Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of Graph Search.
Concept
Urmia
Summary
Urmia or Orumiyeh (ارومیه, oɾumiˈje; (ܐܘܪܡܝ, urmi) is the largest city in West Azerbaijan Province of Iran and the capital of Urmia County. It is situated at an altitude of above sea level, and is located along the Shahar River on the Urmia Plain. Lake Urmia, one of the world's largest salt lakes, lies to the east of the city, and the border area with Turkey lies to the west.
Urmia is the 10th-most populous city in Iran. At the 2006 census, its population was 577,307 in 153,570 households. The following census in 2011 counted 667,499 people in 197,749 households. The latest census in 2016 showed a population of 736,224 people in 225,050 households. The majority of the city's residents are Azerbaijanis, with a large minority of Kurds, and a smaller number of Assyrians, and Armenians, as well as Persian-speakers who moved to the city mostly for employment.
The city is the trading center for a fertile agricultural region where fruits (especially apples and grapes) and tobacco are grown. Even though the majority of the residents of Urmia are Muslims, the Christian history of Urmia is well preserved and is especially evident in the city's many churches and cathedrals.
An important town by the 9th century, the city has had a diverse population which has at times included Muslims (Shias and Sunnis), Christians (Catholics, Protestants, Nestorians, and Orthodox), Jews, Baháʼís and Sufis. Around 1900, Christians made up more than 40% of the city's population; however, in the next decades, most of the Christians were either killed as a part of the advancing Ottoman troops and raids by Kurdish tribes or fled shortly after the end of the war.
Richard Nelson Frye suggested Urartian origin for the name, while T. Burrow connected the origin of the name Urmia to Indo-Iranian urmi- "wave" and urmya- "undulating, wavy".
The name could also derive from the combination of the Assyrian Aramaic words Ur (ܐܘܪ; a common name for cities around Mesopotamia, meaning "city") and Mia (ܡܝܐ), "City of Water" referring to the great Lake Urmia nearby.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.