Biskra

Biskra stands where the last ridges of the Aurès give out and the Sahara begins, a position that has made it a garrison town for two thousand years. The Romans knew it as Vescera, one of the posts along the fortified frontier that ran below the mountains, and traces of that world survive in the ruins scattered across the Ziban plain. In 683 the Arab commander Uqba ibn Nafi was killed near here by the Berber leader Kusaila; his tomb at Sidi Okba, a short way south-east, became one of the oldest Islamic shrines in the country and fixed the oasis in the religious geography of the Maghreb.

Through the medieval centuries the Zab was a chain of palm-growing villages trading dates north into the mountains and south into the desert, ruled in turn from Kairouan, from the Hammadid and Hafsid capitals, and finally from Ottoman Constantine, which kept a garrison at the oasis. French forces occupied Biskra in 1844. The nearby oasis of Zaatcha rose against them in 1849 and was destroyed after a long siege.

Under French rule the railway arrived and the town was rebuilt on a grid of avenues, with a fort, gardens and hotels. From the 1880s it became a winter station for Europeans seeking dry heat, and the writers and painters who came turned it into a stock image of the Orient. Since independence in 1962 Biskra has grown into a provincial capital with a university and a large irrigated agriculture, still built on the date.

Biskra is an Arabic-speaking oasis town on the edge of Chaoui Berber country, and both worlds meet in its markets: families from the Aurès villages come down to trade, and the town looks south to the desert for the rest of its custom. Hospitality follows the Saharan pattern — dates and buttermilk or sweet mint tea offered before anything is discussed — and the rhythm of the year is set by the date harvest in autumn and by Ramadan.

The town has an unusually large place in European art. From the 1880s painters and writers came for the light and the winter warmth, and Biskra appears in Orientalist canvases and in novels of the period, a reputation the town has carried ever since, not always comfortably. The Ouled Naïl dancers who performed in the colonial-era cafés belonged to a tribal confederation of the steppe to the north, and their image circulated in Europe on postcards far removed from the lives behind it.

Music here is the music of the steppe and the oases: the gasba reed flute and the bendir frame drum behind sung poetry, played at weddings and saints' festivals, alongside the rai and chaabi heard everywhere in Algeria. Craft work runs to knotted rugs, palm-fibre baskets and burnous cloaks. Football is followed closely, and the town's club draws large crowds when it plays at home.

The city's population was recorded at about 308,000 in 2007, with several hundred thousand more spread through the oasis towns of the province. It is a young town, and Mohamed Khider University brings thousands of students from across the south-east into the northern districts each year.

Dates are the backbone of the economy. The Ziban groves produce a large share of Algeria's Deglet Nour, the translucent variety that dominates the country's agricultural exports, and the packing sheds, cold stores and lorry yards around Tolga and Biskra work hardest from October to January. Greenhouse vegetables grown under plastic on the plain are the second crop, supplying markets far to the north, and the rest of the town lives on administration, trade, building work and the university.

The day is shaped by the heat. Shops and offices open early, the streets empty through the middle of the afternoon in summer, and life returns after sunset, when the cafés and the market fill and families walk out in the cooler air. Water is the constant worry: the wells are pumped hard, salinity in the soil is rising in places, and drought years show quickly in the groves. Younger people leave for Constantine, Algiers or abroad for work, and the town's growth has pushed new housing out onto land that was gardens a generation ago.

Biskra's best-known dish is doubara, a soupy bowl of broad beans and chickpeas cooked soft and served with cumin, olive oil and a spoonful of harissa, eaten with bread from a small counter for a few dinars. It is breakfast, lunch and street food at once, and Biskrans claim it as their own against the rest of Algeria. The town also has its version of chakhchoukha: rounds of flatbread torn into pieces and soaked in a hot red sauce of mutton, chickpeas and tomato, a dish for guests and for family gatherings.

Around these sit the staples of the steppe and the oases — couscous with mutton on Fridays, chorba with cracked wheat, méchoui roasted whole for celebrations, and the flat breads baked in every household. Mtabga, a thick flatbread stuffed with onion, tomato and chilli and cooked on a griddle, is sold hot in the markets, and grilled merguez is the standby of the town's small restaurants.

Dates run through everything. Deglet Nour is eaten plain with lben, the salted buttermilk, or with fresh milk; lesser varieties are pressed into paste for makroud, the diamond-shaped semolina cakes filled with dates and soaked in honey, and for rfiss, crumbled bread or semolina worked with dates and butter. Strong green tea with mint is poured at every hour, and in summer the drink of the town is cold buttermilk.