Sétif

The plateau around Sétif has been farmed since prehistory, and the Numidians held it before Rome. The Roman colony of Sitifis was founded for army veterans around the end of the 1st century AD and grew into the capital of the province of Mauretania Sitifensis, a town of baths, basilicas and estates in the middle of a grain country whose surplus was shipped from the coast. Christianity took root early, and two large Christian basilicas were built at the edge of the town at the end of the 4th century.

After the Vandal period the Byzantines fortified the site in the 6th century, building the citadel whose walls still stand. Under Arab and Berber rule the town shrank to a village on the caravan routes between the coast and the interior, and by the early 19th century little of the Roman city remained visible. French forces occupied the site in 1838 and laid out a new garrison town on a grid inside the old Byzantine walls, which became a centre of colonial cereal farming.

On 8 May 1945, as crowds across Algeria celebrated the end of the war in Europe, police fired on a nationalist demonstration in Sétif; the riots that followed killed about a hundred European settlers, and the repression across Sétif, Guelma and Kherrata that followed killed thousands of Algerians, with the toll still disputed. Those events are widely seen as a turning point on the road to the war of independence that began in 1954. Since 1962 Sétif has grown rapidly into one of Algeria's largest inland cities, with a university, a tramway and a reputation for commerce.

Sétif has a reputation in Algeria for trade and hard work. The city and the towns around it, El Eulma above all, are known for merchants who import and distribute goods across the country, and that commercial character shapes the way people speak about their own city. It is conservative in manner, with an important religious and reformist tradition inherited from the ulama movement of the 1930s.

Football is the city's great passion. Its club, founded in the 1950s and one of the most successful in Algerian and North African competition, gives Sétif a national profile, and match days fill the roads towards the stadium on the southern edge of town. The 1945 events are the other pillar of local identity, commemorated in monuments, street names and the annual ceremonies in May.

Culturally the plateau belongs to the eastern Algerian world of malouf and of bedoui sung poetry, and Chaoui and Kabyle influences meet here, since Sétif sits between the Aurès and Kabylie and has drawn families from both. Weddings run for days, with henna nights, long meals and music; trays of sweets are exchanged between households at Eid; and the Ain El Fouara fountain in the centre serves as the place everyone meets, photographs and argues about.

About 288,000 people lived in the city at the 2008 census, and well over a million in the province, which is one of the most populous in Algeria. The city has grown quickly, spreading south towards the university and east along the Constantine road in estates of apartment blocks, while the colonial grid at the centre remains the commercial heart.

The economy rests on agriculture and trade. The surrounding high plains produce wheat, barley, pulses and sheep, and Sétif's food processing, dairies and light industry work with that produce; wholesale trade, construction and the university employ much of the rest. The province is also one of the main sources of Algerian emigration to France, and money and visitors flow back each summer.

Life is ordered by the plateau climate: early starts, markets busy in the morning, a pause in the heat of summer afternoons, and cafés full in the evening. Winter is a real constraint, with frost, wind and snow that can cut roads to the mountain villages for days. Housing shortages, traffic in the centre and youth unemployment are the usual complaints, and the tramway, opened in 2018, has changed how people cross the city.

Sétif eats the food of the high plains, built on wheat, lamb and pulses. Chakhchoukha — thin flatbread torn into pieces and soaked in a sauce of lamb, chickpeas, tomato and spices — is the dish of celebration, and couscous, steamed semolina under a stew of mutton and seasonal vegetables, is the Friday meal in most homes. Trida, small squares of hand-cut pasta in a chicken and chickpea sauce, is the festive alternative.

Soups and breads carry the cold months. Chorba frik, the tomato and green-wheat soup, breaks the fast throughout Ramadan; hearty lentil and chickpea dishes are everyday food; and kesra and matlou, flat semolina breads baked on a griddle, are made at home and sold from small bakeries. Sheep from the plateau give grilled chops, skewers and merguez sausages, and dried and preserved meat still appears in winter cooking in the villages.

The city is proud of its sweets, which draw on the eastern Algerian repertoire: baklawa layered with almonds, makroud stuffed with dates and fried, griwech twisted and dipped in honey, and rfiss, crumbled semolina bread worked with butter and honey. They are made in quantity for weddings and for Eid and sold from the patisseries along the main avenue. Strong black coffee and mint tea are drunk at all hours, and the water of the Ain El Fouara fountain is still carried home by some families.