Suakin or Sawakin (, Beja language: Oosook) is a port city in northeastern Sudan, on the west coast of the Red Sea. It was formerly the region's chief port, but is now secondary to Port Sudan, about north.
Suakin used to be considered the height of medieval luxury on the Red Sea, but the old city built of coral is now in ruins. In 1983, the adjacent historic mainland town, known as the Geyf, had a population of 18,030 and the 2009 population was estimated at 43,337.
Etymology
The
Beja language name for Suakin is
Oosook.
This is possibly from the Arabic word
suq, meaning market. In Beja, the
locative case for this is
isukib, whence Suakin might have derived.
[Berg, Robert: Suakin: Time and Tide . Saudi Aramco World.] The spelling on
in the late 19th century was "Sauakin", but in the popular press "Suakim" was predominant.
History
Ancient
Suakin was likely
Ptolemy's Port of Good Hope, Limen Evangelis, which is similarly described as lying on a circular island at the end of a long inlet.
Under the Ptolemies and
Roman Empire, though, the Red Sea's major port was Berenice to the north. The growth of the Muslim
caliphate shifted trade first to the
Hijaz and then to the
Persian Gulf.
Medieval
The collapse of the Abbasids and growth of Fatimid Egypt changed this and Al-Qusayr and
Aydhab became important emporia, trading with
India and ferrying African
hajj to
Mecca. Suakin was first mentioned by name in the 10th century by al-Hamdani, who says it was already an ancient town. At that time, Suakin was a small
Beja people settlement, but it began to expand after the abandonment of the port of Badi to its south. The
Crusades and Mongol invasions drove more trade into the region: there are a number of references to Venetian merchants residing at Suakin and
Massawa as early as the 14th century.
One of Suakin's rulers, Ala al-Din al-Asba'ani, angered the Mamluk sultan
Baibars by seizing the goods of merchants who died at sea nearby. In 1264, the governor of
Qus and his general Ikhmin Ala al-Din attacked with the support of Aydhab. Al-Asba'ani was forced to flee the city. The continuing enmity between the two towns is testified to by reports that after the destruction of Aydhab by Sultan
Barsbay in 1426, the refugees, who fled to Suakin instead of
Old Dongola, were all slaughtered.
[Dahl, Gudrun & al: "Precolonial Beja: A Periphery at the Crossroads." Nordic Journal of African Studies 15(4): 473–498 (2006). ]
Despite the town's formal submission to the Mamluks in 1317, O. G. S. Crawford believed that the city remained a center of Christianity into the 13th century. Muslim immigrants such as the Banu Kanz gradually transformed this: Ibn Battuta records that in 1332, there was a Muslim "sultan" of Suakin, al-Sharif Zaid ibn-Abi Numayy ibn-'Ajlan, who was the son of a Meccan sharif. Following the region's inheritance laws, he had inherited the local leadership from his Bejan maternal uncles.
Ottoman
Following the Ottoman conquest of Egypt in 1517, the
Ottoman Empire became the major power in the
Red Sea. After a brief period of Ottoman-Portuguese struggles in the Red Sea, Özdemir Pasha occupied Suakin in the early 1550s. Though it was only loosely controlled, until the Ottoman province of
Habesh was established in 1555 with the residence of its
pasha in Suakin.
The Ottomans restored the two main mosques - Shafi'i and
Hanafi, strengthened the walls of the fort and built new roads and buildings.
As the Portuguese explorers discovered and perfected the sea route around Africa and the Ottomans were unable to stop this trade, the local merchants began to abandon the town.
Some trade was kept up with the Sultanate of Sennar, but by the 18th and 19th centuries, the Swiss traveler Johann Ludwig Burckhardt found two-thirds of the homes in ruins.
British rule
The British Army was involved at Suakin in 1883–1885 and Lord Kitchener was there in this period leading the Egyptian Army contingent. Suakin was his headquarters and his force survived a lengthy siege there.
The Australian colonial forces of Victoria offered their torpedo boat HMVS Childers and HMVS Victoria and HMVS Albert, which arrived in Suakin on 19 March 1884 on their delivery voyage from Britain, only to be released as fighting had moved inland. They departed on 23 March, arriving in Melbourne on 25 June 1884. An essentially civilian military force of 770 men from New South Wales, including some of the Naval Brigade, arrived in Suakin in March 1885 and served until mid-May.[ Before the Anzac Dawn: A military history of Australia before 1915 Chapter 5: "Australian naval defence", Edited: Craig Stockings, John Connor (2013), accessed 23 June 2016]
After the defeat of the Mahdist State, the British preferred to develop the new Port Sudan, rather than engage in the extensive rebuilding and expansion that would have been necessary to make Suakin comparable. By 1922, the last of the British had left.
21st century
Since 2000, Sudan's National Corporation for Antiquities and Museums has undertaken research and documented the history of Suakin, and in 2022, the online project
Sudan Memory published historical photographs, architectural drawings and a 3D reconstruction of the town on its website.
On 17 January 2018, as part of a rapprochement with Sudan, Turkey was granted a 99-year lease over Suakin island.
On 12 June 2022, some 15,000 sheep drowned in the sinking of the Badr 1 in the port of Suakin.
Buildings of Suakin
A detailed description of the buildings of Suakin, including measured plans and detailed sketches, can be found in
The Coral Buildings of Suakin: Islamic Architecture, Planning, Design and Domestic Arrangements in a Red Sea Port by Jean-Pierre Greenlaw,
Kegan Paul International, 1995, .
Climate
Suakin has a very hot
desert climate (Köppen
BWh) with brutally hot and humid, though dry, summers and very warm winters. Rainfall is minimal except from October to December, when easterly winds can give occasional downpours: in November 1965 as much as fell, but in the whole year from July 1981 to June 1982 no more than was recorded.
[ Monthly rainfall for Suakin]
See also
Further reading
-
Greenlaw, Jean-Pierre (1995) The Coral Buildings of Suakin: Islamic Architecture, Planning, Design and Domestic Arrangements in a Red Sea Port. Kegan Paul International,
-
Um, Nancy. "Greenlaw's Suakin: the limits of architectural representation and the continuing lives of buildings in Coastal Sudan." African Arts, vol. 44, no. 4, 2011, p. 36+. Gale Literature Resource Center
-
Cooke, B. Kennedy, and B. Kennedy-Cooke. “The Red Sea coast in 1540.” Sudan Notes and Records, vol. 16, no. 2, 1933, pp. 151–59, . Accessed 11 Apr. 2022.
-
Livro de Lisuarte de Abreu: fac-simile. Comissão Nacional para as Comemorações dos Descobrimentos Portugueses. Lisboa, 1992. Vasco Graça Moura
-
Couto, Diogo do; Observações sobre as principais causas da decadência dos portugueses na Ásia
External links
