Because of the regional Kurdish government’s ban on tall buildings in a buffer zone around the citadel, it retains a commanding aspect over the city, and its ancient sobriquet, “the Crown of Erbil.” Even today, much of the road system in Erbil, the capital of Iraq’s Kurdish region, is arranged like the spokes of a wheel, with the citadel as the hub.

May Shaer, an architect who was Unesco’s project director on the citadel, said that there were other sites as ancient, and fortified cities as big, but that few combined a living city on top of an enormous archaeological mound, connecting ancient and modern history in an unbroken stream.

“It is really very rare,” she said, “really interesting.”

To hold on to the citadel’s “continuously occupied” title after the evictions, Kurdish officials arranged for one family to remain in their ancestral home in the middle of the old town.

For some reason, the director of the citadel, Dara al-Yaqoobi, would not allow journalists to meet the family. He said they were too annoyed by repeated visitors, and anyway: “They just sleep here. That is not life, that is not continued habitation.”