The most beautiful religious buildings Tunis

Vibrant heart of the medina, the Great Mosque, accessible from the street Jamâa-ez-Zitouna, which also bears the name of Mosque of the Olive Tree (ez-Zitouna), has a classico-Roman look with its arcades and columns with capitals not very Moorish. The largest mosque in Tunis was first built in 698, when the city was founded, by the Umayyad governor Obeid Allah ibn Al-Habhab, then rebuilt entirely from 856 to 863 by the Aghlabid emir Abu Ibrahim and, thereafter, regularly reworked. It is still very much alive and continues to provide religious instruction and to gather the faithful for the five daily prayers. Its architecture presents certain analogies with the mosque of Kairouan. The hypostyle room, the prayer room, with 15 naves, has no less than 184 columns and ancient capitals, probably from the ruins of Carthage. The monument has undergone many transformations over time. The contribution of the Turks was materialized by the addition of a gallery on three sides of the court (in 1653) and the rise of a new minaret which was replaced in 1834 by a tower of 44 m, with the decoration inspired by the Hispano-Moorish minaret of the mosque of the Kasbah. The Ez-Zitouna mosque housed for centuries the prestigious university that bears its name. Its roof and its prayer room have undergone numerous restoration works since independence. The beautiful porch of the National Library can be seen next to it.

The (very beautiful and well-preserved) Catholic Saint-Vincent-de-Paul cathedral, in Romanesque-Byzantine style, is close to the Place de l'Indépendance. It is named after the founder of the Lazarists and the Daughters of Charity who was sold as a slave in Tunis at the beginning of the 17th century while still a young priest. Built in several phases between 1893 and 1897, it was renovated in the late 1990s. The building hosted a visit by Pope John Paul II in 1998.