Urmia

Urmia is the largest city in West Azerbaijan province in Iran, serving as the provincial, county and district capital near the borders with Turkey and Iraq. The 2016 census recorded 736,224 urban residents, the tenth most populous city in Iran, with a metropolitan population approaching one million. The city sits at 1,330 meters elevation along the Shahar River on the Urmia Plain, with the large salt lake Lake Urmia lying to its east. An important town since at least the ninth century, Urmia has long been ethnically and religiously diverse, home to substantial Christian, Jewish and Muslim communities, and it became a center of Christian missionary activity from 1835 and hosted an Assyrian cultural renaissance in the nineteenth century before its Christian population declined sharply during the First World War. It remains a trading center for a fertile agricultural region producing apples, grapes and tobacco. This description is adapted from Wikipedia contributors under CC BY-SA 4.0; changes were made. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/