Batna

Batna is a young city in an ancient landscape. The plain below the Aurès has been settled since antiquity: the Numidian kings raised the Medracen mausoleum on it before Rome arrived, around 100 AD the emperor Trajan founded the veterans' colony of Thamugadi — Timgad — on the edge of the mountains, a town of straight streets, a forum, a library and a theatre, buried by sand after the late antique centuries and excavated from the 1880s onwards, and a generation later, under Hadrian, the Third Augustan Legion built its headquarters camp at Lambaesis.

The town of Batna itself was founded in 1844, when French forces established a camp on the route between Constantine and Biskra to control the Aurès, which had resisted every outside power from the Romans onwards. The camp became a garrison town with a grid of streets, and civilian settlement followed; the name was fixed in the following years. It grew slowly as an administrative and market centre for the mountains.

On 1 November 1954 the war of independence began with coordinated attacks across Algeria, many of them in the Aurès, and the mountains remained a guerrilla stronghold until 1962; the region's part in the war is central to how it is remembered nationally. After independence Batna expanded very quickly as people moved down from the mountain villages, becoming one of the largest cities of the interior, with a university, industry on its outskirts and new districts spreading across the plain.

Batna is the urban centre of the Chaoui, the Berber people of the Aurès, and Chaouia is spoken in the city and throughout the mountains alongside Algerian Arabic. The culture is markedly its own: music built on the gasba, an open reed flute, and the bendir frame drum, with a repertoire of sung poetry about exile, love and the mountains that singers such as Aïssa Djermouni carried to a wider audience in the 20th century.

Mountain crafts remain part of everyday life — heavy wool carpets and blankets woven on upright looms in patterns particular to the Aurès, silver jewellery, and the stone and earth building of the cliff villages. Women's traditional dress is distinctive, with bright layered cloth, heavy silver ornament and, among older generations, facial tattoos that are no longer made.

Society here is conservative, tribal in its older structures and strongly attached to family and village of origin, even for households that have lived in the city for two generations. Hospitality is emphatic, weddings are long and loud, and the memory of the war of independence is woven into local identity, marked in street names, monuments and the annual ceremonies of November. Religious life is Sunni Islam of the Maliki school, and Friday prayer and Ramadan order the week and the year.

About 290,000 people lived in the city at the 2008 census, making it one of Algeria's largest, and well over a million live in the province, most of them within reach of the Aurès. Growth has been rapid, and the districts around the old colonial grid — Bouakal above all — are densely built and busy, while newer estates spread across the plain to the south and north.

The economy rests on trade, administration, education and agriculture. The high plains grow cereals and raise sheep; the mountain valleys produce apricots, figs, apples and cherries; and the city handles the processing and distribution, along with textiles and light industry on its edges. The city's two universities give it a young population.

The rhythm is set by altitude and season: early markets, a long summer afternoon pause, and winters cold enough to shape daily life, with heating costs, snow on the mountain roads and villages cut off for a day or two at a time. Migration from the mountain villages into the city continues, and emigration to France is common enough that summers bring a visible return of families from abroad. Youth unemployment, housing and water supply are the standing local concerns.

Batna's cooking is the plain, filling food of the mountains and high plains. Couscous is the foundation, steamed semolina under a stew of mutton, chickpeas and seasonal vegetables, and in the Aurès it is also eaten in simpler forms with buttermilk or with dried meat preserved for winter. Chakhchoukha — flatbread torn by hand into a spiced lamb and chickpea sauce — is the dish of gatherings, shared with the plateaus to the north and with Biskra to the south.

Bread is made at home as much as bought: kesra and matlou, flat semolina breads cooked on a griddle or in ashes, are eaten with olive oil, honey or butter. Soups of lentils, chickpeas and cracked wheat carry the cold months, and chorba frik breaks the fast in Ramadan. Dried figs and apricots from the valleys, walnuts and the dates brought up from the Saharan fringe at Biskra are everyday sweet things.

Festive food follows the eastern Algerian repertoire — baklawa, makroud filled with dates, griwech dipped in honey, and rfiss, crumbled semolina bread worked with butter and honey — made in quantity for Eid and for weddings, when whole sheep are roasted for méchoui. Strong coffee and mint tea are drunk all day, and in the mountain villages fresh and fermented milk is still served to guests.