The people and buildings in these photos no longer exist. One postcard features an Arcadian-looking Benghazi in what is today Libya, all pergola-lined walkways and skillfully-carved Italianate stone arcades – a far cry from the mounds of rubble that years of post-revolutionary fighting have reduced the city to. [...]
Once the French project got under way, the colonial power expanded the city by dredging the marshland, lapping up against the Medina walls and laying down Haussmannian boulevards. First among them was the Boulevard Marine known today as Bourguiba after the country’s first post-independence leader, which formed the background to media coverage of the 2011 Tunisian revolution. Apartments with elaborate façades fronted such boulevards and electric trams coursed along them. To the pre-modern locals, it must have looked like a spell had been cast on their city. [...]
Like Istanbul, Thesssaloniki, Cairo and many other once-upon-a-time metropolises whose cosmopolitanisms were pulverized by geopolitics and the reductionist founding myths of the nation-state, Tunis is a city of absences. These are most felt in La Goulette, the pleasant seaside neighborhood now deserted by its Jewish and Catholic residents; the suqs in the Medina abandoned by Jewish traders and Muslim aristocrats alike; the decaying, high-ceilinged apartments, bars and synagogues of Lafayette, once rowdy with the sound of Italian and French; the soaring bell-towers of the Cathedral and St Croix, or the onion domes of the Greek Orthodox church close to Bab al-Bahr, the Gate to the Sea.
