Famous Landmarks in Tunis
A medina of reused Roman stone opens through one gate onto French-era boulevards.
Tunis's oldest buildings sit inside the Medina, the walled old town at the city's centre and a World Heritage Site. Its earliest mosque was rebuilt in the ninth century using antique columns brought from Carthage, giving its prayer hall a patched-together character rather than a single design. The medina's boundary is marked by a nineteenth-century gate, an archway under a crenellated parapet, past which Avenue Habib Bourguiba carries the city into its colonial-era Ville Nouvelle of broad boulevards. Further out, a national art museum installed inside a former palace shows how public institutions took over older buildings rather than commissioning new ones. Coastal suburbs add later, different layers again.
Al-Zaytuna Mosque
731–9th century
Its prayer hall stands on rows of mismatched antique columns, reused whole from an older Roman-era city rather than carved to a single plan, the mark of a ninth-century rebuilding over an earlier structure.
The oldest mosque in Tunis, founded at the end of the seventh century or start of the eighth, though the building seen today dates from a ninth-century reconstruction that reused antique columns brought from Carthage. It later grew into the University of Ez-Zitouna, Tunisia's foremost centre of higher education from around the thirteenth century onward. Its teachers included the Maliki scholar Ibn 'Arafa, the jurist al-Maziri, and the poet Aboul-Qacem Echebbi. It is a listed monument, restored repeatedly over the centuries.
- The university that grew from it, Ez-Zitouna, remained Tunisia's foremost seat of learning from around the thirteenth century onward.
- One of its teachers, Aboul-Qacem Echebbi, went on to become a celebrated Tunisian poet.
Photo: Citizen59 (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Bab el Bhar
1848
An archway topped by a crenellated parapet, standing at the exact seam where dense old lanes end and wide, straight boulevards begin.
Bab el Bhar, also called Porte de France, is a gate on the eastern edge of the medina of Tunis, marking the point where the old walled town meets the newer city built up beyond it. Its current form, an archway topped by a crenellated parapet, dates from 1848, following many earlier alterations. It is a listed monument and forms part of the medina's UNESCO World Heritage listing.
Photo: Dennis G. Jarvis (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Bardo National Museum
1888
What identifies the building from outside is the old palace itself: no purpose-built museum front was added when it opened to the public in 1888 as the Alaoui Museum, a name it kept until being renamed after independence.
The Bardo National Museum occupies an old beylical palace in Le Bardo, on the edge of Tunis, tracing Tunisia's history across several millennia through archaeological finds. First proposed in the 1860s by Muhammad Khaznadar, son of the country's prime minister, it has occupied the palace since 1888, when it opened as the Alaoui Museum, named for the reigning bey, later renamed after independence. It ranks among the most important museums in the Mediterranean and the second-largest in Africa after Cairo's Egyptian Museum, with one of the world's largest collections of Roman mosaics, gathered from sites including Carthage, Dougga and Utica.
- It was first proposed in the 1860s by Muhammad Khaznadar, son of Tunisia's prime minister.
- It is the second-largest museum in Africa, after the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.
- Its Roman mosaic collection includes the Virgil Mosaic, a major source on daily life in Roman Africa.
Photo: Yamen (CC BY-SA 3.0)
History
The oldest fabric sits inside the Medina, founded around the turn of the eighth century when its first mosque, the Zaytuna, was raised; a ninth-century rebuild reused antique columns brought from Carthage, and the mosque grew into the seat of what became the University of Ez-Zitouna, Tunisia's foremost centre of higher learning from around the thirteenth century onward. Successive rebuildings reshaped the old town's walls, and its sea-facing gate reached its present archway-and-parapet form only in 1848. The nineteenth century added a layer beyond those walls too: a former palace was converted into a national museum in 1888, while colonial administration laid out the Ville Nouvelle, a grid of boulevards built up around Avenue Habib Bourguiba, its buildings sitting in deliberate contrast to the smaller, older structures behind the sea gate.