The Many Worlds Of Tunisia
by Fred Bruemmer, The Montreal Gazette

"Our plane," the stewardess announced, "will soon land at Carthage International Airport."

Carthage. Two thousand years ago, it was the rival of Rome, centre of the Phoenicians' great North African empire. Now Carthage is a wealthy suburb of Tunis, capital of Tunisia, a favourite holiday land for Europeans and, increasingly, for North Americans.

Bordered by Algeria and Libya, huge oil-rich but troubled neighbours, oil-poor Tunisia, about three times the size of Nova Scotia, has done amazingly well. In 1979, 1.3 million tourists visited the country, in 2005, more than 6.5. million did.

Europeans come primarily for sun and fun, the endless beaches, the lambent sea, for hotels that rival those of southern Europe but cost a lot less. It's friendly, safe, sort of exotic, and nicely tolerant. "If the sight of topless women offends you, please stay away from certain beaches," says a tourist brochure.

North Americans, a tourist official told me, come mainly for the history, the mystique of the Sahara, the Arab ambience, the French flavour.

Walk down the elegant main street of Tunis, the Avenue Habib Bourguiba, named after the founder and first president of the independent Tunisia, and you think you're on the Champs Elysees. Continue on the Avenue de France (all street signs are in Arabic and French) and it's just like the Rue de Rivoli in Paris.

Go a bit further and you come to a totally different world: the labyrinthine Medina, the traditional Arab heart of the city, with magnificent mosques and a myriad markets, those narrow, crowded souks that sell everything from gold and silver jewelry to incense, leather goods, carpets and those scarlet fezzes that remind you that Tunisia was once part of the Ottoman empire.

The traders are friendly and polite. That's one of the great charms of Tunisia. There are none of the pushy touts and louts that are such a nuisance in some other lands. And language is not a problem. Everyone speaks Arabic and French. Younger men and women often speak English, some also Italian or German.

Another joy of Tunis is its Bardo Museum with the best, most varied collection of Roman mosaics in the world, housed in
a former palace. It was built in the 19th century for the governor of Tunis in an amazingly harmonious blending of styles - Hispano-Moresque, Turkish-Persian, elegant Italianate - reflecting some of the many cultural influences that formed Tunisia and make it so fascinating.

The mosaics mirror another world. For more than 500 years, from 146 BC to 426 AD, Tunisia was a wealthy province of Rome, the empire's granary, producing 60 per cent of the grain needed to feed the people of Rome and much of the olive oil.

Rich Romans decorated their Tunisian villas with extensive mosaics. They show Roman life and legends, the flora and fauna of the land: lots of wild boars, which are still hunted in the mountain forests of Tunisia, and lions, leopards and elephants that vanished long ago from North Africa.

Fishermen, in one mosaic, haul in nets full of fish and long lines of pots. (The pots, unglazed amphorae, were lowered into the sea floor, where octopuses in need of homes crawled in, were hauled up and became supper. That's how the Romans did it 2,000 years ago. That's how Tunisian fishermen do it today.)

Above the fishing mosaic is another: Ulysses lashed to the mast of his ship listening raptly to the sirens' song. About 3,000 years ago, according to the Odyssey, Ulysses landed on the Tunisian island of Jerba and nearly lost his crew. The locals were "lotophagoi," the lotus-eaters. Whosoever ate their favourite "honey-sweet" fruit, lapsed into delightful dreamy indolence, all cares forgotten. Ulysses' crew had a taste "and put aside all thoughts of a voyage home."

That's how many tourists to Jerba feel today. The island is popular. Its shores are lined with world-class hotels for the
350,000 visitors that arrive each year, the modern lotus-eaters who revel in luxury and leisure.

Quite close to all this gloss and glamour is a very different world: the modest village of Hara Seghira with El-Ghriba, the oldest synagogue in the world.

According to tradition, when Ebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, sacked Jerusalem and destroyed the Temple of Solomon in 586 BC, some of the priests and their flock fled westward by ship and settled on Jerba.

About 2,000 of their descendants still live on the island, respected as silversmiths and merchants. Once a year, on the 33rd day after Passover, they hold an exuberant pilgrimage, carrying on a litter of holy books, some, reputedly, saved from the Temple of Solomon. They are joined by thousands of Jewish pilgrims from Europe and North America, plus a spattering of curious gentiles and lots of Muslim neighbours. It's traditional, joyful, friendly.

On the Tunisian mainland south of Jerba, the Sahara Desert begins. Parts of it look weirdly otherworldly: the Chott-el-Jerid, an immense, shimmering salt plain, the camel herds that browse near its edge, strangely elongated in the flickering heat; the trading and religious centres on mountain-tops, ancient Berber strongholds with multi-storied granariers; troglodytic villages hidden underground.

George Lucas loved it. Thus he envisaged other worlds, and that's where he filmed many sequences of his Star Wars movies. You remember the scene in the first Star Wars movie when Luke Skywalker looks at the two moons. That was shot on Chott-el-Jerid.

Tunisia's famous Berber troglodytes were merely being practical: their underground homes were cool in summer, warm in winter. The main subterranean village, Matmata, was also for a while the planetary home of Luke Skywalker.

Other filmmakers fell in love with Tunisia: Monty Python filmed the Life of Brian's crucifixion scene near the village of Haddej, just three kilometers from Matmata. And when you walk along the stunning, water-sculptured gorge of Mides near the Algerian border, you may have an eerie feeling of déjà vu; this is where parts of The English Patient were filmed.

You can view the equally beautiful Seldja Gorge from one of my favourite trains: Le Lézard Rouge, or Red Lizard. This maroon-red train with an art deco interior was built for the governor of Tunisia in the 1920s. Now the train chugs sedately along the Seldja Gorge. It stops frequently so tourists can disembark, take pictures of the soaring sienna-brown cliffs, of the train and each other. The elegant train toots, collects its scattered flock and chugs on.

The Tunisian highways are excellent, and many follow ancient routes: the Via Romana, with towns often at 64-kilometre intervals - 2,000 years ago this was the daily distance of a horse drawn carriage.

Sixty-four kilometres north of the coastal town of Sfax, you come to El-Jem, now a small town, with the third-largest and best preserved Roman colosseum in the world. In its dungeons, humans and beasts were caged separately, to be released for gruesome death together in the arena, while 35,000 Romans cheered.

Now, in summer, thousands of visitors sit on the ancient marble seats and enjoy the El-Jem International Symphonic Music Festival.

Travel another 64 kilometres northwest of Roman El-Jem and you come to Kairouan, founded in 671 AD and, after Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem, the fourth-holiest city of Islam. Its Great Mosque is so sacred that more than a million Muslim pilgrims visit it each year.

Many of the 500 pillars that support this magnificent ninth-century building and the galleries that ring its immense, marble-flagged courtyard were once part of Roman temples or Byzantine palaces.

A few, more than 2,000 years old, are Carthaginian, part of Tunisia's amazingly varied cultural heritage.