Old Casbah of Algiers

Casbah is a fortress in the old part of Algiers. The Casbah is full of dark alleys and dead ends where you can see Ottoman palaces, mosques and old houses behind the fortress walls. It is a distinctive “city within a city”, the very heart of Algeria.

In general, the word “kasbah” refers to many fortresses located in various settlements in North Africa. But it was the Old Kasbah of Algeria that was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1992.

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History

The Kasbah was built on the ruins of Ikosium, an ancient Phoenician city. Ikosium stood on a hill and was divided into two parts: upper and lower. In the Middle Ages, the place was a stronghold of Mediterranean pirates. By the beginning of the 17th century there were about 25 thousand slaves in the city. By the way, among them was the captain of the Spanish Royal Navy Miguel Cervantes de Saavedra – the author of the novel “Don Quixote.”

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Between 1954 and 1962, during the Algerian struggle for independence, Kasbah was the center of the National Liberation Front. The old town is a symbol of the liberation revolution, and the movie “The Battle of Algiers” was filmed here.

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Today, the main problem of Kasbah is overpopulation. The number of people living here varies from 40,000 to 70,000. Not surprisingly, the fortress is in a rather neglected state, and some parts of it may eventually collapse.

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Attractions

Not visiting the Kasbah in Algeria is like not visiting the Kremlin in Moscow! In the center of the old city are the ruins of an ancient 17th century mosque, behind it, surrounded by two minarets, the Ketchaoua Mosque, built in 1794, the El Djedid Mosque with its large egg-shaped domes, and the El Kebir Mosque, the oldest of the mosques built by the Almoravids and rebuilt in late 1794.

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Travelers are struck by the fact that there is not a single tree or shrub in the Kasbah, there are no squares, and the dwellings are tightly packed together. The narrow streets, one and a half to two meters wide, are like underground passages or cramped gorges. In some places it is impossible to spread your arms apart, and if a stubborn donkey decides to stop in the middle of the street, no one will pass through. Often over such a street instead of the sky you can see only stone arches of houses. Their architecture deserves special attention: each house in Kasbah resembles a cube or a dome with very small rare windows, more like loopholes of a fortress. And on those streets where passers-by can at least disperse, in the niches lurk stores with a variety of things on the stalls.

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But the real life of the Kasbah takes place almost under the very sky! On the flat roofs, surrounded by railings, are open verandas. On them, in the sweltering evenings, locals rest, dry their laundry, talk with neighbors, and children play here.

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To enter the Old Kasbah of Algiers is to plunge into the mysterious world of the Middle Ages!

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