These alliances were looked upon with great disfavour and some alarm by the Turks, whose keenest desire is to see the Jaf on bad terms with their neighbours in Persia. Consequently when Uthman Pasha in 1895 announced his intention of marrying into the family of the Ardalan Vazirs, some futile opposition was offered by the Turkish Government. However, he proceeded to Sina and brought home to Halabja, then an insignificant village, as bride, a lady of the Vazir family whose father occupied an important position in Teheran.
Once installed at Halabja, Lady Adela proceeded, aided by the prestige of her family, to assert her position, a procedure not opposed by Uthman Pasha. She built two fine houses, finer than any edifice in Sulaimania, upon the Sina model, importing Persian masons and artificers to do the work. Her servants were all Persian subjects, and in Halabja she instituted in her new houses a little colony of Persian Kurds, and opened her doors to all travellers from and to that country, and kept continual communications with Sina, five days’ journey away.
Gradually the official power came into her hands. Uthman Pasha was often called away to attend to affairs, and occasionally had to perform journeys to Sulaimania, Kirkuk, and Mosul on matters of government. So Lady Adela, governing for him in his absence, built a new prison, and instituted a court of justice of which she was president, and so consolidated her own power, that the Pasha, when he was at Halabja, spent his time smoking a water pipe, building new baths, and carrying out local improvements, while his wife ruled.
She built a bazaar in Halabja, a square construction having four covered rows of shops connected by alleys of more shops, all covered in and domed with good brick arches, and trade flowed in to Halabja, which grew to considerable importance. Such importance did the place attain that the Turks actually grew jealous, and to obtain a hold over it, put up a telegraph line, to which the tribesmen objected, and expressed their objection by cutting down the wire. At the same time Lady Adela advised the Turks not to repair it, for she too objected to the incursion of Turks upon her territory, and warned them that as fast as they built up telegraph wires her people should cut them down. And so to-day Halabja possesses no telegraph line, though a uniformed official lives there and rejoices in the title of Post and Telegraph Master. Every summer, when the climate of Halabja becomes oppressively hot, the court of Lady Adela repairs to a little village in the hills, or to a town in Persian territory, where some three or four months are passed.
In and around Halabja Lady Adela has instituted the Persian fashion of making gardens, apart from the gardens around the houses, and now outside the little town are several of the graceful and thickly treed gardens which are only seen in Persia, gardens which are wildernesses of large shady trees, with unsuspected bowers and flower-beds in their shady depths.
So here, in a remote corner of the Turkish Empire, which decays and retrogrades, is one little spot, which, under the rule of a Kurdish woman has risen from a village to be a town, and one hill-side, once barren, now sprinkled with gardens; and these are in a measure renovations of the ancient state of these parts.
Shahr-i-Zur, or Sharizur, used to be called by some Shahr-i-Bazar, and until recently its capital was a place called Gulambar, which is under the Aoraman mountain, and there is a legend to the effect that at earlier times a village called Ahmad Kulwan, across the northern mountains, used to be the capital.
However that may be, in the Sasanian times of Persia, when Qasr-i-Shirin was built, and Farhad hewed at the mountain of Bisitun, there was a great town named Hulwan. This was about the year A.D. 400. Hulwan and its territories extended up to what is now known as Shahr-i-Zur, and behind the site of the modern Halabja, in the hills which form an amphitheatre behind it, there was a large town called Sasan. Here were great stone buildings, and their ruins still stand, ordinary walls and pillars of the great Sasanian age of Persia. There is every indication, besides legend, to show that a great city existed here, and in the Shahr-i-Zur plain below were a number of villages whose inhabitants cultivated its rich and well-watered soil. To-day there are but a number of large, high mounds, a sure indication of ancient inhabitation. Shahr-i-Zur was so well protected by its hills, that it is no wonder that the ancient kings looked upon it as a specially favoured spot, and favourable to development and commerce. Around all sides is a high ring of mountains, except upon the north-west, and besides its ring of hills a swift, strong river shuts them in upon the southern side.
HULWAN
Across this, from Sasan, a great bridge was built into the territory of Hulwan, a part of which still stands. Shahr-i-Zur means the “Strong City,” and Shahr-i-Bazar, “The Market Town”—both equally appropriate names, but there is no proof as to which was originally employed to designate the plain.