The Sundarban
This article used to be produced by National Geographic Traveller (UK).
Grime swirls in a aloof kasbah, stirred by the sirocco — the barren put wind that carries soft Saharan sand throughout the Mediterranean Sea, its pink grains falling in a blood rain. In the fortified central quarter, a shutter is brightly painted with the hamsa, the image of an birth palm inset with a blue iris, believed throughout North Africa to deter the nasty survey. A girl in a slate-grey headscarf and abaya robe-dress sweeps previous, providing a anxious ‘salam’. The crimson crescent moon and huge name of the Tunisian flag flaps in the lumber above a powder-blue door, standing tantalisingly ajar.
It feels for all the world that we’re in a North African medina, now now not the western Sicilian coastal town of Mazara del Vallo. However then, as local manual Paolo Ayed is quick to job my memory, “Sicily is the gate of Europe.” He gestures beyond the half of-birth door, the put girls folks lunge vats of fish broth, greens and couscous — that Maghrebi staple that’s been absorbed, cherish so important from throughout the sea, into Sicilian culture. “I’m half of Sicilian and half of Tunisian,” Paolo says, his eyes electric-blue, his face olive-skinned. “And the heady scent of our kitchens is the same.” His tours are all about the interaction between the Tunisian and Sicilian communities in his fatherland.
The Tyrrhenian Sea is standard for a cooling dip for every and each locals and company.
Photograph by Jonathan Stokes
Mazara del Vallo, 55 miles south west of Palermo, is home to Italy’s biggest Tunisian community, which makes up around 4,000 of the town’s inhabitants of fifty,000. Most arrived after the 1960s, when a inhabitants relate caused excessive unemployment in Tunisia, with a solution offered by labour shortages in Sicily’s fishing industry. However this used to be factual the most authorized wave in a history of immigration from North Africa that goes relieve to the 9th century CE, when a Tunisian-led navy invaded Sicily, turning it into an Islamic emirate for the subsequent 200 years. Mazara’s kasbah used to be constructed then, and it used to be later sacked by subsequent Christian rulers. This present day, it’s been restored and is as soon as extra home to a majority Tunisian inhabitants.
The dialog around authorized-day multiculturalism in Sicily is most steadily defined by the island’s notify at the main edge of the authorized European migrant crisis, with many refugees from throughout Africa and beyond discovering their first landfall right here on account of its notify in the coronary heart of the Mediterranean. However immigration is now now not a footnote to Sicilian history; it’s phase of the essence of an island shaped by outsiders, from Phoenicians and Greeks to Vandals and Normans.
We stroll through the kasbah, the put Paolo grew up in the Eighties. The partitions are embellished with colourful ceramics depicting scenes from the Islamic conquest of Sicily, alongside the winged head of Medusa that adorns the Sicilian flag. We put a question to through the picket shutters of a squat building into a inviting white room, its floor laid out with comely rows of prayer mats and its partitions adorned with Arabic calligraphy. Right here’s Mazara’s authorized mosque — the accepted having been destroyed to accomplish formula for the town’s cathedral. This present day’s mosque sits facet-by-facet with the Church of San Francesco, a looming Baroque edifice of faded sandstone. “There aren’t many areas the put you would possibly well well hear church bells and the call to prayer at the same time,” says Paolo, beaming. “No longer opponents. Guests.”
The street art work found in the kasbah of Mazara del Vallo hints at the Islamic influences in Sicily’s previous.
Photograph by Jonathan Stokes
Amna Acknowledged is a odd visitor at Al Ciliegio, a local agrotourism endeavor, since her arrival from Tunisia in the mid-2010s.
Photograph by Jonathan Stokes
I disclose farewell to Paolo and climb into my condominium car. I’m embarking on a street day out to peek extra about Sicily’s multicultural heritage, heading eastwards into the interior sooner than ending in the capital, Palermo, on the northwest fly, the put the island’s cultural patchwork is at its most sparkling. It’s a heat, sunny June day, but Sicily is greener than one would per chance well well ask for such a dry space, the put the mercury on a odd basis rises to 35C in the summer season months. As the nation-notify flits previous my window, it looks plump of existence: silvery olive groves shimmer cherish shoals of fish, and vineyards erupt in verdant terraces on the hillsides. This greenness is thanks in trim phase to Sicily’s medieval Muslim rulers, who irrigated the island the usage of aquifers and underground channels called qanats, remodeling its agricultural doable.
Apt below an hour’s drive later, I reach Al Ciliegio, a farmhouse on the outskirts of the town of Salemi. As soon as used as a mafia hideaway, it used to be seized by the authorities in the early 2000s and is now a restaurant and agrotourism alternate speed by the San Vito Onlus Basis, a neighborhood endeavor serving to to resolve immigrants from North Africa. I’m ushered into the restaurant’s eating room, which overlooks its vineyard, and am seated at a communal table with a dozen other diners.
A succession of plates is served that have the age-weak multicultural influences on Sicilian cuisine, including pasta alla norma, regarded as one of Sicily’s national dishes, made with tomato, basil and aubergine, a vegetable introduced to the island by the conquering Islamic armies in the 9th century. Next there’s couscous, keen with seafood in the Tunisian fashion, the blue crabs laid on high of the piled grains as if they’re crawling on dunes of sand — but given a Sicilian twist, with the addition of garlic, parsley and moving peperoncino peppers.
After lunch, over cups of sweetened mint tea, I procure talking to Amna Acknowledged, a smiling girl wearing round glasses and a blue hijab, who’s been a odd visitor since arriving in Sicily from Tunisia in the mid-2010s. “My husband would race away for 3 months at a time fishing,
