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# The City Beneath the City
- URL: https://www.assyriapost.com/the-city-beneath-the-city/
- Published: 2026-01-29T22:23:29.000Z
- Updated: 2026-01-29T22:23:29.000Z
- Description: How do you narrate Europe when utopias collapse? Deniz Utlu traces paths of migration, memory, and myth—from Mesopotamia to Stockholm, from Pergamon to Södertälje. A poetic essay on language, belonging, and the invisible maps of memory.
- Author: The Assyria Post
- Tags: Curated stories

****Editor's pick**   
This post is part of hand-picked stories from across the web, curated by the editors of the Assyria Post. 

"I recall a trip in the 2000s to Mesopotamia, to Mardin and Midyat, together with my mother and in the company of a journalist and family friend who had written two reports – one about Yazidis, the other about Assyrians. I remember that he travelled to Sweden for the Assyrians. He had written both pieces as a young journalist in the 1980s, at a time when a large wave of Assyrians emigrated from their northern Mesopotamian homeland in Turkey to Sweden, Germany and the US, and had published these pieces in a slim book, which he gave me thirty years later during that trip. I take it out now: *Yezidiler ve Süryanileri* \[i\] by Murat Öztemir – a tall man, whose eyes, always half-closed due to a sensitivity in his eyelids, never miss a thing. That’s how I remember him. And that he smiles impishly, even when recounting something painful. His report on the Assyrians begins with a journey to Sweden, because this is where a fragment of Mesopotamia had found its way. What has become of this fragment nearly half a century later?"

Read the full story: 

[The City Beneath the City. Mind MapsIn “Mind Maps,” Deniz Utlu explores the interweaving of migration, mythology, and memory—a literary cartography of Europe spanning Mesopotamia, Sweden, and Berlin.![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/5d/f5/5df5a6c1-1f57-4975-951e-ddd33d31dec7/content/images/icon/favicon-23.ico)Goethe-InstitutDeniz Utlu![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/5d/f5/5df5a6c1-1f57-4975-951e-ddd33d31dec7/content/images/thumbnail/gedankenkarten_quer.png)](https://www.goethe.de/prj/zei/en/art/27144461.html?ref=assyriapost.com)