The troglodyte and hilltop communities of southern Tunisia — Amazigh families who dug their houses down into the earth against heat and raiders, and who stored their grain in honeycomb ksour whose vaulted cells still stand at Chenini, Douiret and Ksar Ouled Soltane.
Population: Tens of thousands across the Matmata, Tataouine and Dahar regions
Location: The Matmata hills, Tataouine's mountain villages and the Dahar plateau of southern Tunisia
Language: Tunisian Arabic, with Amazigh (Chenini-Douiret and Matmata varieties) still spoken by older people in a handful of villages
Language family: Afro-Asiatic → Berber and Semitic (Arabic)
Traditional governance: Village councils and lineage organisation; collective ksour granaries administered by agreement among the owning families; today Tunisian municipal administration.
Most African peoples are federations of named sub-groups (clans, sections, chiefdoms or sub-tribes), each with its own dialect, territory and traditions.
Matmata troglodytes
Families of the pit-dwelling villages around Matmata and Haddej.
Chenini and Douiret
Hilltop Amazigh villages of the Tataouine region with their own language varieties.
Ksour communities
Groups holding cells in the collective granaries of Ouled Soltane, Hadada and elsewhere.
Clothing: Wool and cotton wraps against extreme heat and cold; women's silver jewellery and headcloths; men's burnous.
Food: Barley and wheat, olive oil, dates, dried meat and the region's own bread baked in earth ovens; water is the constraint on everything.
Ceremonies: Weddings held in the pit courtyards over several days; the ksar opening for grain deposit and withdrawal; local moussems at marabout tombs.
Marriage customs: Lineage endogamy historically; the ksar cell, like the house, was inherited property and figured in marriage negotiation.
Initiation rites: No formal rite; the digging and maintenance of a household's pit and cisterns was collective work into which young men were incorporated.
Every dish the Atlas publishes for Tunisia, at national rather than community level — 8 in all: the staple a household eats daily, the dish the country names as its own, street food, what is cooked for a wedding or Eid, regional specialities and a drink. Quantities and method are given for every one, so these are recipes rather than descriptions, and each has a photograph from Wikimedia Commons. The Food page carries the whole continent, searchable by country and by ingredient.
Couscous stained red with tomato and harissa, steamed over a fish broth on the Sahel coast. Tunisia's version is the spicy one, and the fish version is what Sfax and Mahdia make on Fridays.
Serves 6 · 1 hour 45 minutes
A whole egg wrapped in malsouka pastry with tuna, capers and parsley, deep fried so the yolk stays running. Eating one without spilling it is a small national test of skill.
Serves Makes 4 · 25 minutes
Chickpea soup poured over torn stale bread with cumin, harissa, olive oil and an egg, assembled to order in bowls in tiny shops. Cheap, hot, and the best hangover food in North Africa.
Serves 4 · 1 hour 30 minutes, plus overnight soaking
also Fried vegetable chop
Peppers, courgette, potato, pumpkin and tomato fried separately then chopped together on a board with egg and harissa, sold from Tunisian corner shops in a bread roll.
Serves 4 · 45 minutes
Beef cooked for hours in powdered jute mallow until the sauce goes almost black. Eaten at the start of the year and at family celebrations, where a long slow blackening is taken as a good omen.
Serves 6 · 4 hours
also Makrout, Date semolina diamonds
Semolina pastry filled with spiced date paste, fried and dipped in honey, from Kairouan, which has made them for a thousand years.
Serves Makes about 30 · 1 hour 30 minutes
Eggs poached in a fierce tomato, pepper and harissa sauce with merguez sausage, cooked and served in the same pan. A fast, hot supper found in every Tunisian household.
Serves 4 · 35 minutes
A clear fig spirit distilled by Tunisia's Jewish community from the nineteenth century and drunk cold as an aperitif. One of very few traditional distilled spirits in North Africa.
Serves Serves as an aperitif · Commercially distilled; served in minutes
Houses Dug DownwardArchitecture
At Matmata a household begins with a circular pit some seven metres deep, into whose walls rooms are then tunnelled, with a sloping passage to the surface. The earth gives constant temperature in a place that reaches fifty degrees, and the courtyard is invisible from the plain. Several hundred such houses exist, some still occupied, some now guesthouses, and one of them served as a film set that made the form famous worldwide.
The Honeycomb GranariesInstitution
A ksar is a courtyard ringed with ghorfas, barrel-vaulted cells stacked four storeys high, each belonging to a family and holding grain, oil and valuables. Built by semi-nomadic groups who needed storage they could leave, they were guarded collectively and administered by agreement. Ksar Ouled Soltane's two courtyards are the best preserved of dozens across the Dahar.
“Dig down and the sun does not find you.”
The logic of the troglodyte house.
“Grain in the ghorfa, sleep in the tent.”
Storage frees movement.
“The cistern is filled by the storm you cursed.”
Flash floods as both danger and supply.
Creation: Islamic cosmology over Amazigh substrate; caves, springs and particular hilltops carry local significance.
Beliefs: Sunni Maliki Islam; marabout tombs and moussems; belief in the evil eye and in protective silver and hand motifs; jnun associated with abandoned pits and ruins.
Ancestors: Lineage graves and inherited ghorfa cells anchor claims; abandoned villages such as old Chenini are visited by descendants.
Allah
The one God
Local marabouts
Saints whose whitewashed domed tombs mark the landscape
Jnun
Spirits of ruins, caves and empty places
Traditional settlements: Pit dwellings invisible from the surface at Matmata; hilltop villages of stacked stone houses at Chenini and Douiret; ksour granaries standing alone on the plain.
Building techniques: Pit excavation with tunnelled rooms and cistern; barrel-vaulted ghorfa construction in mud and stone; rock-cut mosques and olive presses.
Village layout: House around a sunken courtyard with rooms opening off it; ksar as a courtyard ringed with stacked cells and a single guarded entrance.
Ghorfa granary cells
Architecture
Barrel-vaulted storage chambers stacked in courtyards across the Dahar.
Pit dwelling (dar hafra)
Architecture
Underground courtyard house of the Matmata hills.
Rock-cut olive presses
Industry
Underground mills carved into the hillsides.
Ksar Ouled Soltane
Heritage site
The best-preserved of southern Tunisia's collective granaries.
Antiquity–1000s
Amazigh populations occupy the southern hills; underground dwelling and hilltop refuge develop.
1100s–1500s
Ksour granaries built as Arab pastoral incursions increase; hilltop villages fortified.
1881–1956
French protectorate; road building and administration reach the south.
1960s–1980s
State housing programmes move many families out of the pits; some return.
Present
Tourism sustains parts of the region; Amazigh speech survives among older residents only.
Open sources
Premium & scholarly sources