Friday is, of course, prayer day consequently there wasn’t much open. The morning sun was particularly fierce as we went to 37C. Fortunately the traffic was light as we started our day at the Firdos square. This site is famous following the world wide footage of the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s statue in 2003 after the US forces took Baghdad. Today it is a smally green leafy square with bare concrete where the statue was. There is no plaque nor signage there to recall the event.
Al Mutanabbi street is open on a Friday and it is a small bustling market place for all things literary and artistic. We battle the crowds and at one point lose our guide. Reunited we wander down to the statue celebrating the eponymous Iraqi poet. I wander ahead, back to a meeting point and wait in the heat. After 15 minutes they have not return so I double back to the statue. None of our group there!
I wait back at the meeting place and after half an hour I go back and fro along the crowded road. I decide I have to retrace my steps through the marketplace and across the bridge where our bus was supposedly parked. No sign of our group and after half an hour there made the call and flagged down a tuk tuk, negotiated a price and hoped that the boy driving it understood where I wanted to go despite the language barrier. Fifteen minutes later I was back at the hotel. Eventually I managed to get the reception staff to locate our local guide and I was back in business.
The afternoon had a real highlight in the Al Shaheed (martyr) monument, commissioned by Saddam to honour the fallen Iraqi soldiers from any wars. Completed in 1983 it consists of 2 x 132 domes like lotus petals encasing a water feature and a massive sculpture of a coffin draped in the Iraqi flag. It is massive, moving and truly beautiful, and like all the tourist sites here we have the place to ourselves.
The final stop was the pretty little sufi mosque with the unique feature of the minaret tower encased within the mosque. In the underground crypt we see the tomb of Chef Marouk Alkarhki.
