Almost all that remains of the ancient city of Carthage is a small harbor on the peninsula outside Tunis. The Romans leveled and burned the rest of the city at the end of the Third Punic War. Many more recent cities have since been built over the rest of the Carthaginian remains. “Carthage” is now an upscale suburb of Tunis.
From Google Maps:
The harbor is now a fishing port, used by the small, colorful boats that are common in many Tunisian ports.
Stacked along the dock were piles of ceramics, each threaded with ropes or netting. These are octopus traps. Thinking they have found a good rock nook, octopuses slide inside the submerged containers. When the fishermen pull on cords, the jostling alarm causes the octopus inhabitants to hunker down. Fear is their undoing. There is an unfortunate echo of the two-thousand-year-old history of this harbor, as the Carthaginians used a similar strategy of holing up, one that the Romans overcame, ending Carthage’s rule.
Now, though, the harbor is peaceful, inhabited by fish-scrounging cats, a few local kids at play, and fishermen joking as the stow their pots.
Sadly, the museums are empty of visitors. We walked through hall after hall, alone save for museum employees. The same is true in much of Tunisia. A country whose coasts were thronging (and thonging) beach holiday resorts and whose cultural sites were popular destinations for history and archaeology buffs now receives few foreign visitors. Miles and miles of beach hotels stand completely empty, as if the Rapture had taken away all the lovers of blue seas, discos, and seafood. Historical sites — Roman, Carthaginian, Byzantine, French colonial — are visited by local schoolkids and few others. Two bombings by extremists succeeded in closing down a thriving tourist economy. The terrorists got exactly what they wanted: travel warnings from Western countries that stemmed the flow of foreign money to the only remaining Arab Spring democracy.
David George Haskell 