Michael Tomkinson's Tunisia [antikvár]

Introduction To mark its 21st year of publication, and the 37th since our first Twiisia a Holkiay Guide appeared, this edition has been treated to some 300 new illustrations and a much-needed updating. Living with Tunisia for almost 40 years has provided the privilege, rare in this day and age, of seeing a people succeed. Wlien I moved to Hammamet in 1968, the nearby county-town of Nabeul was inaccessible whenever rains flooded the oueds. Now motorways, dual-carriageways and all-weather highways crisscross the country. Tunisians then were suffering from (and, with their usual subtle pragmatism, subverting) a state-imposed programme of collective ownership. They nowadays enjoy an unprecedented level of free-market prosperity, civic empowerment and gender equality. Tunisia in the 1970s received more US aid than anywhere else in Africa. Within twenty years it had become an nd hoc donor nation, sending aid first to Bosnia then, after Hurricane Katrina, blankets, tents and food to New Orleans. Kofi Annan in 1998 called this most tolerant, relaxed and sophisticated state in North Africa 'one of the few countries in the world that serves as an international model'. Tlie grass-roots growth of the 1960s and '70s continues - new settlements and suburbs, clinics, schools and low-cost homes - but with the 1980s came prestigious public works; motorways and two new tram-cum-railways, nationwide industrial zones, city-centre skyscrapers, dams, canals and international pipe-lines, lavish tourist complexes, more international airports, championship golf courses and splendid pleasure ports. Globalization, if less here than in Europe, has made inroads since the 1990s: for the worse in the spread of fast-food joints, inane advertising and get-rich-quick quizzes in the media, for the better in a new and hitherto alien concern for the environment. Material westerization has happily left the Tunisian character generally unscathed. Islam ensures that the country has not and carmot become sunnily ersatz-European. Tunisians are unified, not fanaticized, by their all-pervasive but moderating faith. It influences standards and styles of living; it dictates attitudes and the pace of life, and its values and effects are if anything increasing. Tunisia, to Western visitors, is no longer a novelty. This one-time lair of the Barbary pirates, ex-French protectorate and 'Land of the Veil' first revealed itself to mass tourism in the mid-1960s. As a popular destination it had within a decade earned a permanent place in most travel companies' programmes. More than 600 custom-built hotels now house, feed, transport and entertain an annual average of over five million holidaymakers. Given the diversity of scenery and peoples, a pictorial record such as this offers no more than a sampling. A single day's drive will take you from the rocky north coast, across the forested mountains of Khroumiria, down into rolling farmland strewn with Roman ruins, then over the steppe to the first Saharan oases. 'Tunisia - Crossroads of East and West' say the tourist hand-outs, and it is true that the country has since earliest times been a meeting-place of Middle Eastern and Mediterranean peoples and subject at certain periods to large-scale European penetration. Although most of the locals have the duskiness expected of a Mediterranean people, their divers features suggest that the invading armies, whether Cesar's or the Barbarossas', left behind them not only destruction. Most of the invasions - Phoenician, Roman, Vandal, Byzantine, Arab, Spanish, Turkish and finally French -were followed by periods of settlement. Their legacy is a concentration of historical vestiges more intensive than anywhere else in Africa. The abundance of Roman ciHes - some 200 classified sites - is such that the first to be excavated are now overgrown again, while the authorities are very far from working on the last. Overgrown, built over or otherwise 'developed', some locations have in a sense made of this book a requiem. The photographs have been taken with the help of Jacques Perez and Nejib Chouk over the last 30 years. Most of the views reproduced here remain valid and will, it is hoped, survive. Others I have retained unashamedly in the hope that the visitor, like the photographer, will be able to 'see selectively', to appreciate a site despite the unloveliness rising around it, and so detach visually each feature of beauty or interest from its modern, less decorative surroundings. Tunisia being a metric country, it would be perverse to give distances other than in kilometres (kms). With most towns now spreading almost immeasurably, and many localities lacking any discernible centre, some of the distances are indicated approximately, give or take a kilometre or two. As for place-names, it would have been the opposite of perverse to correct their spelling. Names in Tunisia are of Arabic, Berber, Latin, Punic or Turkish origin and, save for the few places mentioned in early European records, were formerly written in Arabic script alone. From 1881 to 1956 Tunisia was in theory protected, in fact ruled, by the French who, in drawing up the first maps and gazetteers, occasionally committed the linguistic atrocity of adopting not the correct form of place-names but that used locally by the inhabitants or even that which they, the French, could more easily pronounce. The result is like a map of London with the place-names phonetically Cockney. As it would confuse the traveller to give other spellings I have, reluctantly, left these Gallic 'Ammersmiffs and 01 Bileys.