Tunis, Tunisia – It was nearing nightfall in Halk el-Wadi, also known as La Goulette, a quiet coastal suburb of Tunis, when the Virgin Mary emerged from the local church, Saint-Augustin and Saint Fidele, into a crowded square.
The statue of the Virgin, carried on the shoulders of a dozen churchgoers, was greeted with cheers, jubilation and enthusiastically waving Tunisian flags.
Recommended Stories
list of 3 itemsend of list
Hundreds of people – Tunisians, Europeans and sub-Saharan Africans – had gathered for the annual procession of Our Lady of Trapani.
Many of the participants in the procession, and the Catholic mass that came earlier, were from sub-Saharan Africa.
“It is the Holy Virgin who has brought us all here today,” Isaac Lusafu, originally from the Democratic Republic of Congo, told Al Jazeera. “Today the Virgin Mary unites us all”.
In a large, packed square just outside the church gate, the statue was moving in a circle as people prayed and sang hymns. All this under the watchful eye of a mural of the famous Italian actress Claudia Cardinale, born in La Goulette, reminiscent of the distant past when the district was home to thousands of Europeans.
a melting pot
The Catholic feast of Our Lady of Trapani was brought to La Goulette by Sicilian immigrants in the late 1800s, in the days when the port town was a hub for poor southern European fishermen looking for a better life.
Immigration from Sicily to Tunisia peaked in the early 20th century. Almost all the fishermen, with their families and descendants, have now returned to European shores, but the statue of the Virgin remained – and, every year on 15 August, it is carried in procession outside the church.
“This is a unique incident,” Tunisian journalist and radio presenter Hatem Bouriel told Al Jazeera.
He further described how, in the procession’s heyday in the early 20th century, native Tunisians, Muslims and Jews alike, joined together with Tunisian-Sicilian Catholics to carry the statue of the Virgin Mary from the church to the sea.
There, participants will ask Mary to bless the fishermen’s boats. Many residents would shout, “Long live the Virgin of Trapani!”, Bouriel said, while others threw their chechiya, a traditional red hat worn in the Maghreb, into the air.
As well as its religious significance – for Catholics, August 15 marks the day Mary was taken to heaven – the feast also coincides with the Italian holiday of Ferragosto in mid-August, which traditionally signals the high point of summer.
Silvia Finzi, born to Italian parents in Tunis in the 1950s, described how, after the statue was brought out to sea, many residents of La Goulette would declare that the worst of Tunisia’s summer was over.
“Once the Virgin was taken into the water, it seemed as if the sea had changed,” Finzi, a professor of Italian at the University of Tunis, told Al Jazeera.
“People will say ‘the sea has changed, the heat is over’, and now you won’t have to swim to cool off”.
european migration
The first European immigrants began arriving in La Goulette in the early 19th century. Their numbers increased rapidly after 1881, when Tunisia became a French protectorate. At its peak in the early 1900s, the number of Italian immigrants throughout Tunisia – who were largely Sicilian – was estimated at more than 100,000.
In the decade after 1956, when Tunisia gained its independence from France, most of its European residents left the country, as the new government leaned towards nationalism.
In 1964, the Vatican signed an agreement with Tunisia, transferring control of most of the country’s churches – now largely empty – to the government for use as public buildings. The agreement also ended all public Christian celebrations, including processions in La Goulette.
For more than half a century, August 15 was celebrated only with a Mass inside the church building, and the statue of Our Lady of Trapani remained fixed in its place. The date remained significant for La Goulette’s very small Catholic population, but it ceased to be a significant event for the wider community.
sadness
In 2017, the Catholic Church received permission to resume processions, initially just inside the church premises. This year, when Al Jazeera visited, the procession left the church property but only as far as the square outside.
Many of the attendees were young Tunisian Muslims, who had little connection to La Goulette’s historical Sicilian population.
A major reason for this is undoubtedly the high status given to the Virgin Mary in Islam – an entire chapter of the Quran is dedicated to her.
Other participants were attracted by a sense of nostalgia for La Goulette’s multi-ethnic, multi-religious past.
“I love the procession,” Rania, 26, told Al Jazeera. “Many people have forgotten about it now, but European immigration is an important part of Tunisia’s history”.
Rania, a student, told Al Jazeera about her love for the 1996 film, Un été à la Goulette (A Summer in La Goulette).
With dialogue in three languages, and evocative scenes of sunlit courtyards and shimmering beaches, the film is a saga of La Goulette’s past.
Directed by renowned Tunisian filmmaker Farid Boghedir, it follows the lives of three teenage girls – Gigi, a Sicilian, Merimee, a Muslim, and Tina, a Jew – during the summer of the 1960s.
However, the film ends on a bleak note, with the outbreak of the 1967 war between Israel and several Arab states and the subsequent departure of almost all of Tunisia’s remaining Jewish and European residents.
new migration
As Tunisia’s European population declined, the country has seen an influx of new migrant communities from sub-Saharan Africa.
The majority of these new immigrants, numbering in the thousands, are from Francophone West Africa. Many people come to Tunisia in search of work; Others hope to find a way across the Mediterranean Sea to Europe.
Many of the sub-Saharan migrants – who face widespread discrimination in Tunisia – are Christians, and as a result, they now make up the vast majority of Tunisia’s church-going population.
This fact is reflected in a fresco in the church of La Goulette, inspired by the feast of Our Lady of Trapani. Painted in 2017, it depicts the Virgin Mary giving shelter to a group of people – Tunisians, Sicilians and sub-Saharan Africans – at her zenith.
In the fresco the air around the Virgin is filled with passports. The church’s priest, Father Narcisse, who is from Chad, told Al Jazeera that these represent documents that immigrants throw into the sea when traveling from North Africa to Europe in the hope of avoiding deportation.
The fresco highlights the fact that the Madonna of Trapani, once considered the protector of Sicilian fishermen, is today invoked by immigrants from far more diverse backgrounds.
“This celebration, in its original form, marks the deep ties between the two shores of the Mediterranean,” Archbishop of Tunis Nicolas Lernold told Al Jazeera. “Today, it brings together a more diverse group – Tunisians, Africans, Europeans; locals, expatriates and tourists.”
“Mary herself was a sojourner,” Archbishop Lernold said, referring to the New Testament story that describes Mary’s flight from Palestine to Egypt with the baby Jesus and her husband Joseph.
From a Christian perspective, he suggested, “We are all sojourners, just passing through, citizens of a kingdom that is not of this world”.
spirit of la goulette
La Goulette was once home to ‘Little Sicily’, an area characterized by clusters of Italianate-style apartment buildings. Most of these structures – modest buildings built by newly arrived fishermen – have been torn down and replaced, and little more than a church remains to testify to the area’s once significant Sicilian presence.
By 2019, only 800 Italians remained from the original immigrant community in all of Tunisia.
“There are very few of us left,” said Rita Strazera, who was born in Tunis to Sicilian parents. He explained that the Tunisian-Sicilian community meets very rarely, with some members coming together for a celebration on August 15, and holding occasional meetings in a small bookstore in front of the church.
Nevertheless, the feeling of Little Sicily has not completely disappeared. Traces of the old La Goulette remain in memory, in film, and, Strazera told Al Jazeera, in other, more surprising ways too.
“Every year, on All Saints’ Day, I go to the cemetery,” Strazzera said, referring to the annual celebration when Catholics remember their deceased loved ones.
“And there are Tunisians, Muslims, people who maybe had Sicilian parents, or Sicilian grandparents, and they come to see their graves, because they know that’s what Catholics do.”
Strazzera said, “There have been a lot of mixed marriages, and so, every year, more of them visit the graves. When I see them, it’s like a reminder that Little Sicily is still with us.”
