Fatima was falling asleep in the front seat, her scarf-laden head flopping onto her neighbor’s shoulder with every bump in the road. Tsung Chi, Rahaf and Ladifa were quietly talking in Chinese in the middle row. Valerio slept next to me in the back. The sun rose slowly over brown and green fields as we sped away from Tunis along a two-lane highway.
We headed west, passing Mateur, Sejnane, and Nefza. The land became greener and more mountainous the closer we got to Algeria. I had made the mistake of sitting next to the southern-facing window, and was roasting in our louage. Soon, the red-striped van crunched the gravel of a small road under a nest of palm trees. Gold light filtered through the fronds as we grabbed our bags and oriented ourselves. We had arrived in Tabarka, once know as Thabraca “The Shaded Place.”
Tabarka is lush, verdant and sleepy. The streets are small, and nearly empty of trash and people. Coffee shops spill out into the streets where chawarma roasts on their vertical spits and hotels are plentiful. This is the vacation town for Tunisians and not fully sacked by industrialized tourism. Old boats packed with fishing nets and scuba gear crowd a big marina flanking the north of the city. From the aquamarine Mediterranean rises a small island near the shore. It is blanketed with forests and peaked by a dune-colored Genoese fort.
A causeway now connects Africa to this island, and we walked to it under the the midday sun. The sweeping panoramas were alone worth the sweat equity of the climb. At the summit, we crouched in the shade of the fort and breathed deep, wiped our foreheads, and then bribed our way into the now-closed fort. We had to avoid an entire side of the roof top terrace because it was exposed to the public and/or the guard’s boss.
Now the fort is a lighthouse, but in the 16th century the island was used by the pirate-king Hayreddin Barbarossa as a base for sacking Italian and Spanish ships. Effectively, the Ottoman admiral was able to keep the Mediterranean an Ottoman-dominated zone after the Reconquinista. Barbarossa was forced to abandon the island and his base in Tabarka by the Genoans, who built the fort and successfully defended it until the bey of Tunis took it in 1741.
Like Djerba and Binzerte, the richness of Tabarka is obvious as a connection between the riches of the hinterland to the markets of the sea. In our group’s quest to see ancient Roman sites and the region’s history, we roughly followed the trail of resource extraction about 80 km or 130 miles south to the towns of Ain Draham, Bulla Regia and Chemtou.
Ain Draham is a mountain town where you can hunt swine and hike across gorgeous ridges. We were the only tourists there when we arrived: an Italian, a Chinese, three Taiwanese and an American. In the Jebel Kroumirie, Romans captured exotic animals and sent them sometimes through Tabarka to the colosseums. There, under the roar of the crowd, these North African beasts fought gladiators or mauled Christians. North Africa is now a barren place comparatively to what Barbarossa, the Genoans and the Romans knew. The trend of extraction continued throughout history, with French staging big game hunts out of Ain Draham. Until the early 19th century, lions and leopards stalked the mountain forests. Now, the big pigs are the king.
We boarded another louage and headed south, rising in and out of valleys and cutting across farmland. The land became more dry and ashen as we reached Jendouba, a transportation hub described in Lonely Planet as “pretty dull” and “hard to avoid.” Within five minutes, our group had split into two yellow taxis, speeding through the hill country towards an old Roman city called Bulla Regia.
The town belonged first to the Carthaginians, eager to harvest wheat near the banks of the Medjerda River, then the Numidians following the sack and salting of Carthage, and then finally the Romans. They built on top of their predecessor’s buildings and economy. Wheat was shipped north through places like Tabarka throughout the empire. Bulla Regia grew rich. Today its success is evident: the ruins are spread nearly from horizon to horizon.
Rocks lay baking in the sun, and we hesitated briefly under the shade across the road. Broken arches, cornerstones, and column heads littered the ground as we entered the city. Familiar Roman characters etched in stone shortly after the death of the Nazarene reminded Latin roots. We slowly entered the stone pathway into the center of the city, flanked by cisterns and temple ruins. The road, smoothed by nearly 2,000 years of tread, led to a mammoth stone structure forty feet high. This was Bulla Regia’s ancient bathhouse, named after Juliam Memmia, wife of Emperor Septimius Severus. It’s long shadow was cool, and we walked underneath its beige bulk, running hands across ancient Roman script, keystones and columns. Ducking under archways, imagining life before ignition, we stopped briefly at a colorful floor-mosaic in a befallen temple. Across the new asphalt road near the ruins, a minaret rose to the sky. At the right angle, it seemingly grew from inside the mosaic itself.
The old theater beckoned us next, and we entered its arena like the spectators of old. Passing a decapitated statue of Isis, the din of the crowd was audible. A bear mosaic lay at in the theater’s center. White seats curved in neat rows, split by stairs, ringed the theater. How little things change, I thought, remembering sports arenas in my time. We then wound our way north, past a cold, clear stream teeming with frogs and long grass. Kids swam in an azure pool, a gray dog panted in the shade of a palm tree, and a man cleaned his glasses with the corner of his wool suit. When he was done, he spoke to me in French. I replied in my stilted Arabic that, yes, we would like to see the famous mosaics.
Following his gray suit, we walked over rubble and an immense city grid. In the distance, a large machine was drilling into a mountainside, it’s noise barely discernible above the wind, the buzz of insects, and the crunch of our footsteps. And then our guide disappeared, down worn steps into the earth.
The temperature fell, gratefully, as we descended. Our eyes quickly adjusted to the dark and our new surroundings. We were inside the underground villas of Bulla Regia. Ceilings twenty feet high stretched for a city block in both directions. Sky lights let in golden sunbeams illuminating an old fountain. Floor mosaics decorated many of the villas: the blue eyes of Amphitrite still shone after all these centuries, fish flapped through the ocean, and two male gods courted the naked form of Venus.
Rahaf, Ladifa, Valerio and I left ascended into the punishing sun, and returned to the roadside to find our Chinese friend Fatima distraught and tearing up. Before arriving in Bulla Regia, Fatima had poked me on the shouldered an said, “I forgot something very important at the hotel.”
She had left her wedding ring in Tabarka. Both Valerio and I cast a knowing glance at each other: She’s never going to see that ring again, I thought. Fatima called the hotel where she remembered forgetting the ring. She was determined to go back: much depended on it.
“I will think about our marriage,” her husband had ominously responded to her mistake.
Fatima is a Chinese Muslim from Beijing who can trace her Islamic roots to the 12th Century. She came to Tunis to learn the language of her God, a unique motivation in our class. She wears the headscarf here in Tunis and the wedding ring although she is not married - they are defacto wards against solicitations. Fatima is very nice, funny, and a great dancer. She told us at Valerio’s last dinner in Tunis that before coming here, she hadn’t thought it possible to be friends with people from other countries, much less Taiwan. But now, she and Rahaf are great friends, and she’s made Italian, American and Tunisian friends as well. Her sentiment echoed something I’ve been discovering: we all have more in common than not.
Back at the roadside in Bulla Regia, three Taiwanese girls rallied behind their grieving Chinese friend to reach the northwest Tunisian coast in a quest for a lost wedding ring. Valerio called them “The Fellowship” (Later the four girls nicknamed him “Little Black Man” because of his intense tanning abilities).
Valerio and I left Bulla Regia to the opposite direction, to journey through the southern Kroumirie hills to the source of the prized Roman golden marble. The mining city of Chemtou is an inspiring display of limited technology and slave labor. Slabs of marble the size of houses rest between hills, looking like golden shards fallen from a shattered comet. Like Tabarka, Chemtou was first a Numidian operation, but with the Romans, large-scale extraction came, and its cherished marble was carved from the hillside and transported through Tabarka to decorate halls of the empire.
We climbed the nearby hill over the antiquated mining operations to see a Numidian temple from the 2nd century BC. Below us, lay a unique beauty revealed by hands of slaves for the lusts of the rich: uniform, deep cuts into the caramel-colored marble. On top of temple, we could see aqueducts, old Roman temples and houses, and a theater. The wide ruins of the slave’s quarters exposed the real source of Chimtou’s stone.
After remarking on the strategic location of the hill, separating from the slaves from the rich, Valerio reminded me where we stood.
“There is God between them,” Valerio said, nodding towards the Numidian temple.
Later, we stumbled south in the oppressive heat to a fallen Roman bridge. It’s majestic size was not diminished by its ruination. The river was now a small creek, winding its way around the behemoth stones of the collapsed bridge. Standing on the north edge of the bridge, it was easy to imagine the arch over the river and, most vividly, how it broke.
Past a cloud of monarch butterflies flittering between yellow flowers, Valerio and I stopped at the old forum and baths. With an aqueduct in the distance, we rested. The sky had been ripped open by the sun, and unfiltered, untempered heat blasted the earth. Guzzling water to replace our lost fluids, we taxied to Jendouba and caught a louage back to Tunis.
We quickly bought a whole chicken and a large pizza, gorged ourselves and passed out. The next day was Valerio’s last day in Tunis. After the beach at Gammarth, we headed to a nice Italian restaurant and met Fatima and Rahaf there with Valerio’s roommate Paola. Fatima recounted her quest for the ring, and happily displayed her shining diamond for us in the soft light. We discussed the dialects of our countries late into the night, and when we rose to take Valerio to his homecoming flight, I made everyone pancakes. Valerio ended up taking most of the batch with him to Italy, soaked in honey and wrapped in foil.
It is an interesting time in Tunis. Like Valerio, many of my classmates and friends are leaving. Realistically, I won’t see most of them ever again. This feeling of loneliness, maybe a bit of abandonment, has to be stronger with Tunisians. On a massive scale, what does this do to a people’s understanding of others? What happens when nearly every new friend leaves?
Home 
Dispatches Africa North Tabarka, Bulla Regia, and Chemtou: Golden Marbles, Underground Chambers and The Needles
Dispatches Africa North Tabarka, Bulla Regia, and Chemtou: Golden Marbles, Underground Chambers and The Needles
Tabarka, Bulla Regia, and Chemtou: Golden Marbles, Underground Chambers and The Needles
