The Beautiful Ruins

"Your country is in ruins, my dear", I said to my boyfriend as we walked amidst the shambles of a former seaside resort. Broken ceramic tiles mingled with sand and seashells along the beach; lamposts, their bulbs shattered, lined the pier we walked upon. Behind us, a large hotel effort stood, its barren structure left naked, unfinished. It was my first day in Tunisia, and yet the effects of deterioration had not escaped my notice. From the remnants of the Phoenicians, of which barely a trace remains in modern-day Tunisia, to the crumbling remains of the once-glorious ancient Roman baths, temples, and aqueducts, to the barbed wire lining the streets, left over from the Arab spring revolution, to the peeling posters of parties from the more-recent election, plastered on almost every walled surface in every town or city we visited... Tunisia is a land of evolution. It's a beautiful, amazing, magnificent evolution.

I have seen olive trees and eucalyptus dotting an arid landscape. Mountains covered in dense fog, wind beating against their sides. Cliffs and rocky hills plummeting towards the Mediterranean, covered in wild rosemary and cypress. Boiling hot springs. Cool blue water. Mountain men who live in distant areas, where the weather changes at a moment's notice, and the roads are sometimes impossible to travel. I've visited Souk and Medina and Casbah and Marabout. I've eaten tuna and sea bream and lamb, mechouia and brik and harissa. Wild clementines, pomegranate, and dates for breakfast; fennel at lunch and dinner; thé à la menthe with pignoli. I've traveled the hour-long car journey from the baths at Carthage to the springs at Zaghouan, lined with the aqueducts the ancient Romans built to transport water between the two cities. I've touched soft lambswool drying on a rooftop terrace, and watched children playing soccer in narrow streets. I've seen cows' heads hanging in front of butcher shops, and heard the lingering, melodic call to prayer throughout the day. I've seen amazing views of mountain and sea, sunrise and sunset, perched beyond streets lined with buildings and homes painted in blue and white. I've even seen a Tunisian cemetery: graves buried on previous graves, buried on previous graves, in a lush garden overlooking the city. Evolution. Transformation. Ruin. I've walked through so many doors; but not just doors: memorable doors. Doors that mark the event of one's passage through them. New doors, old doors, ancient doors.

This evolution, perpetual state of transformation, has left its mark, still leaves its mark. The trail of change is evident in every area of the city, with new neighbourhoods built over or next to old; with cars almost as old as the automobile itself sharing space with more-recent versions; with evidence of French colonization alongside centuries-old mosques and arches. It's like a tree's rings, from which you can trace the periods of plenty by the thickness of the circumference: you can tell the metro system was built at a more prosperous time, for example, just by looking at the trains. You can see that now is the moment of a thinner ring (but isn't that the case in most places in the world today?), as trash is left alongside the streets in the popular areas, but not in the tourist sections of town. You must see it all, the old and the new, the endless accumulated transformations; and most of all, you must see the beauty in the ruins, in order to see, really see, Tunisia.

"A friend took me to the most amazing place the other day. It's called the Augusteum. Octavian Augustus built it to house his remains. When the Barbarians came, they trashed it, along with everything else. The Great Augustus, Rome's first true, great Emperor; how could he have imagined that Rome, the whole world as far as he was concerned, one day would be in ruins?"
"During the dark ages, someone came in here and stole the Emperor's ashes. In the 12th century it became a fortress for the Coloma family, then a bull ring. They stored fireworks in here after that. Nowadays it's used as a bathroom for the homeless people, so you'd better watch your step going down."
"It's one of the quietest and loneliest places in Rome. The city has grown up around it for centuries. It feels like a precious wound, like a heartbreak you won't let go of, cause it hurts too good. We all want things to stay the same. Settle for living in misery because we're afraid of change, of things crumbling to ruins. Then I looked around in this place, at the chaos it's endured, the way it's been adapted, burned, pillaged, then found a way to build itself back up again, and I was reassured. Maybe my life hasn't been so chaotic, it's just the world that is, and the only real trap was getting attached to any of it. Ruin is a gift. Ruin is the road to transformation. Even in this eternal city, the Augusteum showed me we must always be prepared for endless waves of transformation."

[Julia Roberts as Liz Gilbert; Eat, Pray, Love]

"Where there is ruin, there is hope for a treasure."
[Rumi]