This week’s dream: Algeria’s ancient treasures
For some years, a visit to Algeria was a “tricky prospect” owing to anxieties about Islamist militants. But it is now safe for travellers, and well worth a visit for its empty beaches and its “olive-dotted” landscape, but also for its architectural and artistic heritage, says William Dalrymple in the FT. The country’s colonisation by France and its 20th century war of independence, in which 25,000 French and at least 400,000 Algerians lost their lives, figure large in its image abroad. But for much of the last 2,000 years, North Africa carried far more weight in the global balance of power – and in Algeria’s Moorish palaces and Roman towns, such past glories shine forth.
Near the Roman hilltown of Tiddis, for example, lies the tomb of a Berber cavalry commander, Quintus Lollius Urbicus, who was the first African governor of Britain. Appointed in 139AD, he led the reconquest of lowland Scotland, and oversaw the building of the Antonine Wall, from the Firth of Clyde to the Firth of Forth. At that time, a third of Roman senators were north African, and their “sybaritic” lives at home are easy to imagine as you wander the ruins of Timgad and Djémila, with their “palatial” bathhouses, theatres, houses of pleasure and houses of Bacchus. Equally evocative are the mosaics, depicting a world of lionhunting and horse racing in summer, and winter afternoons of pig-sticking and gladiatorial combat.
Equally sophisticated were the medieval Muslim empires – the Almoravids and Almohads, whose palaces in Tlemcen are as “extraordinary” as those in southern Spain. And in Algiers, the wealth of the Barbary pirates (the terror of western Europe in the early modern age, capturing 100,000 white Christian slaves to serve Algiers) can be seen in the “gorgeously painted” palace apartments of the Dey and – more luxurious still – of the corsair Admiral Barbarossa. Wild Frontiers
(wildfrontierstravel.com) organises group trips.