Walks around Sousse
The city of Sousse itself deserves a tour. It is best to start in the old town, near the fortress called Ribat. Ribat is one of the oldest surviving fortified monasteries. It was founded in 780. From the watchtower you can see how the fortress protected the harbor at the Sea Gate of the medina. The medina in Sousse is large and beautiful. Its narrow streets lead to towers and crenellated walls of fortresses. The most beautiful shopping streets are the Suq el-Kaid market.
The Great Mosque was built in 850 on the spot where a sacrificial area stood in Phoenician times. It also resembles a fortress: two round watchtowers, heavy arches of the gallery - all this once really served as protection for the townspeople. The mosque has an interesting minaret - squat, with an external staircase. In North Africa there is another one like it - in the Ibn Tulun Mosque in Cairo.
From the medina you can exit through the Western (Bab el-Garbi) or Southern (Bab el-Kabli) gates, and then walk along the mighty city wall. This path leads to the Kasbah - another fortress. Now it houses the Archaeological Museum with an excellent collection of ancient finds, including a mosaic "Triumph of Bacchus" found in Sousse. Above the fortress and above the entire medina rises the 30-meter signal "Caliph's Tower", built in 859.
In the north of the city there is a restored underground burial vault of the 2nd-4th centuries - the catacombs of the Good Shepherd.
Tunis, the capital of Tunisia
Excursions to the capital city of Tunis necessarily include a visit to the Bardo Museum. The Bardo Museum holds many treasures. For example, the world's largest collection of Roman mosaics, red-figure vases and amphorae on bronze tripods. Statues of gods and goddesses, for example, and also their lost arms and legs.
But the city of Tunis, one of the capitals of the Maghreb, is more interesting than its museum. A walk around the city can begin on Avenue de France, which ends with a triumphal arch and the Gate of France. This is a lovely boulevard with endless rows of flower market and a thick canopy of fresh greenery overhead. Birds sing there, tourists rustle maps, and even lovers kiss, despite the strict upbringing in Muslim traditions. At the beginning of the century, wealthy eccentrics lived on this boulevard, inviting eccentric architects with the boldest fantasies. Lavish balls and parties were held in the buildings they built according to their fantasies. Now these slightly dilapidated buildings are occupied by hotels, shops and restaurants. One of these establishments is "Café de Paris" with all its modernist attributes.
Suq beyond the bab
The heart of any Tunisian city is its old town. The medina of Tunis is truly old - it arose when Carthage was destroyed. Two words can be considered key to this vague image: bab and suq, the first meaning "gate" and the second "market". As soon as you enter the gates of the medina, only the market remains, which stretches, flows, scatters in all directions to all the other gates.
In the city of Tunis there are two medinas - daytime and nighttime. During the day, only the market remains in the medina - this foundation of foundations and holy of holies, the center of life, its motley skin and dark underside. The market is fluid and unpredictable: a step left - a coffeehouse, a step right - a minaret. The streets of the daytime medina are just shops. For a thousand years this medina has been continuously fragrant and shouting in every way, ringing with silver and inviting onlookers to taste, buy, exchange, lose and get lost. And the Great Mosque ez-Zitouna stands as a landmark for those who go from the perfume market to the slipper market.
The nighttime medina behaves differently. It embraces you by the shoulders and leads you to wander through labyrinths of alleys. Its porous darkness is diluted by timid lights, its mosques and palaces glow with a ghostly greenish light. Shops close, locks rattle, brooms shuffle, and only small coffeehouses, inconspicuous by day, reveal themselves, luring with cozy warmth and the aroma of coffee.
Carthage
The yellow stones and black mosaics of Carthage contrast with the white-and-blue surroundings. Carthage was indeed destroyed, sad as it is. What remains are the Punic names of Tunisian suburbs: Salammbo, Hamilcar, Gammarth, La Marsa, and Carthage itself, which sounds like "Cartage". The archaeological zone includes the Byrsa hill with the national museum, the burial place of sacrificial infants Tophet Salammbo, the Punic port, the Antonine Baths, mosaics of Roman villas, the foundations of the Damous El Karita basilicas, and a heavily renovated theater. The Carthage Museum has collected all the excavated remains of life on these reddish lands - mosaics, vases, fragments of statues.
At the end of the day, when dusk approaches, one should go down to the Punic Port. It is just a small round bay with a snow-white cube of a museum on the shore, but the fading light and blue haze make it ghostly, and then it reflects the lights of long-burned-out torches, capitals with the horns of Ammon, and triremes dozing under palm trees. Modern Carthage carefully hides its belonging to the Maghreb. Its shining clean streets are buried in roses and bougainvilleas, they are built up with snow-white villas, and huge cypresses give them their fragrant shade.
Sidi Bou Said
The most magical place on the coast is the village of Sidi Bou Said. "Sidi" means "saint" in Arabic, Bou Said is the name of the local saint, patron of the village and protector of sailors. On the seashore, at the foot of the orange cliffs of the hill of Hamilcar, it seems like an ordinary wealthy resort - beautiful villas, luxurious gardens, yachts sleeping on transparent water. But once you climb the hill, you find yourself in an untouched Middle Ages, in the ancient East, in a real Maghreb fairy tale. Stone-paved streets flowing down the hill break off at a bird's height above the bright blue sea, and this blue color, passing onto Moorish doors, carved balconies, lacy gratings of gates and stair railings, asserts itself above flat roofs in the shining sky. The walls of houses are painted bright white, and everything else the brush can reach is bright blue.
During the day, when the village fills with tourists and sprouts souvenir shops, it looks like a bright toy just taken out of a box, like a gingerbread Disneyland. But at dusk and early in the morning, when the multilingual noise subsides, everything falls into place and makes sense: the squat lighthouse, the sailors' cemetery at its foot, the mosque minaret, the steep steps of streets, and ancient coffee houses on ancient terraces.
Matmata
One of the most interesting excursions is a trip to the Sahara. Usually it is arranged for two days, with an overnight stay in an oasis. Not only the Sahara itself is interesting, but also the road to it. The desert does not immediately come into its own. At first it timidly tries its strength. Around Sousse lies the Sahel - salty land on which salty grass grows. The only elevations on this plain are grazing camels and sheep. From time to time there are mud-brick ruins or tents - villages of nomadic Bedouins. Each such duar village has its own sheikh. From Sousse to Sfax stretch olive and almond groves. Gabes opens the way to the desert, which for many centuries has met and seen off caravans. This is where the real exoticism begins. What dates are there when you can climb into the strangest fortifications in the world - Berber ksour, reminiscent of earthen cells! Ksour stretch along the edge of the desert and form entire villages.
The hills turn into mountains, studded with sparse bristles of thorny bushes and cacti, the coloring of the earth and sky becomes prehistoric. Or alien - as anyone prefers (here, in the Tajma area, Spielberg filmed "Star Wars"). The next stop is Matmata.
...The bus stopped in the middle of the hills, and the guide cheerfully announced: "We are in the village of Matmata. Whoever sees the house first will get a prize." Sheep were wandering along the slope, boys were kicking a ball near the road, dogs were barking. Everything was like in an ordinary village, except for one small detail: there were no houses anywhere. The guide was extremely pleased - for the hundredth time the trick worked. Although he had no credit for it: simply Matmata is a village of troglodytes who live underground. They enter their homes through a hole in the roof, and the most resourceful manage to set up even underground courtyards. After taking a closer look, we vied with each other to point out holes in the ground. Some had television antennas. The troglodytes invented their dwellings not from a good life - they escaped from invaders this way. As a result, Byzantine fortresses and Turkish forts were destroyed, while villages like Matmata survived. The last time this trick came in handy for the troglodytes was not so long ago - during the Second World War.
El Djem
You should go to El Djem even if you don't want to go to the Sahara. Because El Djem is the second largest amphitheater after the Colosseum, quite well preserved. Once the ancient Roman city of Thysdrus stood around it, and 40,000 spectators raged on the stone steps. Now only light and shadow play in it, but their play is brilliant. It is especially impressive against the background of the modern "city" - identical one-story cubes stacked into endless streets in the middle of an endless plain.
Kairouan
In this city, a stop is usually made on the way back from the Sahara. It is a sacred city for Muslims, the first in the Maghreb and the fourth in the world - after Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem. There they see the Great Mosque with a huge number of marble columns brought from the surrounding Roman settlements. The second attraction of the city is carpets. Carpets have been woven here since the 9th century, according to ancient traditions, and now they make zarbia, alloucha and mergoum with short pile. Kairouan carpets are amazing, and in a good shop you can learn a lot of interesting things about them. For example, the ornament is not only a matter of taste, but also of tradition. It encodes symbols-amulets and entire novels about life.
Douz
You think an oasis is three proud palm trees above a spring, sheer romance and poetry? No. An oasis is a vegetable garden. It consists of three tiers: vegetables are grown on the ground, fruit trees go higher, and right up high, near the sky, grow coveted dates wrapped in yellow cellophane. An oasis is also a village or even a town. To find this out, you need to drive for a long, long time along a rocky road along the Grand Erg Oriental, looking at distant mountains and listening to the close breath of the Sahara. From time to time dunes approach the road itself, and wooden fences block their path - this is how locals try to keep the advancing desert at bay. Behind such a fence hides the oasis of Douz, where tourists spend the night. Europeans briskly pile out of buses and jeeps, briskly walk to the fence - and suddenly stop, finding themselves on the edge of the Great Desert. Here begins the Grand Sud.
The edge of the Sahara is occupied by a large camel camp, always ready to justify their reputation as ships of the desert. We boarded the ships and sailed over the dunes. The dunes were yellow, and in them, digging themselves holes, big yellow dogs were sleeping. Then the dogs came to an end, and the dunes remained.
Douz thrives thanks to the water of mineral springs. It comes to the surface hot - at 50-80 degrees Celsius, and at night it is cooled in special reservoirs. Early in the morning, when the air is still cold, a thick cloud of fog envelops the oases, and through it camels and buses slowly trudge to work.
Tozeur
The prosperity and importance of an oasis is measured by the number of date palms and fruit trees, which is determined by the amount of water. In Nefta there are 400 thousand trees and 152 springs. In Tozeur there are 200 springs and 200 thousand trees. Here grow the most delicious dates in Tunisia.
In the old part of the city there is what guidebooks proudly call the "Sahara Zoo". At the entrance we were met by an old man who was probably five hundred years old. The old man was so black that he seemed blue, justifying his belonging to the Tuareg tribe - the "blue" people of the desert. And he turned out to be the most amazing inhabitant of the zoo.
Simultaneously chatting with tourists in different languages, the old man was talking about something with the animals. It was perfectly obvious that they understood him: black boars the size of a cat obediently lined up their offspring, the size of a mouse, in front of the spectators; huge monitor lizards froze in picturesque poses, playing with their tails; a cobra that he pulled out of a box while muttering something obediently spread its hood and did not eat anyone. "And this is Sebastian," the old man smiled, entering the lion's cage. The lion also smiled and offered its ear. An enthusiastic Englishwoman who came close to the bars and extended her hand—apparently to make acquaintance—was met by Sebastian with a deafening roar and a leap at the iron bars. At parting, the old man showed another friend. From his shirt pocket he took out a matchbox, from which a scorpion briskly jumped out. "This is my Masha," the Tuareg said tenderly. Masha raised her venomous tail.
The famous Dar Cheraït Museum is also in Tozeur. There is a collection of antiquities and the "Thousand and One Nights" medina, an art gallery, and a café. Mirages
Mirages live on Lake Chott El Jerid. The only road crossing it goes from Tozeur to Kebili. The lake is salty and dry, but its solid surface is occasionally broken by salt marshes.
It is worth coming to Tunisia just to see Chott El Jerid, even if the mirages pass you by. In this endless pearly-gray space there is no horizon; the sky merges with the earth—or rather, with a strange snow frozen in waves—and everything is enveloped in a ghostly glow that erases shadows and sharp lines. Total lifelessness, total emptiness.
And then a boy emerges from the ground, holds out a brownish gypsum flower and says: "Madam, buy a desert rose!"