Samarra
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).
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).
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Samarra