Sousse, Tunisia

By Patrick Totty

Tunisia is kind of the forgotten man of North Africa. Algeria and Libya, with their volatile politics, Morocco, with its fabled kasbahs and souks, and Egypt, with its 5,000-year history and status as the Arab world’s cultural capital between them suck all of the air out of most discussions about North Africa.

But visitors to this small country (at 63,000 square miles, about the size of Washington State) find a land with stable politics, a population that’s friendly toward Westerners, and a location along a picturesque and important stretch of the Mediterranean Sea. The strategic Mediterranean islands of Sicily and Malta are each only about 200 miles from Tunisia, and most of its coastline along the Gulf of Hammamet faces east, providing a straight shot toward Egypt, the Levant and Cyprus.

In the 9^th century B.C., the Phoenicians, astute traders who were on their way to becoming Carthaginians, sensed the possibilities of a port city south of present-day Tunis and founded  Hadrumentum. The city allied itself with Rome during the Punic Wars, thereby escaping damage or ruin and entered a relatively peaceful 700-year stint under Pax Romanus.

After the fall of Rome, the Vandals, and later the Byzantines, took over the town, renaming it, respectively, Hunerikopolis and Justinianopolis.

But all of this naming and renaming, affiliating and disaffiliating was just prelude to the main event in Sousse’s long existence. In the 7^th century A.D., a new religion burst from the Arabian Peninsula and swept westward across North Africa. Islam, the third of the great monotheisms, rapidly spread Arab culture across what has been a thoroughly Romanized and Christianized landscape. The Arabs seized the city, which in the aftermath of Rome’s fall was a moldering remnant of its former self. They renamed the city Sûsa and within a few decades elevated it to the status of main seaport of the Aghlabid Dynasty.

When the Aghlabids invaded Sicily in 827, Sûsa was their main staging ground.

In the centuries that followed, as Europe gained technological ascendancy and began pushing back at Islam, Sûsa was briefly occupied by the Normans in the 12^th century, was later more substantially occupied y the Spanish and in the 18^th century was the target of bombardments by the Venetians and the French. The French renamed the city Sousse.

Despite the turmoil around it, Sousse’s character had retained the solidly Arabian look and feel it had assumed in the centuries after Islam’s wars of conquest. Today it is considered one of the best examples of seaward-facing fortifications built by the Arabs. Its ribat, a soaring structure that combined the purposes of a minaret and a watch tower, is in outstanding condition and draws visitors from around the world.

These days, Sousse, with a population of more than 430,000, retains a medieval heart of narrow, twisted streets, a kasbah and medina, its ribat fortress and long wall on the Mediterranean. Surrounding it is a modern city of long, straight roads and more widely spaced buildings.

UNESCO declared the medina of Sousse a World Heritage Site in 1988, citing among other things its almost complete intactness.

A useful URL: http://www.ovpm.org/ville.asp?v=75