Tunisia 🇹🇳 The Mediterranean’s Best-Kept Secret

🌐 Around the World with Beyondia 🧵 Mediterranean Region 🪡 Episode 20

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Rome destroyed Carthage twenty-two centuries ago. The land Carthage stood on is still here. Rome is not.

Carthage, Tunisia

In the year 146 BC, on the north coast of what is now Tunisia, a Roman army under the consul Scipio Aemilianus completed the most thorough destruction of a city in Mediterranean history. The walls of Carthage were pulled down, the surviving population was sold into slavery, the harbour was deliberately silted up, and tradition has it that the soil itself was ritually cursed. The city had been Rome’s only true rival for control of the Mediterranean. For more than a hundred years, between 264 BC and 146 BC, the two empires had fought three Punic Wars across a sea that neither could afford to share. Hannibal had marched across the Alps with elephants in 218 BC, occupied Italian soil for seventeen years, and won at Cannae the single greatest tactical victory in classical military history. Rome had survived by margins that no historian who knows the period describes as comfortable. When the third war ended, Rome did not annex Carthage. Rome erased it. The point was not victory. The point was that this enemy would never come back.

And yet, twenty-two centuries later, the country is here. Tunis, Carthage’s modern successor, is a city of three million people. Olives still grow on the same slopes Carthaginian and later Roman farmers cultivated. Punic — the language Hannibal spoke — is gone, but archaeological excavations along the coast still produce stelae and tombstones inscribed in it, more than two thousand years after it was last anyone’s mother tongue. The Bay of Carthage, the natural harbour that made the city possible, is still a working coastline, lined now with the suburbs of modern Tunis. The Punic ports — the famous round military harbour, the rectangular commercial harbour — are still visible as depressions in the ground at the edge of the suburbs. Roman Carthage, founded a century after the destruction on the same site, lasted another five hundred years and produced one of the great cities of the Empire — second only to Rome itself in the western Mediterranean, home of Saint Augustine in the late fourth century, the city where his Confessions were partly conceived. Roman Carthage in turn fell to the Vandals, then to the Byzantines, then to the Arabs. The Romans did not save themselves by destroying the Carthaginians. They just bought time. The land outlasted both of them.

El Djem, Tunisia

A hundred and ninety kilometres south of Tunis, in a small inland town called El Djem, sits the third-largest Roman amphitheatre still standing in the world. It was completed around 238 AD in a Roman provincial town then called Thysdrus, in the middle of what is now central Tunisia. The amphitheatre held 35,000 spectators — half the capacity of the Colosseum in Rome — in a town whose entire population at the time was perhaps half of that. Thysdrus was, in the early third century AD, one of the richest small towns in the Roman Empire, grown wealthy on the olive-oil trade between North Africa and Italy. The amphitheatre is, in many respects, more intact than the Colosseum. Its outer wall is still largely complete on the north side. Its underground hypogeum — the network of corridors and chambers where gladiators and animals waited beneath the arena floor — is still navigable. Standing inside it on a quiet weekday morning, with no other visitors, with the wind from the Sahara moving across the stone tiers, is one of the most unsettling experiences in Mediterranean archaeology. The town was not famous. The amphitheatre was. The amphitheatre is still here. The town has become famous for it again, after fifteen centuries during which the world entirely forgot Thysdrus existed.

This is the pattern. Tunisia has eight UNESCO World Heritage Sites in a country slightly larger than England. The medina of Tunis. The medina of Sousse. The Roman amphitheatre at El Djem. Punic and Roman Carthage. The ruins of Dougga in the north, the most intact Roman provincial town anywhere in North Africa. The holy city of Kairouan, founded in 670 AD by the Arab general Uqba ibn Nafi, which for several centuries was the fourth-holiest city in Sunni Islam after Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem. The island of Djerba, with its old synagogue, its Muslim and Jewish and Ibadi communities, and a continuous trading history reaching back to the Phoenicians. The Berber troglodyte villages of the south, which George Lucas filmed for Tatooine in Star Wars. Every period of Mediterranean civilisation that mattered, Tunisia hosted. Every empire that came through this sea passed through this country. None of them stayed permanently. All of them left buildings.

Sidi Bou Said, Tunisia

Twenty kilometres east of Tunis, on a high cliff overlooking the Bay of Carthage, sits the village of Sidi Bou Said. White houses, blue doors, blue window frames, blue shutters, blue lattice screens — the most photographed village in North Africa, and a place that looks at first glance like a Greek island someone has carried four hundred kilometres south. The aesthetic is not Greek. It came across the Mediterranean in the late fifteenth century with Muslim refugees fleeing the Spanish Reconquista, who brought with them the colour palette and the design language of Andalusian Spain — whitewashed walls, lime-painted seasonally to fight bacteria, and the deep cobalt blue that was reserved, in Islamic Spain, for ironwork. In 1915, a French-British aristocrat named Baron Rodolphe d’Erlanger moved into a large palace at the top of the village. D’Erlanger was a musicologist and painter who had come to Tunisia to study and preserve traditional Arab music. He noticed that the village’s aesthetic was beginning to dilute. He persuaded the Tunisian authorities to pass an ordinance requiring every house in Sidi Bou Said to be painted only in white with blue trim — no exceptions, no other colours, enforced by inspection. The ordinance is still in force, 110 years later. Every door is the same blue. Every wall is the same white. The most famous look in North African travel photography is the result of one of the world’s earliest and strictest colour laws.

This is what Tunisia keeps doing. It absorbs the civilisations that arrive, lets them build what they build, and keeps the buildings after the civilisations leave. The Phoenicians built Carthage; the Romans destroyed it and built their own city on top; the Vandals took the Roman city; the Byzantines took it back; the Arabs replaced it with Tunis; the Ottomans built mosques on top of the Arab ones; the French built protectorate boulevards through the Ottoman city; modern Tunisia kept all of it. The country is not a single layer with old things in it. The country is the layering. There is no period when Tunisia stopped accumulating. The walls of the medina of Tunis include reused Roman columns, reused Carthaginian stone, Ottoman tile, French signage, and a working twenty-first-century population. None of this is exhibited. All of it is occupied.

Some countries point at one century. The best ones keep them all.

Nine regions. One hundred and twenty destinations. Three hundred and forty-one weeks remaining.

The Mediterranean’s southern shore is the older one. The next stop is a small island halfway home.

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