The Muzaffariya minaret or muzaffariya lighthouse in the city of Erbil, 1154-1233
Muzaffariya Lighthouse or Jolly Lighthouse, is an ancient lighthouse that was established during the era of the Atabeg Muzaffar al-Din Kawkapuri, 1154 AD - 1233 AD who ruled Erbil in the days of the Atabeg (Erbil Mosul), The Mudhaffari lighthouse is located on the western side of the Kurdish city of Erbil, and this lighthouse is considered the second largest historical landmark in the city of Erbil after the Citadel of Erbil. The lighthouse is about 500 meters away from the Citadel. The fame of the Mudhaffari minaret became famous due to the beauty of its view and the engineering of its construction. It is believed that it was built in the era of Atabegiya of Erbil and Mosul, the days of the rule of the Sultan Muzaffar al-Din Koukbari of the city of Erbil. On the walls of the lighthouse, the date of its construction and the nationality of its engineer,
And the Sultan Muzaffar al-Din Kokbari, whose title means the blue wolf , was the son-in-law of the Kurdish Ayyubid sultan Sultan Salah al-Din al-Ayyubi, The height of the Mudhaffari minaret is about 37 meters, and its diameter is 21 feet.
It is built of red bricks and stucco, and is built on an octagonal base of equal lengths except for two sides. It consists of an octagonal geometric bottom, and a cylindrical upper part. The minaret is decorated from its external facades with motifs very similar to the motifs of Sinjar Minaret, Al-Hadba Minaret and Daqouq Minaret. The Al-Muzaffariyyah lighthouse has two gates, each door is about two and a half meters long, and each door leads to stairs leading to the top of the lighthouse. Inside the lighthouse there is a cylindrical building whose diameter becomes smaller as you ascend to the top. The staircase revolves around it, as one enters through the aforementioned two doors to ascend to the top of the lighthouse. The number of steps for each ladder is 132 from each side. There is no convergence between them except in the floor of the lighthouse and above. The lighthouse, so that two people can go up or down at the same time without seeing each other, and the lighthouse has a window in the middle of its height on the eastern side for air movement. According to some circulating narrations, Al-Muzaffariya Minaret was approximately 45 meters high, and that was before the upper part of it was hit by a lightning bolt in the spring season, when lightning, thunder, and rain showers abound in the city of Erbil and its suburbs, and the thunderbolt was spared from about 8 meters high, There is a folk tale narrated from generation to generation about Al-Muzaffariya Lighthouse and the purpose of building the two staircases in it, and the reasons for the similarity between it and other lighthouses in Kurdistan. Among them, it is narrated that the engineer who executed the lighthouse was a student of the engineer of Daqouq Lighthouse located in the south of the city of Kirkuk, but as a result of a dispute between him and his teacher during the construction of Daqouq Lighthouse, the student leaves his teacher, and builds the Muzaffariya Lighthouse in Erbil , which was later called the Çolî lighthouse, which means the lighthouse of the wilderness in the Kurdish language, because of the lighthouse’s distance from the Citadel of Erbil and the residential neighborhoods surrounding it, and the student realizes that his teacher will definitely visit him after hearing the news of the construction of this lighthouse, so he prepares for that visit From the beginning, he expects envy and grudge from his teacher if he sees this lofty building that was built in a better way than his teacher built for the Daquq minaret, and that his teacher will come later to see the minaret, so he thinks of building two staircases inside the cylinder of the minaret, and when his teacher visits the city of Erbil, the professor asks his student They climb the minaret together, so the teacher begins to climb from the first staircase without realizing that there is a second staircase, while the student climbs from the second staircase, and they meet at the top of the minaret, and then the student realizes that his teacher is in an abnormal psychological state, so the student gets scared and rushes down the stairs. The first, and the professor believes that the second staircase meets the first on the way down, so he chooses the second, and they meet again on the ground, and there are people following the event, then the professor in front of the people congratulates his student on this achievement, and travels to the city of Mosul to build a better lighthouse than his student. He builds a lighthouse, and concludes that its lighthouse is tilted and is expected to fall at any moment, but he failed in his endeavor, and that lighthouse was called the Al-Hadba Lighthouse. here are old pictures of the Mudhaffariyya minaret dating back to the mid-twentieth century AD, in which the minaret appears to be alone in an open courtyard. While the lighthouse is now in the center of the city of Erbil, as a result of the wide urban movement that Erbil witnessed after the year 1991 AD, and then the rapid reconstruction movement of the city after the year 2003 AD, And in the year 2009 AD, an Italian company, in cooperation with the Department of Antiquities of the Kurdistan Ministry of Culture, restored Al-Muzaffariya Minaret to protect it from falling, because its floor had recently become soft and fragile, and it is now considered one of the archaeological symbols and tourist attractions in the city of Erbil.[1] [2]