Samarra

Samarra , town, N central Iraq, on the Tigris River. It is on the site of an ancient settlement and has given its name to a type of Neolithic pottery of the 5th millennium BC The present town was founded (836) by the Abbasid caliphs. Samarra's 17th-century, golden-domed mosque complex, sacred to Shiite Muslims as the burial site of the 10th and 11th imams and the site of the disappearance of the 12th ( "hidden" ) imam, was severely damaged by terrorist bombings in 2006 and 2007. There are notable ruins of many palaces, mosques, and other buildings, including the 9th-century great mosque with its spiral minaret. The town was the scene of fierce fighting between Sunni insurgents and U.S. occupation forces in 2004.

Samarra a city in Iraq, on the River Tigris north of Baghdad; its 17th-century mosque is a place of Shiite pilgrimage.
appointment in Samarra an unavoidable meeting with death or fate, from a story by Somerset Maugham in the play Sheppey (1933), in which a man sees Death in Baghdad and flees to distant Samarra to escape, not realizing that Death had always intended to meet him that night in Samarra.

A similar story, in which the place of apparent safety is Ispahan, is found earlier in Jean Cocteau's Le Grand Écart (‘The Miscreant’, 1923).