Annonce

**nacer-eddine06** · 12 janvier 2020, 21h23

William Dalrymple on the treasures of Algeria

William Dalrymple on the treasures of Algeria
The country boasts a wealth of little-visited Roman ruins and Ottoman palaces

William Dalrymple JANUARY 10 2020

Climbing the rolling hills around Constantine in Algeria last July, we paused at the top of a ridge. It was a warm summer evening and we looked down, through the golden haze, at the newly harvested fields stretching out below.

The panorama around us could have been southern Tuscany: olive groves and vineyards, ripe fields of barley rising to low hills patched with orchards. In the distance were higher mountains and here and there, you could see the nests of long-legged storks, perilously perched atop telegraph poles, street lights and minarets.

This was not far from where St Augustine of Hippo once played as a boy, in the days when north Africa provided a third of the grain and nearly half the olive oil of the Roman empire. Later, as an earnest student, Augustine found the olive oil so inexpensive that he could afford to light his lamps and work all night, a luxury he would later miss when he moved to Italy. In those days great forests of pine blocked Augustine’s view of the coast. Today one can catch frequent glimpses of Mediterranean blue through the hills.

It was while we were standing there, catching our breath, that we stumbled across a most unexpected monument. At the top of the slope facing the old Roman hilltown of Tiddis, we found ourselves standing in front of a large honey-coloured classical rotunda, constructed from massive blocks of cut stone, each perhaps half a tonne in weight.

The tomb, we learnt, was erected to commemorate a local boy who rose to high office in Roman service, a Berber cavalry commander brought up in these hills who eventually became one of Hadrian’s most successful protégés. We know what we do about Quintus Lollius Urbicus due to two inscriptions. One of these I had just seen, further down the hill in his hometown of Tiddis — sculpted on the plinth of a now-lost statue in the Tiddis Forum.

The fine, deeply cut Roman capitals are still easily legible. They tell how the Algerian general rose to prominence as Emperor Hadrian’s candidate to command the Tenth Legion at Vienna. Soon afterwards, he received military decorations for his service as a legate during Hadrian’s Jewish War of 132–135. His consulship was granted in 136AD, after which he governed Germania. Then, soon after Hadrian’s death, he was sent westward, to the furthest and most uncivilised extremity of the empire, becoming the first African Governor of Britain.

The story of the apex of his brilliant career is told in a second inscription found at the somewhat unlikely site of Balmuildy, just to the north of Glasgow. According to this inscription, the Emperor Antoninus Pius sent Lollius Urbicus to reconquer lowland Scotland. Between 139 and 140 Urbicus massively enlarged the fort at Corbridge, in preparation for the coming campaign to the north of Hadrian’s Wall. By 142, commemorative coins were being issued, celebrating his great victory.

The tomb of Quintus Lollius Urbicus, near the old Roman hilltown of Tiddis © William Dalrymple

Urbicus went on to oversee the building of the stone and turf Antonine Wall, running from the banks of the Clyde to the Firth of Forth. Having subdued the Caledonians, Urbicus was finally promoted to Rome with the prestigious post of Prefect. Here, unannounced, with no sign or fanfare, we had just stumbled across the tomb of the brightest star of a Berber landowning family who two millennia ago had conquered my homeland.

We don’t tend to think of Algerians as victorious imperialists. Indeed, only 60 years ago, Algeria was the bloody battlefield for one of the 20th century’s most bitter wars of decolonisation, in which as many as 25,000 French and between 400,000 and one million Algerians lost*their lives. By the end of the war, the*majority of the million-strong French settler population had been evacuated. It is perhaps partly because this anti-colonial conflict still looms so large in the European imagination that we tend to imagine the tide of colonisation flows exclusively from west to east,*north to south. But Algerian history teaches us the reality is, at least, a little more nuanced. It was wealthy north Africans who crushed the Caledonian resistance and seized north Britain for the Romans. By the end of the second century, a third of the Roman senate was north African while the Emperor Septimius Severus grew up a little to the east in Leptis Magna (now in modern Libya).

The Roman ruins at Djemila, which was the centre for a wealthy agricultural elite

The Roman ruins at Djemila, which was the centre for a wealthy agricultural elite © William Dalrymple

Over the coming weeks, as we walked around the astonishing Roman sites dotting Algeria, we were constantly reminded how much richer and more civilised Roman north Africa was to provincial Britannia and even more so to barbaric Caledonia. Across the Algerian hills we saw the ruins of rich Roman city after city, all filled with the most fashionable accessories — running water and hypocaust heating, private rain-fed cisterns and opulent latrines — and all the amenities that riches could bring: elegant temples to the local Severan dynasty, now deified, and palatial bath houses, triumphal arches and theatres that once rang with the sound of plays by Plautus and Terence. Each had a well-appointed Houses of Pleasure and amphorae-filled Houses of Bacchus.

Each of these ruined cities still had its own easily definable character. Timgad, one of a chain of fortress cities marking the Empire’s southern frontier, and the boundary between intensive cultivation and its absence, was an orderly army town built on a grid system: Camberley transported to the edge of the Sahara.

**nacer-eddine06** · 12 janvier 2020, 21h23

Djemila felt more like an Algerian Cirencester, a beautiful, richly appointed town which acted as the centre for a wealthy agricultural elite, in this case from the sale of wine, olive oil and grain, all of which was once sold in the long arcaded Cardo Maximus leading up to the forum, still peppered with statues to local worthies.

The countryside near Tiddis, the hometown of Quintus Lollius Urbicus, who rose under Emperor Hadrian to eventually become the governor of Roman Britain © William Dalrymple

In both cities, it was the mosaics which most immediately brought to life a lost and attractively decadent world. One showed naked Nereids cavorting on water tigers while the Old Man of the Sea looked on, waving his tentacles, and his rival Neptune charged along underwater in his chariot drawn by seahorses. Others revealed a world of bird and lion hunting and horse racing in summer, broken by winter afternoons of pig-sticking and bouts of gladiatorial combat: the perennial pastimes of the provincial Roman nobility. In some mosaics we see these landowners in tight tunics and bright stockings receiving the obeisance of their peasantry; in the background we catch glimpses of the two-storey villas they once lived in, surrounded by parkland and groves of cypresses. An inscription at Timgad summed up the life these people once aspired to: “The hunt, the baths, play and laughter: that’s the life for me.”

Nor did the legacy of richly sybaritic living end with the fracturing of Roman rule. If anything, the Arab conquest from the seventh century onwards increased the wealth and sophistication of this area. Europeans know well the incredible legacy of Islamic Andalucía, and the latticed apartments of the Alhambra, one of the most sublime and otherworldly pieces of architecture in Europe, but they sometimes forget the Berber dynasties that built these wonders had no less spectacular palace complexes back home in their own ancestral hills, where the Almoravids and Almohads ruled empires that encompassed both Spain and the Maghreb.

A Roman mosaic in Constantine © Alamy

Before I began researching for my Algerian travels, I don’t think I had ever heard of Tlemcen. Yet what is left of the palaces and mosques there bears witness to a courtly culture every bit as extraordinary as that of al-Andalus. Here, as there, long mirror pools give on*to loggias filled with orange trees, each perspective ending with tall archways framed by stucco stalactites of fabulous richness. Rings of mud-brick city*walls gave way to tall square minarets towering over white-washed courtyards. Up on a hill lies the Sufi shrine of Sidi Boumediene and a college where the great Arab philosopher, historian and political theorist Ibn Khaldun once taught.

No less surprising is the old city of Algiers. Again, it is a place that defies preconceptions. Before I went, my mind was filled with the narrow alleyways of the Casbah, scene of much of the anti-colonial street fighting in Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 film “The Battle of Algiers”. What I had not fully realised was the extent to which Algiers was home to a dynasty of rich and powerful corsairs who were once the terror of western Europe — the boot firmly on the other foot. In the early 17th century, at the height of the Barbary pirates, the population of the port of Algiers consisted of around 250,000 free Muslims who were waited on by 100,000 white Christian slaves, mostly from southern France and the Italian coast. In all, nearly one million Europeans were enslaved in north Africa at this time. Most of these were captured from the northern Mediterranean, but around 20,000 were British.

Between 1609 and 1616 it was reported that 466 British ships were attacked by Barbary galleys, and their crews led away in chains. By May 1626 there were more than 5,000 British captives in the city of Algiers and a further 1,500 in Sali. Frantic arrangements were made in London to redeem them “lest they follow the example of others and turn Turk” — in other words convert to Islam. In Tavistock, deep in Devon, the burghers of the town had to dig into their pockets no fewer than 34 times between 1660 and 1680 to ransom the towns’ captives enslaved in Algeria.

Dar Aziza, one of several palatial buildings in the capital formerly used by the Dey of Algiers © William Dalrymple

A narrow street in Mzab in Ghardaïa Province, in the south of Algeria © William Dalrymple
It was reports that very large numbers of British captives were converting to Islam that really rattled the Stuart authorities. Those who did “turn Turk” seemed to include a fairly wide cross section of English society, from arms dealers to mercenaries, sea captains and soldiers of fortune as well as a trumpeter and a lone Englishwoman who became one of the wives of the Dey of Algiers. Worse still, while some of these conversions were forced, many were clearly not, and travellers regularly brought back tales of their compatriots who had “crossed over” and were now prospering in Ottoman service.

When Charles II sent one Captain Hamilton to ransom a group who had been enslaved on the Barbary Coast, they all refused to return. The men had converted to Islam, risen in the ranks, and were now “partaking of the prosperous Successe of the Turks”, living in a style to which they could not possibly have aspired back home, in a society they found to be every bit as sophisticated as their own and a great deal more tolerant. Captain Hamilton was forced to return empty-handed: “They are tempted to forsake their God for the love of Turkish women,” he wrote in his official report. “Such ladies are,” he added, “generally very beautiful.”

Visiting the gorgeously painted palace apartments of the Dey of Algiers on our last day, it was easy to understand why so few wished to return home to the harsh winters of their homelands. Elegant courtyards filled with warm arcades of whitewashed horseshoe arches gave on to gardens where water dripped from marble fountains and creepers wound their way up barley-sugar columns from terracotta pots. In the apartments of the Corsair Admiral Barbarossa, the level of luxury is raised several more notches: imported Iznik*tiles from the Ottoman homelands clad the walls with yellow tulips, blue narcissus and red-dotted cintamani patterns. Above, sunbursts explode across the wooden roof in red and orange solar ripples.

The Mechouar in Tlemcen, the Algerian Alhambra © William Dalrymple
For much of the past few years, a visit to Algeria has been a tricky prospect: in the aftermath of the civil war the few travellers who ventured here were sometimes taken hostage by Islamist guerrillas. But now, while the politics remains uncertain, the fighting is long over, and the country is safe for travellers. It is sometimes tricky to get a visa, but once you are there the roads are good, the hotels are comfortable (if rarely particularly luxurious) and the tagines and kebabs are fabulous. Even the wine, modelled on French originals, is excellent, if a little expensive.

More*over, Algeria is possibly the last safe place in the Mediterranean where you see miles of empty beaches and olive-dotted landscapes almost entirely unwrecked by development. You can still wander almost alone through the*country’s most important archaeological sites, exquisite mosques and Ottoman palaces. This will no doubt change: the first tour groups are on their way. Go quick.

Details
William Dalrymple was a guest of Wild Frontiers (wildfrontierstravel.com). Its 11-day group tour, ‘Algerian Colours’, costs from £2,845 per person including full-board accommodation, guided excursions and transfers. The next trip departs in March

**tizi oualou** · 12 janvier 2020, 22h27

les occidentaux se sont émerveillés de notre terre, sa richesse et son patrimoine histoirique, bien avant la colonisation française,
Bou Saada avait dit un peintre Français ( ou il s'était installé la bas ) est un paradis sur terre

Isabelle Eberhardt a préféré mourir à Ain Sefra ( W de Naama °) que vivre à Genève en suisse, son pays d"origine

et la liste est longue, longue, trop longue d'occidentaux ( tiens, jamais d'arabes du golf, à part tirer sur la gazelles looooooooooooooool ) qui ont admiré du fond du coeur notre pays sans connotation négative ( pour s'approprier les richesses )

alors cet ecossais, il se reveille et s'emerveille en 2020 ? nous, on a déjà oublié qu'on a un beau pays looooooooooooool

Annonce

Un historien écossais visite l’Algérie et s’émerveille de ses « trésors »

Un historien écossais visite l’Algérie et s’émerveille de ses « trésors »

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