Algiers
French Colonial Capital of Algeria
May 16th was the day I had dedicated to seeing the city of Algiers. I was not up particularly early. I had my breakfast in the motel, which really only consisted of several different kinds of bread and light pastry products. There were two boxes of cereal on the table, but they were just for show. Both were empty. After munching on the breakfast, I thought I would see about exchanging a few more dollars for dinars.
Most of the advice I had read said to just ask the desk at your motel for guidance on where to go in town to find the black market money changers. I asked the old man at the desk what the name of the square was where people went to change money. He asked how much I wanted to exchange. I told him about $100. He offered me 21,000 dinars, which represents about a 15% cut. I politely declined, and asked if he could just tell me the name of the square I needed to search for. The clerk told me if I wanted to try my luck at the square, I would just have to figure out how to do that myself. Another fine example of Arabic hospitality.
Google answered the question for me. The square was right around the corner. The first money changer I encountered offered me the same crappy rate of 21,000. The second said the same. The third guy I found offered me 23,500, which seemed close enough to me to allow a small profit on the exchange. I handed him my hundred. He handed me a wad of bills and quickly sought to end the transaction. I counted the money, because it looked short. He had given me 13,500. I asked him for the rest. He mumbled something about “not having had his coffee that morning.” He then handed me enough bills to get to 22,500. I waved him for the rest of the money. He then handed me enough to make 23,000. I asked again for the remaining 500 and finally walked away with my 23,500. Here again, Arabic hospitality.
I had a busy day planned. I went off to the far side of the city using a combination of metro and foot. I went to the Hamma Garden. This is a large, experimental garden in an urban part of Algiers. It has huge alleyways of all ficus trees, or all one type or another. There is a large fountain in the middle, overshadowed by the enormous martyr’s memorial atop the nearby hill. The garden also boasts a whole section on English design, and another on French design. On one end, the garden even houses a zoo, which did not happen to be open at the time of my visit.
Just above the botanical garden sits the martyr’s memorial, surrounded by an independence museum and an army museum. I used the teleferic to get to the top of the hill, where I visited the Independence War Museum. It gave a nicely presented but very one sided account of the French occupation and subsequent defeat at the hands of the Algerians in their quest for independence. The army museum seemed as if it would be better, but perhaps also take longer. I suspected it would be at least as propagandistic as the one near the memorial.
The memorial itself is home to some fantastic views. Otherwise, it is just a very large, modern looking set of conjoined arcing pillars. It is lit up in Islamic green at night. You can see this memorial from just about anywhere in Algiers. It does not take all that much time to visit this site, as it is really just a gigantic statue.
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It was late in the morning when I set out to cross town in order to visit the Notre Dame d’Afrique. I tried to get back on the teleferic to descend to the metro. The queue for the teleferic was ridiculously long and hardly moving at all. I decided to shell out for an InDrive to make this, my longest leg of travel around town, as quick as it could be. The connections weren’t good anyway, so taking a taxi made the most sense.
The Notre Dame d’Afrique is a very large, stately church building also built on a promontory giving way to spectacular views of the city and coastline. It is apparently a still-operating Catholic church, though Christian groups are restricted to the point of strangulation in Algeria. It doesn’t seem it would ever grow, or even remain in stasis. I was able to visit the inside, which did indicate that one time, the church had an evangelistic character, or at least wanted to. I bought a post card on the inside. The outside was also impressive, but did not take all that long to see. The 19th century church is large and interesting, but not something so unique as the Hagia Sofia or something. All of this, too, did not take all that long to visit.
My next stop was the few places I visited that had any ties at all to the Barbary Wars I had studied so vigorously a few years earlier during my grad school program. At the top of the casbah, Algiers has the remains of a Palace of the Dey. The Dey was an Ottoman era suzerain ruler of Algiers, who sent financial “gifts” to Istanbul, and cooperated with that government. They operated in a semi-independent status, often negotiating their own treaties and declaring war on European powers. This was generally done as a pretense for piratical attacks in which Algiers and the other Barbary states captured ships in the Mediterranean, enslaved the poor, and extracted ransom from the wealthy or influential. They even extracted tribute from several European powers who felt it expedient to pay some small portion of their revenue in exchange for safe passage for their ships, and guaranteed continual harassment of their competitors.
The Palace of the Dey has been under construction for years, and most of it is inaccessible. There is a small area dedicated to the janissaries that is open. You can also see the mosque, a powder magazine, and a few other buildings. The exterior remains intact and visible, though much of it is difficult to photograph as there is a modern Algerian military complex in the area. Even though there wasn’t much to the site that was accessible, I found it interesting to see at least a small part of the palace and fortifications from this time when the American navy was born and first cut its teeth with the half dozen special frigates commissioned in the 1790s.
I walked down through the Algiers casbah en route to the Ketchaoua Mosque which sits at the bottom of the same area. The casbah in Algiers is much smaller than those of Marrakech and Fes, as far as I could tell. Others had written that they believed a guide was necessary, as if the area were dangerous or easy to get lost in. As with the casbahs of Morocco, many of the streets of this part of the old city were small, winding, and commercialized. The main difference was that the tourists there were Algerian or French, for the most part. If I attempted to wander off the commercialized paths, a local or someone else made it clear I was about to enter some place I wasn’t supposed to be, even if they couldn’t communicate with the spoken word. It just wasn’t all that difficult or dangerous.
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The mosque at the bottom of the hill was attractive from the outside, but was either closed to all outsiders, or just closed at the time I arrived. I snapped some photos of the exterior, sat down for a rest on the steps, and then continue toward the Bastion 23 Museum, also known as the Palace of the Rais. This group of fortified waterfront palaces was occupied by rulers of the area from a period preceding Ottoman dominance. The control situation over time in North Africa seems to have been almost constantly fluid. The first of the three main palaces hosted a naval museum, focusing on the Ottoman era Algerian navy, much to my delight. The second palace was mostly empty, and was just open for visitors to enjoy the architectural aspects. The third was closed for the setup of an art display. There were also a half dozen historical fisherman’s shanties, but these, too, were closed.
I spent the bulk of my time in the naval museum. Here again, I observed a very selectively presented, state approved take on history. There was some nice detail on the history of governance in the area throughout the Renaissance and Early Modern eras. Interestingly, Algiers was always presented as a diplomatic equal and ally to the Ottomans rather than a vassal state, which all of the Barbary States other than Morocco most certainly were. The displays on the types of ships used by the Algerians during the Ottoman era were detailed, informative, and useful. There was information on armaments and manufacture.
Most of the information on foreign relations and accounts of battles and results suffered wildly from bias. Algerians, from the account given of the Battle of Lepanto, were responsible for the survival of much of the Ottoman fleet. Lepanto was even presented as almost a victory for the Muslim side. Lepanto is a famous naval battle in which the Holy League rallied an alliance of Christian nations in opposition to Ottoman incursions in Greece. It was the last naval battle in history in which one side relied heavily on galleys – ships where were only assisted by sails while they were primarily powered by slaves manning oars. By all accounts, Lepanto was a decisive victory for the Holy League over the Ottomans, whose navy never fully recovered. The Holy League’s fleet was let by John of Austria, who you can read about (HERE). He is buried with his Habsburg family members at El Escorial near Madrid.
In a further laughable omission, no mention at all is made of the fleets of licensed pirates – loosely managed “privateers” – who terrorized the Mediterranean on behalf of the Ottoman Empire’s tributary states, capturing slaves, demanding ransom and tribute, capturing ships and booty. The Algerian navy’s participation is described as warfare against aggressive European powers. They are presented as instruments of foreign policy and extractors of treaty concessions, rather than slave capturing pirates. History is never presented in completely unbiased form, but at least in American museums, some effort is made to acknowledge those trodden upon or negatively impacted by U.S. policy. We tend to at least recognize the negative experiences of victims of our policies and behaviors. As can be seen from my other articles mentioning museums, foreign ones run by the state almost never present information that would reflect poorly on the state.
After determining most of the rest of the museum wasn’t even really open, I decided I would mail my post cards, then head back to rest for a bit in the room before supper. In the meantime, David called me. He wanted to meet again. After a long delay you can read about here, we were finally able to meet for a wonderful dinner of Chakhchoukha. Chakhchoukha is a Delicious Algerian specialty. It seems like a bigger version of tagine, in which you could order vegetables, chicken, or lamb. I chose lamb of course. I also had harira, which is a chickpea soup, known well in Oran. This, too, was very tasty.
I paid for supper. David then wanted to show me some sites of my choice. I didn’t really know much else what to see. I listed off all of the places I had been and asked if there was anything he thought I should see. He was a very religious fellow. He thought I really needed to see the Grand Mosque of Algiers. It is a huge building – complex even – that can accommodate over 100,000 worshipers. There were even people there at that late our listening to the Islamic equivalent of a sermon. David did his prayers, and also did his best to convert me to Islam.
On the whole, I have to say that people in Algeria are far more seriously religious than folks in most Christian countries. Even though the government mandates nearly complete dominance of Sunni Islam, people genuinely participate in it, to the point that mosques I saw were overflowing on Friday, and people were praying out on the sidewalk near the street because there was no more room inside.
The building was impressive, modern, and well organized. I did not convert to Islam, however. I enjoyed seeing and learning about the building and many of the customs, but there is still much I do not understand even after having read the entire Quran. The Quran so heavily relies on references to Judeo-Christian Biblical traditions that I cannot figure out how Muslims can even know how to interpret the references the Quran makes to Bible stories if they’ve never laid eyes on the Bible. Nevertheless, we share a lot of stories and traditions in common.
It was late when I got back to my room. I slept long, and prepared for my trip to El Eulma the next morning. It had been a busy, productive day. Algiers was a good stop, if a short one. The power tripping would continue as I would make a crash course through some major Roman runs near El Eulma, Constantine, and Annaba.
