What better than a day out with friends to visit a place of slaughter? Kent and Anja with little Maja, (1yr) in her backpack and Surprise, surprise, we meet our other friends from Yasmine Marina, Andy, Gayle and their sprog Luwkas, (4yrs) in the street outside the colosseum.
The Romans had some clever ideas when it came to keeping the peace; ” do as we say or we’ll feed you to our Lions and make a spectacle of you”. Seems to have been an order the locals here were obliged to agree with, along with everyone else the invaders came across. El Jem is the third largest of its kind in the Roman Empire and sits atop a small hill overlooking the olive plains that stretch for miles. The town itself is nothing remarkable, it now caters for coach loads of tourists who are dropped off at regular times during the day to be jumped on by the locals trying to get them inside their souvenir shops or tacky restaurants selling fish and chips. You might be tempted to have a ride on a Camel? Some post cards perhaps? No, not today thank you.
We were lucky, it was a windy but sunny Sunday and there appeared to be only a few coach loads of tourists, Japanese and Germans mostly and some French. As usual the Japanese swarmed all over the structure in 10 min then jumped back into their coach, cameras full of great pictures of a place they could never have really appreciated. We saw them again in the museum, same process, gone in 10 min, off to the next photo opportunity. Never can understand why they come all this way? We spent about 45 min wandering about, peering through arches and trying to imagine what a full house of 30,000 bloodthirsty Romans would have sounded like while they waited for the next spectacle. The local boys use the remains as a playground, I’m not sure if they have to pay the 6Dhr entrance fee. They get their kicks by goading each other to jump off sections of the walls or climb up some part of the crumbling structure like trendy city kids do in downtown New York. They have little fear or sense and obviously no respect for the relic. Sadly guards are not part of the entry price or they don’t work on Sundays? After 1,700 years of abuse, what damage could they do?
The original structure is oval with seating from the pit, up to the Gods. Building an entertainment facility on this scale takes a hell of a lot of stone and several dozen hammers.
This is one of the most difficult to build as it has no natural walls to start from, i.e. a hill side or wadi. To complicate matters there was no natural stone for 30km so they had to cart the stuff by hand before they had even carved the first block. Fit blokes them slaves. It goes without saying that the stonework is brilliant, no need to use cement, the weight of the blocks and the way they are cut and placed gives the whole structure massive strength. Not having any corners must help.
The locals are trying to rebuild parts of the walls but the skills have been long lost through time. As stone was not available locally, the colluseum was to become a quarry for the construction of the town, long after the place had been sacked several times and blown up in the 19th century.
As part of our entry fee we had access to the museum, half a mile down the road. Its site is on the remains of a huge villa that has been excavated and sympathetically reconstructed in the style of the time to give one a feel for what it might have been like. Some of the mosaics have been left where they were found and have lasted better than axeminster carpet in Sandringham. They have several cases of stone ware and ceramics, some metal work and the obligatory headless statues dotted about.
What is most impressive are the mosaics that have been dug up, restored and fixed to the walls like they have in the Bardo in Tunis. Gay and I were of the same opinion that the quality was better here than in the Bardo and the signage was in English too. They were mostly complete and had been dug up in three metre sections so the damage was minimal.
It’s not possible to appreciate the work involved when seen as a picture but if you ever get the chance, come and have a look. The floor designer in 3c.ad. had books full of designs to choose from, when you were having your new summer palace built they would adapt the images to suit the tastes of the customer. There are similar themes throughout, blood, lust, animals, fruit, fish etc. Some of the faces were quite bizarre, rarely with beards and eyes that were out of proportion and misaligned. It was as if they were all inbred! As you can see in the picture on the left, Homer Simpson was alive and well and having a ball in El Jem.
We wandered about the original floor plan outside for half an hour, the original walls raised only a foot, just to give one an idea of the room sizes and layout. Sadly the town is beginning to encroach and new builds are now up to the perimeter.
We now look forward to the magnificence of Leptis Magna in Libya......
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