Postcard from Irbid: Urban sprawl masks archaeological gems in Jordan’s northern city

The kingdom's ‘bride of the north’ is rarely part of the tourist itinerary

Clock tower, central Irbid, Jordan. All photos: Khaled Yacoub Oweis / The National

The city centre

A monument to the poet Mustafa Wahbi Tal in front of the new municipal building

Central Irbid

The clock tower

The new municipality

Cask, Irbid museum

Bronze statue, Irbid museum

The Irbid museum has a mosaics section

Basalt garnet from the norther Himmeh valley, Irbid museum

Philoahwe, originally excavated from the Greco-Roman city of Gadara near Irbid

Arab calligraphy on stone at the Irbid museum

Paleolithic stone with engraved design

The Tal family house, which is open to the public

Pictures of Wasfi Tal, the Jordanian prime minister assassinated in 1972, hang at the Tal House in the old quarter of Irbid

Guest room, Tal House

The courtyard of the Irbid museum

A fragment of the ruins of the theatre

Syrian-owned Al Sawlajan, Irbid’s top Arab sweets maker

Irbid has many unfinished buildings

The Roman theatre at Catapolias, on the edge of Irbid

An olive grove inside the city

An ancient olive press

The outskirts of the city

Pausing for directions in Irbid, Jordan’s third city, can turn into a protracted process. Once it becomes clear that the person asking is not from the area, inhabitants often extend an invitation to visit their homes for a meal, or at least a cup of tea.

Many of the people in Irbid have not forgotten their roots in rural areas, where opening homes to strangers is regarded as a duty. The city is in the north-west of Jordan, on the edge of Hauran, the ancient agricultural plain in the centre of the Levant.

Irbid has expanded over several decades with the establishment of two state universities, along with state-sponsored industrial estates and government agencies. Outlying villages have become urban neighbourhoods, although many new buildings remain unfinished – an indication of Jordan's economic stagnation over the past 15 years.

Amid the construction survive olive groves and grain fields that produce small brown lentils, tastier than the Turkish variety that dominates the market.

Thousands of Syrians fleeing civil war since 2011 have taken refuge in Irbid because of its proximity to their homeland, expanding the city's pool of skilled labour and enhancing its cuisine. Many of them have family links to the area, which was not interrupted by borders before the modern Arab Middle East was carved from the remnants of the Ottoman empire in the 1920s.

But few of the hundreds of thousands of tourists who visit Jordan each year venture into Irbid. Although the city is dubbed “the bride of the north”, not much is believed to be there. Its entrance is littered with car wrecks, rubble and rubbish. The city is dense and congested, and it takes patience, passing through one traffic light after another, to reach the old quarter – one of very few districts in Jordan with courtyard houses, influenced by the residential architecture of Old Damascus.

One of the biggest and best preserved homes, belonging to the Tal family, is open to anyone. Every Ramadan it hosts iftars for rubbish collectors, a widely ignored segment of society. The family produced two of Jordan's important figures: Wasfi Tal, the prime minister assassinated during an official trip to Egypt in 1971, and Mustafa Wahbi Tal, pen name Arar, who is widely acknowledged as the best poet in the country's modern history.

Arar, who died one day before his 50th birthday in 1949, befriended members of the gypsy community and was seen as a bohemian of sorts. His house on a nearby hill is now a museum, which closes at 2pm. There is also a small monument to him, with a drawing of the long-haired poet, in front of the giant new local government building in a square devoid of any architectural features, in contrast to the old Ottoman governor's house opposite.

The Ottoman building, known as the Saray, has been turned into the city's museum. On one afternoon this week, there were only three people there. “This is fantastic,” said Mohammad Mansi, a soldier on leave. “I think I am the only one among my friends who has been here.”

The museum's display starts with finds from Pella, an archaeological site near the Jordan River, south-west of Irbid. The earliest Christians fled to Pella just before the Romans destroyed Jerusalem in 70AD. About 250,000 years earlier, people from the Stone Age wandered in the area looking for prey, and later it exported wood to Egypt for use in chariot wheels.

An earthen flask on display was probably carried by one of the enterprising people of Pella, filled from the once water-rich area. Roman and Arab Muslim sections follow, with statues and mosaic halls. Some artefacts are from Capitolias, a Greco-Roman city whose remains, including a theatre, are just behind an elementary school in the northern Irbid neighbourhood of Beit Ras. The road there, through a car repair district, resembles a scene from a Mad Max film, with sawn-off vehicles and sparks flying from machinery on either side.

A semi-circular road completed in the last two years has made it possible to bypass Irbid on the way to better known sites near the border with Israel and Syria: the Greco-Roman city of Gadara, now known as Um Qais, and the nearby battlefield of Yarmouk, site of one of the most consequential victories in history because it ushered in the expansion of Islam outside Arabia.

The arrival of Syrians has added to the culinary delights in Irbid, although the owner of Hamza falafel shop, one of the city's best, is rumoured to have returned to Syria after the fall of Bashar Al Assad on December 8.

A dozen Syrians still work at Sawlajan, the undisputed top Arabic sweets shop in the city, famous for its mabrouma – a cylinder of hair pastry lightly fried in ghee and stuffed with pistachios from Aleppo.

“Most of us are preparing to go back,” said one Syrian manager at Sawlajan who fled from Deraa in 2013. “But I will keep coming back, and the standard will remain the same.”