Hard as it is to believe, there are ruins here we haven’t seen yet. Perhaps more surprisingly, we’re still interested in visiting them. In this case, there are a pair of locations, Dougga and Bulla Regia, which are accessible as a day trip from Tunis.

So what’s the appeal of more ruins at this point? It’s all about the y-axis. Carthage is flat. We’re pretty sure that’s because the Romans fucking flattened it. Whenever you see anything like a column standing in Carthage, it’s because someone found the pieces and stood them back up. Most of the Carthaginian ruins are foundations.

We hadn’t been fully aware of that until we visited El Jem, an enormous Roman colosseum that still has most of the vertical structures, such as bleachers and galleries, intact. You 100% get the you-are-there feeling that Carthage doesn’t completely offer. So in hunting about for a couple of day trips we might enjoy in our last few weeks here, Dougga and Bulla Regia stood out for their aggressive use of the y-axis. El Jem definitely whet our appetites for a more immersive ruins experience.

We used the GetYourGuide app for the first time, to book what we thought was a group tour. It would have been our first, but we figured it would be survivable on a one-day jaunt. Imagine our surprise when a car pulls up to our pickup spot with a driver, our guide, Yaya, and empty back seats for us. The lap of unexpected bougie luxury.

Dougga

This was definitely a full-day trip. We got picked up at 8:00 am at the clock tower in Tunis’ city center and returned there at 5:00 pm. Our first stop was Dougga, about a two hour drive, but we stopped and stretched our legs at about the halfway point, in Testour. Like most Tunisian cities, it dates back to at least Roman times. However, it has a distinctly Andalusian flavor due to the influx of Muslim and Jewish refugees in the 1500s. That’s obvious nowhere so much as the town’s Great Mosque, which dates to 1631 and features Andalusian architectural and decorative elements.

As a major agricultural center, Dougga was a wealthy city in its Roman heyday. The area is still one of Tunisia’s key breadbasket suppliers, with the ruins nestled lovingly within a patchwork of beautifully tended fields.

Dougga is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, having earned that designation as the best preserved Roman small town in all of Northern Africa. Our guide provided an unexpected reason for the extent of the Roman ruins in Tunisia. According to Yaya, one Koran proscription is to not live where pagans lived. So while the Romans were delighted to build on the ashes of Punic cities they’d razed, Muslims ignored them. There were plenty of Byzantines and Vandals without those prohibitions, but at least the Muslims left the Roman sites alone. I have no way of proving this, but it’s at least a good story.

Prior to its Roman iteration, Dougga had been inhabited by Phoenicians and Berbers, going all the way back to the 6th century BC. In fact, one of the most interesting things about the site is that, unlike Carthage, the Romans didn’t raze Dougga when they concluded the Third Punic War. Instead, they built on top of the existing Numidian street plan, which is why the city isn’t laid out in the prescribed Roman rectilinear grid.

That laissez-faire attitude extended, unusually, to the civic sphere, as well. The Numidians, who were Berber, lived side-by-side with the Romans for 250 years, with dual magistrates each governing their own sections of the larger city. Very un-Roman.

Except…

The Numidians were kind of Rome’s fifth column in Carthage. It was pressure from the Numidians that drove the Carthaginians to beef up their naval preparedness in violation of the treaty signed with Rome at the end of the Second Punic War. Which set off the Third Punic War, crushing Carthage. How did the Romans learn about Carthaginian military plans? The Numidians ratted them out.

So while co-government might have been a little un-Roman, you can see the rationale for it, even from this distance.

The Theater

The entrance to the site takes you right into the theater, which was built in 168 AD. It optimistically seated about 3,500, despite Dougga only having 5,000 residents at the time. This, like most of the structures, both in Dougga and in similar Roman era cities, was financed by local poohbahs, but built largely to a Roman provided plan. If the locals built enough, spent enough, and built to plan, they could get their taxes lowered and become Roman citizens. Kind of like how you can buy citizenship in many countries today by purchasing expensive property. Those who don’t study history are doomed to live in Barcelona.

Downtown

Dougga boasted a robust city center, encompassing the Capitol, a forum, a market, and several temples. The highlight is the Capitol, which is still standing as originally built in the 2nd century AD. It wasn’t a Capitol in the sense that it was a seat of government. Rather, it was a temple dedicated to Jupiter, Juno, and Minerva.

It’s an epic structure, with its front columns rising 26 feet and the original pediment still intact. This was not, as so many structures of its ilk were, reassembled from parts. The front of the Capitol has been standing in its current configuration for almost 2,000 years.

It has survived for so long in no small part to an act of defacement during the Byzantine era. Under pressure from the Vandals, the Byzantines tore down some of the existing buildings in order to harvest enough material to add a defensive wall, which had the secondary effect of supporting the rest of the structure. It’s the wall at the lower left of the picture below, by the tiny human figures. They clearly weren’t trying to build a monument, as the stacking of the stones lacks the precision of the Roman and Punic work. In addition, they were prone to using the capitals and pediments as bases instead of caps, which just looks kind of weird when you stare at it. Which we did.

Dougga happens to sport prime examples of opus africanum, a local building technique the Romans adopted in North Africa. It’s characterized by pillars of alternating vertical and horizontal stones to provide structural stability, permitting the rest of the wall to be filled in with smaller stones. Walls were traditionally built here using dry-stacked stones, with opus africanum thrown in to support more substantial structures. It can be seen clearly on the side of the Capitol.

The Baths

For a small town, they had plenty of baths. Archaeologists have identified four, three of which have been fully excavated. One belonged to a private residence, two were public baths, and no one is quite sure about the fourth. Of the two obviously public baths, one was considered a winter bath and one a summer bath. The pictures below are from the winter bath, the Licinian Baths.

Sewage

Who doesn’t want a whole section on sewage? Fine, I’ll be brief.

First, the city actually had a sewer system. There are still access stones scattered throughout the city, like the manholes of the gods. The one place you can see the system in action, as it were, is at the latrines, nestled between the winter bath house and the residential district. It features twelve regal seats that flush directly into the sewer.

Speaking of regal, in the third picture below you can see the mosaic platform on which stood servants prepared to… serve. Behind them was a basin, in which they soaked cotton affixed to the end of long sticks. Which they then delicately reached forward to wipe the bums of their masters, depositing the soiled cotton directly in the latrine.

Jesus, don’t you dare tell Elon Musk that was a thing. Thank you.

Housing

There were two distinct residential neighborhoods in Dougga. You can see one of those neighborhoods on the hill in the picture below. The housing in this area was, relatively speaking, modest. But below that was the housing for the Masters of the Universe. These were massive compounds with substantial below grade components, entire second levels that protected the residents from the elements.

Mosaics

Seriously? Did you really think we could do this without more mosaics? You are a silly, silly person.

Bulla Regia

Next stop, Bulla Regia. OK, next stop lunch. Then ruins. Order of operations.

Bulla Regia lacks Dougga’s vertical majesty, but that’s because its claim to y-axis fame is negative. Where Dougga had some housing that included below grade components, Bulla Regia’s housing tilts heavily underground.

Bulla Regia is also a little wilder than Dougga. Lacking the UNESCO designation, there’s less signage, less oversight, and less budget available for upkeep and exploration. The dark side of the depth of Tunisia’s historical heritage is that there’s a certain amount of necessary budget triage.

Housing

The Romans built heavily underground in Bulla Regia, mimicking in results if not technique the traditional Berber troglodyte cave dwellings. While the houses all had a full story aboveground, the lower floor provided protection from the extremes of both summer and winter.

Unlike in Dougga, we were able to enter the lower floors in Bulla Regia, and we were struck by how well they were lit and ventilated. These were engineered to be very comfortable spaces.

Infrastructure

Despite being Dougga’s little brother, Bulla Regia boasted a full panoply of the expected Roman amenities: baths, a theater, bugs… The works.

Mosaics

Ha. Just when you thought there would be no more mosaics. Foolish mortal.

Curiously, the mosaics in Bulla Regia are better than Dougga’s. That’s because there’s an entire Dougga wing at the Bardo in Tunis. They’ve looted themselves. But as a lesser site, Bulla Regia has been left comparatively alone, leaving a richer collection to enjoy in situ. And as with all of the other ridiculously beautiful mosaics we’ve seen here, it is impossible not to be completely gobsmacked by the expressiveness and delicacy of the execution.

And back to Tunis to close out our day.

I hesitate to promise, but unless something truly bizarre happens, this should be our last ruins visit and our final documentation of mosaics. I hope you’ve enjoyed.