A Kurdish mountain region on the Iran-Iraq border, terraced for millennia, with a music that is on the UNESCO list
My Village Hawraman Cafe holds a 4.6 from seven hundred and seventy-two people, charges ten to twenty pounds, and it is named after a real place.
Hawraman
A mountainous Kurdish region straddling the border between Iran and Iraq.
And it is extraordinary to look at – the villages are built into near-vertical slopes, in tiers, so that the roof of one house is the courtyard of the house above it.
The terracing is ancient. It has been farmed continuously for a very long time, and the dry-stone agricultural terraces on those slopes represent an enormous accumulated labour over millennia.
It is on the UNESCO World Heritage list.
The Kurds
Who are, by most estimates, the largest ethnic group in the world without a state.
Somewhere in the region of thirty to forty million people, spread across Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria – and divided by borders that were drawn, in very substantial part, by European powers after the First World War.
The Treaty of Sevres in 1920 contemplated a Kurdish state.
It was superseded by the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923, which did not, and that is essentially where the matter has rested for a century.
The Prat is not going to write a geopolitical analysis in a bar review. We would simply note that the name over this door refers to a place that exists, in a country that does not.
The singing
Which is the thing that makes Hawraman specifically famous.
There is a religious vocal tradition from the region that is on the UNESCO intangible heritage list – a form of chanting performed in gatherings, with a distinctive rhythmic and vocal structure.
And there is a wider Kurdish tradition of the dengbej – the singer, the teller – who holds and performs, from memory, an enormous body of narrative song.
Which is what a culture does when it does not have a state, and therefore does not have institutions, and therefore cannot rely on anybody else to write anything down.
You memorise it. And you sing it. And you teach somebody younger.
The finding
Seven postcodes and seven hundred and six articles.
Every community that has arrived in London with nothing has built its institutions in a room where food and drink are served.
The Huguenots. The Irish. The Italians. The Jewish East End. The Bengalis.
And a Kurdish cafe in Camden, named after a mountain.
Verdict
Excellent, cheap, warm, and a very strong number.
Go, and ask them about the village.
The roofs
Which are the streets, and which is not a metaphor.
The villages of Hawraman are built on slopes so steep that the houses are stacked vertically – and the flat roof of each house forms the terrace, the courtyard, and the through-route of the house above.
Which means you walk across your neighbour’s roof to get home.
And it means the entire village is a single connected structure, in which privacy is essentially a negotiated thing rather than an architectural one.
The Prat’s architectural desk regards this as the most complete inversion of the English relationship to property it has encountered in seven postcodes, and notes that it has worked for several thousand years.
Cyndi Himmelstiere is a satirical journalist at Prat.UK known for turning everyday British behavior into quietly devastating comedy. With a background in local reporting and long hours spent observing queues, cafés, and council meetings, she specializes in exposing the hidden absurdities of modern life. Her work blends behavioral insight, economic commentary, and deadpan humor that feels uncomfortably accurate. Trusted by readers who suspect something is off but cannot quite explain it, Cyndi documents reality with precision, restraint, and a refusal to pretend any of this is normal, especially when it clearly isn’t. She is the author of Could Modern Doctors Have Saved History’s Greats?
A Hackney politician complained that it was making people skeptical about government promises. He didn’t ask why skepticism was unwarranted.