- For centuries, Batman was just a sleepy village called Iluh, but in the 1940s, oil (black gold! Turkey tea!) was discovered in the area, and Iluh—now just a mile or two south of the nation’s largest petroleum field—became a boomtown almost overnight. In 1957, it was renamed for the nearby Batman River, a tributary of the Tigris.

- "So where did the Batman River gets its name?", superhero geeks everywhere demand to know at this point. In Turkey and Persia, a batman is an ancient unit of measure—in fact, the word is still defined in plenty of English dictionaries not as “a caped crusader with a cool utility belt” but “a Turkish unit equal to 16.96 pounds.” But most commentators believe that the Batman River actually took its name as a shortening of “Bati Raman,” a nearby mountain.