Sherry Chandler » Come wiz me to zee Casbah
Come wiz me to zee Casbah
When I was a girl, this was a throwaway comic line, heard everywhere from Crosby-Hope Road pictures to Pepé Le Pew cartoons. I knew I was supposed to laugh at it, I knew the Casbah was some exotic, romantic place, but I had no idea what it was.
So I turned to this NYTimes article, “The Crumbling of the Casbah,” this morning with considerable interest. Now that I have a pretty good idea of what the Casbah is I learn that it soon may be no more:
Casbahs, from the Arabic for “fortified place,” exist across North Africa, and many have been beautifully restored. In Algiers the word once referred only to the citadel built above the old city, but it came to mean the old city itself. When people speak of the Casbah, they are referring uniquely to this crowded hillside between the fortress and the sea.
A Phoenician trading post called Ikosim occupied the point of land as early as the sixth century B.C. The Romans arrived 500 years later, and the arc of an amphitheater can still be traced in the walls of the buildings in the lower Casbah.
The Vandals eventually chased the Romans away, and a Berber tribe was living there when Buluggin bin Ziri arrived in the 10th century to found a new city on what was left of the old one. He called the new city El Djazair, which means the islands in Arabic, referring to the string of islets off the coast that form a natural breakwater for the harbor. From El Djazair came the anglicized name Algiers and later Algeria.
The Berbers built a wall around the city. Five gates closed it off from the world, and gates also closed each end of the city’s narrow streets, although both the wall and the internal gates have long since disappeared.
After the Barbarossa brothers captured the town in 1516, Algiers became a fabled redoubt of Barbary pirates who plied the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. In 1575 Miguel de Cervantes was taken captive on his way back to Spain from a military campaign and spent five years in Algiers before he was ransomed and sent home.
In those days the fortified city was filled with more than 100 fountains, 50 hammams, or public baths, 13 large mosques and more than 100 prayer halls, one for almost every street, so that residents could perform the last of their five daily prayers after the gates were shut for the night. A flutist circulated playing a Turkish melody called a coupe jambe — French for leg cut — to announce the evening curfew.
Colonialism was hard on Algiers:
When the French arrived to colonize the country in 1830, one of the first things they did was cut the city in two with the “rue du Centre” to allow their troops easy access in the event of insurrection. They surrounded the Casbah with colonial-style buildings, destroyed the walls and tore down much of the northern quarter to build the colonial neighborhood of Bab al-Oued.
So was the battle for independence, which basically seems to have turned the Casbah into a slum:
In 1958 the Casbah’s 175 acres were home to only 30,000 people. Those numbers swelled as the battle for independence gained strength, and people crowded into the city to escape reprisals by the French. More than 80,000 people live in the Casbah today. Each house, intended for a single family, now holds as many as 10 poor families.
Earthquakes have taken their toll. And so has fundamentalism, which whether Christian or Moslem, never seems to have much concern for culture. The Casbah has been a major hiding place for terrorists.
There is a movement underway to restore/rebuild the Casbah but
“More than a third of the houses have collapsed, and at least another third are in an advanced state of deterioration,” said Abdelkader Ammour, secretary general of a foundation that is trying to save the crumbling swatch of hidden courtyards and winding narrow streets. “We don’t want it to disappear.”
Mr. Ammour said the problem isn’t money. “It’s a question,” he said, “of political will.”
Or as Nabila Oulebsir, an Algerian architect who has written extensively on Algiers, says, “The question is whether you reconstruct or construct something new.”
Historic preservation is a luxury for steady times, and Algeria is still feeling its way toward the future from a dark and turbulent past. It has only just righted itself from a decade of fundamentalist Islamic violence. The nation’s focus is now on economic development. But tourism, the great engine of preservation in so many cities, is low on the list of Algeria’s concerns. Algeria doesn’t really need tourists. It has oil.
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