National Company for Acting, also hosting the Iraqi National Symphony Orchestra's larger concerts. The repertoire runs from Arabic-language Shakespeare to political satire; posters go up at the gate.
The institute that trained most of Iraq's modernists since 1936, on Zaytoun Street in Mansour. Student sculpture fills the yard and the corridor galleries hang end-of-year shows; visitors who sign in at the gate are usually waved through.
Wax-figure tableaux of Baghdadi life before oil: the storyteller in the qahwa, the coppersmith at his anvil, the henna night, the Jewish and Christian quarters. Set in a restored Ottoman building on Mamoun Street by the Shuhada Bridge.
Baghdad's independent contemporary-art collective runs studios, film nights and the Baghdad Walk festival out of a converted house in Karrada. Evening openings pull in the city's under-35 painters, photographers and musicians.
The gold-domed shrine of the seventh and ninth Shia imams anchors a whole district of mirror-work halls, silver doors and covered market lanes. Non-Muslims are generally not admitted inside, but the surrounding souq is open to all.
The coppersmiths' market off Al-Rasheed Street, where workshops still beat trays, coffee pots and cauldrons by hand. The hammering is the point — it has been the soundtrack of Baghdad commerce since the Ottoman period.
Built in 1359 as a caravanserai beside the Murjan Mosque, its enormous brick barrel vault sheltered merchants' animals below and lodgings above. It served for decades as Baghdad's grandest restaurant; the shell and its inscriptions survive.
Adhamiya wraps around the Abu Hanifa Mosque and its 11th-century minaret, the Sunni counterpart to Kadhimiya across the river. Antar Square's teahouses, kebab grills and bookstalls fill up after evening prayer.