Tunisia Festivals and Celebrations

Tunisia's calendar is agricultural and maritime before it is cultural. The dates come in from the southern oases in autumn, the olives are pressed through the winter, and on the Kerkennah Islands a fishing season opens that is old enough and distinctive enough to have been inscribed by UNESCO in its own right.

Charfia, which is a season rather than a festival

Charfia fishing in the Kerkennah Islands went onto the UNESCO Representative List in 2020. It is a fixed trap fishery: palm fronds are driven into the shallow seabed in long converging lines that steer fish, on the falling tide, into chambers at the end. The traps are built from date palm, they are set out at the start of the season and taken up at the end, and the rights to a given position are held and passed on.

It is worth understanding before you look at a photograph of it, because at a distance a charfia reads as a line of untidy vegetation in shallow water. What it actually is, is a fishery designed around a tide, a palm tree and a set of inherited rights.

The Sahara at Douz, and the harvests

Douz, on the northern edge of the Grand Erg Oriental, holds an international Saharan festival each year that brings together camel racing, horsemanship, poetry and music from the desert communities. It is the largest of the southern gatherings and the one most visitors have heard of.

Elsewhere the pattern is the one the country runs on: date harvests around Tozeur and the Djerid oases, olive harvests across the Sahel, and a long summer season of arts festivals in the coastal towns, of which the one staged in the Roman theater at Carthage is the best known.