The Casbah, fiche en anglais

The Casbah

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   Casbah means citadel. It is a place for the local leader to live. Casbah from the Arabic “fortified place” exists in the North Africa. In Algiers, the word once referred to only to the citadel built over the old city, but it came to mean the old city itself.

       It is 122 meters above the sea. It is a mid-sized city which was built on a hill goes down towards the sea and divided in two parts: the high city and the low city. It is about 50.000 people resident.

     The fortified city was filled with more than 100 fountains, 50 hammams or public baths, large palaces of pashas during the Ottoman period, 13 large mosques and more than 100 prayer halls one for almost every street, so that residents could perform the last of their five daily prayers.

    The twisting alleys that wind between the mud-brick and stucco houses still follow the original footpaths. Many of streets are vaulted by houses.

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     In other places the cantilevered overhangs of houses extend over street to within inches of one another and now may even touch, having settled with time or as a result of occasional earthquake. Doorways and lintels are carved from buff-colored tuff, a kind of soft volcanic stone.

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   Pashas, grown rich through the pirate trade, built palaces on the more level ground between the shoreline and the hill. Poorer people had to walk uphill. But, whether for rich or poor, most of Casaba’s houses, which date from Ottoman period of the late 18th century, follow the same pattern: three stories built around central courtyards ringed by a loggia and a terrace on the roof which it tight and tangled that makes easy to jump from one to another. Often with a fountain in the middle, but even most of the more modest houses have courtyards open through the sky.

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    There are few windows in the exterior walls, and those that exist are either small or covered with lattice. “The home is a feminine space” ,said Omar Hachi, an archaeologist working in the Casbah, He owns a spacious courtyard house that he wants to turn it into a museum. “Men inhabited public spaces, but women stayed home”.

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         The thick walls and filtered light from the courtyards created cool, quiet chambers embellished with the occasional horseshoe arch or twisted column. The house was built for one family and now houses three, altogether about 20 people. Sheets hang across the balconies of the narrow central courtyard to give each family a modicum of privacy. Everyone in the house shares a small toilet on the ground floor.

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    In the Casbah we can find The Katchaoua Mosque which is considered as a monument too. It was built during the Ottoman rule in the 17th century. Katchaoua with Byzantine and Moorish design and decorations presents a wonderful sight. During the colonization it was converted to Cathedral of ST Philippe but it was reconverted to a mosque after the independence.

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   The 1st feature that immediately strikes visitors with fascination is the 23 step flight of stairs that lead to the mosque entrance. There is an ornamented portico which is supported by four black-veined marble columns. There are arcades built with marble columns.