Kairouan: Visitor and Heritage Guide

Kairouan sits on a plain in the middle of Tunisia at roughly equal distance from the sea and the mountains, which is a strange place to put a city until you understand that it was founded as a garrison. It was inscribed in 1988, and UNESCO calls it the most ancient Arabo-Muslim base of the Maghreb and one of its principal holy cities.

670 AD, and five centuries as a capital

Kairouan was founded in 670 AD and was the capital of Ifriqiya for five centuries. UNESCO describes it as a place of outstanding diffusion of Arabo-Muslim civilization, bearing unique witness to the first centuries of that civilization and to its architectural and urban development. For anyone reading North and West African history, that is the point: this is where the architectural vocabulary of Maghrebi Islam was worked out before it traveled.

The inscribed property is serial. It takes in the medina of 54 hectares and its suburbs of 20, and separately the Basins of the Aghlabids and the Zawiya of Sidi Sahib. The medina's ramparts run for more than three kilometers.

The Great Mosque, and the three other things

The Great Mosque was rebuilt in the ninth century and UNESCO describes it as not only one of the major monuments of Islam but a universal architectural masterpiece, and as the model for several other Maghrebi mosques. The prayer hall forms a quadrilateral of 135 meters by 80. At its southern end is a hypostyle hall of seventeen naves supported by what the inscription calls a forest of columns in marble and porphyry. The courtyard is flagstoned and bordered with porticoes, and the massive square minaret of three stories interrupts the northern end.

Three other things are worth the walk. The Mosque of the Three Doors carries what UNESCO records as the most ancient surviving sculpted facade in Muslim art. The Basins of the Aghlabids are a ninth century open air reservoir of two communicating cisterns, one of the most beautiful hydraulic ensembles built to water a town. And the Zawiya of Sidi Sahib holds the remains of Abou Zama El-Balawi, a companion of the Prophet.