Five times a day, the voices emanating from loudspeakers perched on minarets call the faithful to prayer. They resound from the Medina to La Goulette, silence the firing of two stroke moped engines, football matches on screens in cafés crowded almost exclusively with men, echo over heavily-guarded government buildings, from the Zoutina mosque down Habib Bourguiba avenue, across Tunis lake, climb the hill where the newly erected Taqwa mosque dwarfs the Acropolium (the old St Louis Cathedral) to reach the ruins of the city the Romans built on top of the Carthaginian one they destroyed, and descend again toward the Mediterranean, passing the remains of lavish roman villas and baths, spoils of the victors, and finally the abandoned punic port from where Hannibal set sail to conquer a large chunk of southern Europe.

I don’t know what the voices area saying, but I’d like to imagine that through the call to pray one can hear a cry for tolerance, a call to embrace the lessons of history that permeate every patch of dirt of this ancient land.

Walking Project 115_punic city – carthage from chris worland on Vimeo.