Shipwreck in the Desert

On entering El Djem, Tunisia

“The first glimpse you get of El Djem is as exciting and surprising as seeing the Great Pyramid for the first time. It appears on the horizon of a featureless plain like a gigantic ship on an expanse of ocean.”
— Nina Nelson, Tunisia, 1974

The amphitheater appeared like a ship to me as well, or rather a wreck that had crashed against the shores of distant spacetime and got stuck. It weirdly floated on the crests of the town’s more modern buildings. Currently frozen in place, it had obviously moved at some point, gliding from an otherworldly fog into our present, where it now stood and stared at its own incongruity.

There are still lots of Roman ruins in Tunisia, ranging from restored tourist sites to piles of stones behind some goat shed. This one from 238 CE is the largest. Modeled on the Colosseum in Rome, it’s among the four largest amphitheaters still standing in the world. It was used not just for blood-soaked entertainment but also as a fortress, quarry, grain storage and manufacturing center, and in 1979, UNESCO listed it as a World Heritage Site. But before it was cleaned up and much of the surrounding town of El Jem/Djem developed around it, many foreigners had already visited and noted their first impressions.

“The great amphitheatre of Al Djem appears majestically on the horizon as we motor along the road from Susa, a vision of past civilisation in a country that has run to waste. From far off we sight this mass of masonry, so strangely isolated, looking like some desert island in a silent sea, or a city left stranded by the passing centuries in a sort of No Man's Land.”
— Beatrice Erskine, Vanished Cities of Northern Africa, 1927

From: Isabel Anderson, From Corsair to Riffian, 1927

From: Alexander Graham and H.S. Ashbee, Travels in Tunisia, 1887

I learned only later that it was also the fortress where Dihya, or Al-Kahina, made her last stand. She was a warrior queen who united many Berber tribes in a fight against the incursion of Arab Islamic armies in the last half of the 7th century CE. She defeated the Egyptian commander Hassan ibn Noman and conquered vast territories in Northern Africa.

On Hassan’s second attempt years later, however, she made the mistake of burning Berber villages and crops between the armies to slow him down. This cost her the support of many Berbers. She withdrew to the fortified amphitheater at El Djem and lost her final battle there. Rather than be captured, she escaped towards the Algerian border, where she died, probably by suicide. Hassan decapitated her body and sent her head to the Caliph in Baghdad in a jewel-covered chest to prove her defeat.

“About half an hour before reaching El-Djem, the great massive pile of its amphitheatre becomes visible against the horizon, standing out with startling effect as the only object on the huge, void plain. Though actually immense in size, its complete isolation conveys an exaggerated impression of its enormous proportions, which seem in their might to defy the possibility of extinction by time or vandalism.”
— Graham Petrie, Tunis, Kairouan & Carthage, 1908

It’s impossible to walk across the arena now and get a sense of all the bloodshed, of gladiators, animals, warriors, revolutionaries. The progressive decay of the ruin was halted and partially erased for better public consumption. Its guts have been stripped away, reinforcing its presence as the skeleton of a wreck.

So we might as well have some fun and see how it was transformed for the filming of Monty Python’s “Life of Brian” — if it was in fact filmed here (as claimed by many sources, including Wikipedia) and not at Carthage, neither of which look like the amphitheater in the film.

“The Sahel shrank from us and we found ourselves on a level desert plain. I looked out of the window westwards: on the horizon appeared an enormous dark blur, like a ship at sea, the only upright thing in this great yellow-brown wilderness. ‘El Djem?’ I smiled at the ladies. ‘El Djem,’ they confirmed shyly.”
— John Marriner, The Shores of the Black Ships, 1971

“These ruins loom up in the midst of the desolation like a light-house to a tempest-tossed mariner, and are the only objects visible in this flat, deserted country where not a tree is to be seen anywhere. One wonders why any one should have erected a monument of this nature in such a God-forsaken spot.”
— William Vanderbilt, A Trip Through Italy, Sicily, Tunisia, Algeria and Southern France, 1918

The colosseum looms above the ugly jumble of the modern town of El Jem like a sinister mirage. When I first caught sight of it, unexpectedly, turning a corner near the bus station, I just stood there staring at it, stunned. It could hardly be real, it was so out of scale, so astonishingly intact and quite deserted, as if I'd conjured it up in a trance.
— Robert Dessaix, Arabesques: A Tale of Double Lives, 2009

What I found to be best preserved was not the massive weight of the building’s history but rather its opposite – its ethereality as a mere shell stripped of its anchor in place and time, a stone vessel tossed on waves of blood and sand. As such, its impact continues to ripple across the plain.

“There it is! she cried at last, pointing out the distant silhouette of a small amphitheatre. The El Djem Coliseum, because that’s what it was, was in fact… a Roman amphitheatre in ruins surrounded by fields, tiny on the horizon, its crown abandoned in the emptiness and worn away with time, toward which we advanced in silence.”
— Jean-Philippe Toussaint, Self-Portrait Abroad, 2010

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