Travel Guide Sbeïtla

Located 38 km from Kasserine, the Roman ruins of Sbeïtla are really worth seeing if you go to Kairouan. Sbeïtla presents a well marked unity and identity of small city of homogeneous architecture - white aligned huts - built on a narrow and geometrical plan. On Wednesdays, market day, the whole city-medina is transformed into a vast souk. Sbeïtla offers the visitor a site that is among the best preserved in Tunisia: the ancient city of Sufetula. Its history is not well known. In spite of older traces (Punic steles and dolmens), it is assumed that the city itself dates from the Roman period, more particularly from the reign of the emperor Vespasian, who pacified the region and ordered this very regular urban structure. Enriched from the 2nd century by olive growing, Sbeïtla saw its prosperity maintained during the following centuries, while Christianity progressively penetrated there (as testified by churches dated from the 4th and5th centuries).The city had a famous episode when the Byzantine patrician Gregory settled there and proclaimed himself emperor, after having seceded from the Empire. Shortly afterwards, in 627, the Arab troops of Abdallah ibn Saad seized the region and made Sbeïtla fall into oblivion. It was only much later, in the 18th and 19th centuries, that travelers' accounts and testimonies drew attention to this region again.