It has stood for centuries, a slope of gleaming white houses climbing in steps from the sea like a construction of sugar cubes. It gave this Mediterranean port the nickname la Blanche, the white one. But despite the romance surrounding the old quarter, known as the Casbah and once home to pirates and freedom fighters, it is literally imploding from neglect.
UNESCO has declared it a World Heritage site, and the Algerian government has designated it a protected landmark, to no avail. Closed in on itself, symbolizing the local population’s long isolation from French colonial rulers — and more recently, radical Islam’s retreat from modernity — this seemingly impenetrable agglomeration of houses is falling down.
“More than a third of the houses have collapsed, and at least another third are in an advanced state of deterioration,” said Abdelkader Ammour, secretary general of a foundation that is trying to save the crumbling swatch of hidden courtyards and winding narrow streets. “We don’t want it to disappear.”
Ammour says the problem isn’t money. “It’s a question,” he said, “of political will.”
Or as Nabila Oulebsir, an Algerian architect who has written extensively on Algiers, says, “The question is whether you reconstruct or construct something new.”
Historic preservation is a luxury for steady times, and Algeria is still feeling its way toward the future from a dark and turbulent past. It has only just righted itself from a decade of fundamentalist Islamic violence. The nation’s focus is now on economic development. But tourism, the great engine of preservation in so many cities, is low on the list of Algeria’s concerns. Algeria doesn’t really need tourists. It has oil. Casbahs, from the Arabic for “fortified place,” exist across North Africa, and many have been beautifully restored. In Algiers the word once referred only to the citadel built above the old city, but it came to mean the old city itself. When people speak of the Casbah, they are referring uniquely to this crowded hillside between the fortress and the sea.
A Phoenician trading post called Ikosim occupied the point of land as early as the sixth century BC. The Romans arrived 500 years later, and the arc of an amphitheater can still be traced in the walls of the buildings in the lower Casbah.
The Vandals eventually chased the Romans away, and a Berber tribe was living there when Buluggin bin Ziri arrived in the 10th century to found a new city on what was left of the old one. He called the new city El Djazair, which means “the islands” in Arabic, referring to the string of islets off the coast that form a natural breakwater for the harbor. From El Djazair came the anglicized name Algiers and later Algeria.
The Berbers built a wall around the city. Five gates closed it off from the world, and gates also closed each end of the city’s narrow streets, although both the wall and the internal gates have long since disappeared.
After the Barbarossa brothers captured the town in 1516, Algiers became a fabled redoubt of Barbary pirates who plied the Mediterranean and the Atlantic. In 1575 Miguel de Cervantes was taken captive on his way back to Spain from a military campaign and spent five years in Algiers before he was ransomed and sent home.
In those days the fortified city was filled with more than 100 fountains, 50 hammams, or public baths, 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 after the gates were shut for the night. A flutist circulated playing a Turkish melody called a coupe jambe — French for leg cut — to announce the evening curfew.
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