Both the lady in orange and the man in green were taking photos with their tablet.

Down one level

Looking up from below and waiting to get eaten by a lion. 

The Romans may have given us much good, but they also gave us this horror show.

Going up to the bleacher seats.

It really reminded me of walking through Salem Stadium to sit and watch the Salem Red Sox

View of the shops surrounding the entrance to the coliseum

The Roman road leading to the coliseum

We saw this cut in many of the blocks possibly used to lift and move them.  That’s a guess.

Purchasing videos about Tunisia and the Bardo Museum in Tunis

We did some mosaic shopping in el Jem but that’s a whole story in itself so I’m skipping it for now.  From the coliseum we went to the El Jem Museum.  When Randal tried to pay we were asked if we’d visited the Coliseum.  When Randal said yes, the young man told him one ticket was for both so wouldn’t take our money even the 1 dinar charged for taking photos.  The total cost or our visits to both the Coliseum and the El Jem museum was 21 dinar = $14 which was totally worth it. 

El Jem Museum

This is the first room you enter and you’re immediately wowed by the beauty and condition of the mosaics.  Most were once floor mosaics and have been brought to this former home, now museum.  When you look at the patterns you must remember that as with carpets the images are too be looked down on from different parts of the room. 

Our guide in the Bardo museum in Tunis referred to the same image as the Star of David.  The huge entire mosaic book Randal bought ignored it altogether though it did have some pages on Christian themed mosaics.

It was like looking at tapestries, the patterns were so intricate.

You could absolutely imagine these as “carpets” similar to the carpets we saw in India, Turkey, and Tunisia.

Randal, “Spirit of the Year”  and the Four Seasons…

The 4 seasons are the same woman with each image getting progressively older representing Spring, Summer, Fall and Winter.

This one too ould be mistaken for a woven carpet

Dolphin and swans; each mosaic had an explanation with it so you could have spent hours looking and reading about all of the imagery.

Corner detail shows the details in the designs.

Dionysus/Bacchus features heavily in these mosaics

The original : this image is copied by many of the Tunisian mosaicists

If this were a less grim image it would make me think it came from Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak.  Wonder if he studied mosaics for some of his images. 

Nice happy bunny mosaic.

You can certainly learn a lot about illustration studying mosaics.

We left El Jem the first time aiming for Sfax as our overnight stop, the plan being to get up early the next day, leave Sfax and drive to Djerba where we would spend the night.  We did finally find a hotel in Sfax.  It was clean enough, more than it was worth, but we had no other option as we’d made no plan ahead of time not knowing actually where we’d spend the night.  We’d hoped to be further along the road to Djerba, but we’d had too good of a time in El Jem so left late in the day.

Hotel Al-Rachid in Sfax with a view of the sun set over concrete

Our less than luxurious room.  But it had wifi, AC, was safe and quiet.  And the shower was hot.  The staff was very nice too.

Finding food.

Hotels don’t start to serve dinner until about 8 pm and we were hungry by 7 pm after an early light lunch in El Jem.  But there was not much around our hotel so we ate in this little local joint down the road a block.  We had Tunisian salad, grilled chicken, fries, bread and some water.  It was fine.  Tunisian salad is like Greek salad without the cheese.  But usually it has tuna with it and this one also had rice.  If you read French or Arabic you could order from the menu.  I know enough French to order a few things combined with the café guy’s bits of English.  Aqua with gas was a stumper.  But they didn’t have any anyway so I had plain bottled water and Randal had regular Coke, no Coke Light, Zero or Diet being available. 

We probably could have taken a taxi to an upscale restaurant and paid more money for grilled chicken but we were too tired and this was just fine.  And kind of fun.

A missed road sign can be a good thing!  El Fath Tunisie Marbre

    This is the first mosaic workshop we visited just past the turn off to El Jem which we’d missed.  The staff were kind enough to give us a tour.  It was here we first noticed that most of the mosaics are assembled by women.  Not necessarily designed by women, but they are the ones who put the puzzle together following the pattern created by the artist.  Sometimes the artists use ancient Roman images and sometimes they create new contemporary designs.

El Fath Tunisie Marbre Mosaics display

Huge boulders  become smaller rocks which become small oblong stick which get cut into mosaic pieces.

Ladies working on a contemporary mosaic  made from glass pieces

A finished mosaic

Glass pieces for the mosaic in progress

Randal ever the mosaic student

Artist/teacher  and  student : Naceur Bouslah  with Randal

I was especially pleased to see a woman as the artist.

Hungry lions

We saw this image in most mosaic shops but saw the original in the mosaic museum in El Jem

Following the artist’s pattern on this plate

Recycled bits

Left over or broken bits were used to create this contemporary piece which I quite liked.

Lunch with parking…

Just near the coliseum in El Jem hawkers point to parking spaces where you may park if you pay them in dinar one way or the other.  Buy food, souvenirs ….  We opted to park and pay for lunch.  It was actually quite good: omelette, fries, salad with tuna, bread and mint tea for me.  And there was a WC.

Father and son café: the son.

The black and white photo is his dad.

A Berber Kilim hanging outside a shop in El Jem.  Now it’s on DoraMac!

I actually passed it up the first time we were in El Jem as the shop was closed.  But luckily for me, the shop was open our second visit to El Jem, so I bought it.  The shop owner had a “new one” in the with his other carpets but I liked the faces on this one better.  From what I’ve read the colors and patterns are traditional Berber.  The wool seems never to have been carded so it is quite scratchy.  I think it will be a wall hanging somewhere one day. 

     “In contrast, the indigenous rural Berber women have a tradition of weaving short-nap, flat weave rugs or tapestries; their products fall into two categories; mergum or mergoum, which are woven and  embroidered and kilim or klim which are only woven.  The “Mergoum” and “Klim” are characterized by the combination of two simple geometrical patterns, the lozenge (or diamond shape) and the triangle. 

     Berber designs from the south of Tunisia also incorporate animal figures — most often camels. Contemporary urban, mechanized weaving is more the domain of men.

http://www.ibike.org/africaguide/textile/textile2.htm

     “The Kilim has gone through a specific evolution in the area of the city of EL JEM, located at the centre of Tunisia. Originally, it was a plain cloth made of single-tint coloured strips and was used as a ground carpet. By and by, it was enriched with a decoration. It is now commonly made of wide strips, for longitudinal edges, bearing triangular and lozenge motifs; such strips surround a surface ornamented with horizontal strips which would be organized in a symmetrical manner on both sides of a central strip which is a little wider than the others. Set on a red background, motifs and strips are green, orange, black or white; they are obtained thanks to a technique based on a compromise between double-sided weaving and one-side weaving.” http://www.tunisartex.com/eng/produits.asp

The coliseum in El Jem with the sweetest faced camels I’ve ever seen.  When we walked by they actually looked as if they wanted to speak to us.  I restrained myself from going to pat them as the owner mightn’t have been pleased and perhaps maybe not the camel either.

Poster outside the coliseum

     “The Amphitheatre of El Jem bears outstanding witness to Roman architecture, notably monuments built for spectator events, in Africa. Located in a plain in the centre of Tunisia, this amphitheatre is built entirely of stone blocks, with no foundations and free-standing.  In this respect it is modelled on the Coliseum of Rome without being an exact copy of the Flavian construction. Its size (big axis of 148 metres and small axis 122 metres) and its capacity (judged to be 35,000 spectators) make it without a doubt among the largest amphitheatres in the world. Its facade comprises three levels of arcades of Corinthian or composite style. Inside, the monument has conserved most of the supporting infrastructure for the tiered seating. The wall of the podium, the arena and the underground passages are practically intact. This architectural and artistic creation built around 238 AD, constitutes an important milestone in the comprehension of the history of Roman Africa. The Amphitheatre of El Jem also bears witness to the prosperity of the small city of Thysdrus (current El Jem) at the time of the Roman Empire.

     Criterion (iv): The Amphitheatre of El Jem is one of the rare monuments of its kind and unique in Africa, which is not built against a hillside, but on flat ground and supported by a complex system of arches. The monument of El Jem is one of the most accomplished examples of Roman architecture of an amphitheatre, almost equal to that of the Coliseum of Rome.”   http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/38

http://www.africanworldheritagesites.org/

Modern performances in an ancient coliseum  must be spectacular to see (especially as no one is being eaten by a lion.)