Dede Ler Yadakter: A café for Kirkuk’s older generation keeps Iraq’s fading past alive

Shafaq News- Kirkuk

Behind a modest doorway in one of Kirkuk’s older neighborhoods, Abu Murad Omar Ahmed has built what feels less like a café and more like a sanctuary for memory.

Inside “Dede Ler Yadakter” —translated as “The Ancestors’ Café”— walls are covered with relics from another era: copper utensils, antique clocks, aging radios, an Aladdin heater, historical jars, and portraits of Iraqi political figures long absent from public life.

At the entrance, a sign immediately defines the atmosphere: “No entry for young people or children under 18.” The restriction is intentional. Abu Murad says he wanted to preserve the calm and traditional identity increasingly disappearing beneath the noise of modern cafés, mobile phones, televisions, and electronic games.

The fifty-year-old owner transformed his lifelong passion for antiques into both a business and a personal effort to preserve fragments of Iraq’s social memory. “Most of these pieces came from elderly people or old homes that disappeared over time,” he told Shafaq News while sitting among shelves crowded with objects collected over decades.

Over time, the café evolved into a gathering place for retirees, heritage enthusiasts, and visitors searching for a slower rhythm rarely found in modern Iraqi cities. Some customers arrive simply to photograph the antiques. Others spend hours playing dominoes and backgammon while drinking tea served in traditional istikan glasses, recreating the atmosphere of old Iraqi cafés that once functioned as social and cultural salons.

Every corner of the space is built around nostalgia. Portraits of former Iraqi leader Abdul Karim Qasim and former president Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr overlook tables where elderly men exchange stories about Kirkuk before wars, displacement, and rapid urban change reshaped the city.

For many regulars, the appeal lies precisely in the café’s refusal to modernize. “The place feels like the 1970s or 1980s,” said Hassan Ali, one of its frequent visitors. “You sit here and forget the noise outside.”

Unlike many cafés competing through loud music and giant television screens, “Dede Ler Yadakter” relies on silence, familiarity, and routine.

Ahmed Rashid, another regular customer, said even the smallest details, from the arrangement of the antiques to the way tea is served, create the feeling of entering an old Baghdadi or Kirkuki home.

The café has also become an informal social space bringing together different groups from Kirkuk’s multiethnic society. Visitors from outside the province increasingly stop by to explore objects tied to Iraq’s disappearing domestic culture.

In one corner, several deaf customers gather daily around domino tables, communicating through gestures and laughter while steam rises from glasses of tea.

“They feel comfortable here,” Abu Murad said quietly. “The café gives them calm.”

For another regular, Samir Jabbar, that sense of familiarity explains why customers keep returning.

“Everyone knows each other here,” he said. “Modern cafés lost that spirit a long time ago.”

As Kirkuk continues to modernize, “Dede Ler Yadakter” survives as a quiet act of resistance against forgetting, a place where worn furniture, fading photographs, and aging household objects continue carrying the memory of lives and eras that might otherwise disappear.

Between the scent of old wood and the sound of tea glasses touching tabletops, Abu Murad continues welcoming visitors each day, preserving pieces of a city still searching for traces of its older self.

Read more: Discover Iraq: Kirkuk, a city of oil, culture, and conflict