Kairouan

Where it sits. Kairouan stands on a dry plain in central Tunisia, about 155 kilometres south of Tunis and 60 kilometres inland from Sousse, with no river, no port and no defensible hill. It exists because of a decision rather than a geography: the site was chosen in 670 CE by the Arab commander Uqba ibn Nafi as a fortified base far enough from the coast to be safe from Byzantine naval raids and far enough from the mountains to be safe from Berber attack. The result is a walled city set in flat, pale country, its brick ramparts running about three and a half kilometres around a dense medina of whitewashed houses, blue doors and covered lanes.

The Great Mosque. The Mosque of Uqba dominates the northern edge of the medina and is one of the foundational buildings of Islamic architecture in North Africa. Its present form is essentially ninth-century, rebuilt under the Aghlabid emirs, and it established a template repeated across the western Islamic world: a vast rectangular courtyard paved in marble and sloped to drain rainwater into cisterns, a hypostyle prayer hall carried on hundreds of columns salvaged from Roman and Byzantine sites, and a square, three-tiered minaret that is among the oldest standing anywhere. The prayer hall holds a carved wooden minbar and a mihrab faced with lustre tiles imported from Iraq. Non-Muslim visitors may enter the courtyard and look into the hall from the doorway, with a dress code enforced and access closed around prayer times and on Fridays.

Water, and the rest of the city. Two circular reservoirs on the northern outskirts, built by the Aghlabids in the ninth century, are the other great survival: an outer basin roughly 128 metres across fed by an aqueduct from the hills, with a smaller settling pool alongside, engineered to supply a city with no natural water. Within the walls, the Mosque of the Three Doors carries a carved and inscribed street facade from 866 that is unique in the region, and the Zaouia of Sidi Sahbi, known as the Barber's Mosque, is a seventeenth-century complex of tiled courtyards around the tomb of a companion of the Prophet. Kairouan is also the centre of Tunisian carpet weaving, with knotted wool rugs sold from upstairs showrooms around the main souk, and it is known nationally for makroudh, a semolina pastry stuffed with date paste and soaked in honey.

On screen. In the summer of 1980 the medina became Cairo. The production of Raiders of the Lost Ark filmed its Egyptian street sequences here, using Kairouan's lanes, arches and rooftops for the marketplace where Marion is pursued, the basket chase, and the confrontation in which Indiana Jones, faced with a robed swordsman putting on a display, simply draws his revolver. The moment was improvised on location after the scripted whip-versus-sword duel proved unworkable during a shoot in which the crew was suffering badly from illness and heat, and it has since become one of the most quoted gags in adventure cinema. The desert and canyon material for the same film was shot much further south, near Tozeur.

Walking it. The medina is compact enough to cross in twenty minutes and rewarding enough to spend a day in. The main axis runs from Bab ech Chouhada in the south to the mosque quarter in the north, with the souks branching off it. Away from that spine the lanes are residential and quiet, whitewashed to head height with the upper walls left in ochre plaster, and doorways painted in a blue that is noticeably deeper than the coastal towns' version. A combined ticket sold at the tourist office covers the Great Mosque, the reservoirs and several of the zaouias.

Local context worth knowing. Kairouan has been a centre of religious scholarship for more than a thousand years and is treated with real reverence in Tunisia; it is a place of pilgrimage rather than a museum town, and behaviour and dress carry more weight here than in Tunis or Sousse. The city is also a working provincial capital with a substantial rural hinterland, and the market days bring in traders from the surrounding plain.

Getting there and timing. Louage taxis run regularly from Tunis in about two hours and from Sousse in under an hour, and buses connect to most northern towns; many visitors come as a long day trip from the coast, which is enough for the mosque and the souks but not for the outlying zaouias. March to May and September to November are the comfortable months; July and August on this inland plain are hot and dusty, with little breeze. Early morning gives the best light in the Great Mosque courtyard, when the arcades throw hard shadows across the marble and the space is close to empty.