History comes alive in Tunisia

I’ve long wanted to come to Tunisia. For years, Morocco has been one of my favourite places to visit – I set my second novel in Marrakech – but the country is changing. Middle Eastern money is sloshing in bringing with it luxury hotel chains and futuristic skyscrapers straight out of Dubai. For Tunisia – set back by the hideous tourist attack in 2015 and remaining on the Covid red list long after many other countries opened their doors again – similar development is much slower to materialise, and I was keen to see how Tunis compared with the Moroccan cities I know well: Fez, Marrakech, Rabat and Tangiers. We are staying at the Residence Tunis, the city’s original five-star hotel, used as much by wealthy locals for weddings and parties as tourists. It’s a grandiose building with palatial, marble-floored spaces and a vast, palm-dotted pool terrace. Half an hour from the centre of Tunis, it’s in the beachy suburb of Gammarth, originally a quiet fishing village, but now mostly home to hotels and resorts. We opt to eat in on the first night, at the El Dar restaurant, where I’m introduced to brik – a triangle of crispy filo pastry holding a runny egg (delicious but messy) and learn quickly that Tunisian harissa delivers considerably more punch than the readymade version back in the UK.

“We eat harissa with everything,” says Ali the next morning. “Did you have it with your eggs for breakfast? Shaksuka, you must try.” The taxi drops us on Avenue Habib Bourguiba, the city’s main boulevard. It is a North African equivalent of Barcelona’s Las Ramblas, with a central tree-lined promenade flanked by two lanes of battered taxis, delivery vans and mopeds. On either side, the pavements are packed with café tables, many filled with locals mopping up bowls of shaksuka – eggs with tomatoes, onion, garlic and, of course, harissa – with chunks of fresh flatbread.

As we stroll, I ask Ali where I can buy some spices, expecting him to suggest a stall in the medina. Instead, he swerves down a dusty side street and into a large, glass-fronted épicerie, with long shelves behind the counter holding giant glass bowls blazing with colour. Butter-yellow turmeric, coffee-hued cumin, rusty-scarlet ras el hanout. “Red pepper hot or red pepper mild?” asks the man behind the counter. I agree to taste both, licking my finger and touching it to the small spatula of cherry-red powder he pushes towards me. At first, nothing. Then it’s as if someone has lit a match inside my mouth. “I’ll just take the mild,” I wheeze.

Once I can feel my mouth again, Ali leads us into the medina and all the space and light of the Avenue Habib Bourguiba fades away, replaced by cluttered stalls stacked with T-shirts, rattan baskets, Berber shawls in autumn shades, brass cooking pots and shisha pipes. It’s a classic labyrinth: we turn left, then right, left again, a maze of switchbacks and alleys, studded with nondescript doorways that lead into dimly lit coffee shops filled with gaggles of young Tunisians, sipping dark espresso and tucking into brik.

All the classic ingredients of a medina are here: the white-walled madrassa (Koranic school) with zebra-striped archways set around a shady central courtyard, jewellers stacked with blazing gold necklaces and bracelets – an essential part of a Tunisian wedding – and cubbyhole parfumeries, all watched over by the eighth-century El Zitoun mosque. My favourite stop of the morning is Maison Jasmine, a parfumerie where I lift the stoppers out of half-a-dozen bottles: musky lavender, sweetly scented rose and tangy, citrussy neroli. By the time we’re sitting cross-legged at the Café M’rabet, a local’s favourite, I feel as if I know the medina already – which is, of course, the fastest way to get horribly lost.

At Ali’s suggestion, we take a 20-minute taxi ride from the centre to the suburb of La Goulette for lunch the following day, a low-key residential neighbourhood famous for its fish restaurants, with a small fleet sailing from the port. The glistening fish at the bar La Maison de Grillade, draws us in with a long trough of ice, piled with seafood. “And perhaps a cucumber salad?” suggests the waiter, when we order mechouia to accompany our fish. This classic dish of grilled vegetables, puréed with garlic, has such a kick of spice that I wolf down the cucumber in almost one gulp.

From La Goulette, it’s a 20-minute taxi ride to the village of Sidi Bou Said, past the coffee shops and shisha lounges of the hip La Marsa district, to a cluster of white and blue houses with blue-framed windows. The French painter Rodolphe d’Erlanger painted the windows of his house, Ennejma Ezzahra, in blues in 1912, sparking a memorable trend.

But it’s Carthage that stays in my mind, that silent half hour surrounded by the remnants of centuries gone before, rather like a metaphor for the country itself: still standing, still vibrant. Tunis delivers exactly what I’d hoped to find – an undistilled sense of its North African self, less intense than Marrakech, more familiar than Tripoli – albeit with a predilection for spices hotter than the sun.

Photographs by Philip Lee Harvey/Gallery Stock, Karim Ben-Khelifa/The New York Times, Dagmar Schwelle/Laif