Bahla

Bahla is one of the long-settled oases of the Omani interior, its life built on aflaj channels drawing water from the wadis of the western Hajar to a large grove of date palms. Its importance grew with the Banu Nabhan, the dynasty that dominated inland Oman from roughly the 12th to the 15th century and made Bahla its seat. Much of the fort as it stands, along with the long mud-brick wall that enclosed the oasis and its gardens, dates from that period or was rebuilt on foundations laid then.

The fort is a settlement in itself — towers, courtyards, mosques, wells, a governor's quarters and storerooms enclosed by high walls of sun-dried brick on a stone base. It was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1987 and, badly eroded, stayed on the list of World Heritage in Danger until 2004. A long programme of consolidation and rebuilding followed, and the fort reopened in 2012. Its scale is the best single measure of how much power the oasis once held.

Bahla's other trade is older than any dynasty: pottery here is traced back as far as 2500 BC. Its potters worked the clay of the oasis into unglazed water jars, incense burners and cooking vessels that were carried across Oman and traded along the coast, and the craft is still practised in workshops on the edge of the town. After 1970 tarmac roads, schools and piped water arrived; families left the mud-brick quarter for concrete villas, and the old houses below the fort were abandoned to the weather.

Bahla is a conservative Ibadi town with a strong sense of its own antiquity. The mosque and the majlis shape social life, families are large and closely related, and hospitality follows the formal Omani pattern: long greetings, kahwa poured from a dallah into small cups, dates and halwa, and an insistence that the guest take a second cup before the cup is shaken to signal enough. Men wear the white dishdasha with a kummah or a wrapped massar; women wear long dresses with a headscarf, and in the interior more often cover fully in public.

Pottery is the town's craft identity. Workshops dig and prepare local clay, throw water jars, jugs and incense burners, and fire them in kilns whose output is sold in the souq and across the country. Bahla's pottery is generally unglazed and porous, which keeps stored water cool, and it appears in Omani kitchens well beyond the interior.

The town also carries a reputation in Omani folklore as a place of jinn and sorcery, tied in popular stories to the great wall and to the fort itself. Omanis repeat these tales with a mixture of humour and caution; residents are used to being asked about them, and the polite approach is curiosity rather than ridicule. Otherwise the cultural calendar is the interior's: Ramadan evenings, the two Eids, habta markets in the days before them, weddings with razha sword-and-chant dances, and National Day in November.

Bahla is a wilayat whose people are spread between the old centre and newer neighbourhoods along the highway. Almost nobody now lives in the mud-brick quarter beneath the fort; households moved out over the decades after 1970 into concrete villas with piped water and air conditioning, leaving the old houses to erode.

Work is a mix of government jobs, farming, small trade and craft. The date gardens still matter, worked on falaj turns that are timed and shared among families, and pottery, livestock and small shops make up much of the rest. Tourism is present but modest: visitors mostly come for the fort, spend a couple of hours and drive on to Nizwa or Al Hamra, so the town has fewer hotels and restaurants than its fame suggests. Many residents commute to Nizwa or work in Muscat and return at weekends.

The day follows the prayer times and the heat. Shops open early and close through the middle of the day, the souq is busiest in the morning, and the town comes back to life after the late afternoon prayer, when families visit and children play outside until late. The concerns people raise are the familiar ones of the interior: employment for young Omanis, the cost of maintaining earthen buildings, water for the gardens, and how much of the old oasis can realistically be saved.

Bahla eats what the oasis and the herds provide. Dates are the constant, several varieties grown in the gardens behind the fort, served with kahwa — lightly roasted coffee brewed pale with cardamom — to every visitor. Halwa, the dense sweet of sugar, starch, ghee, rosewater, saffron and nuts, is stirred for hours in a large pot and brought out for guests, weddings and Eid.

The festive dish is shuwa: goat, lamb or beef rubbed with a spice paste, wrapped and lowered into a pit oven dug in the ground to cook for a day or more, then opened when the family gathers. Majboos, spiced rice cooked with meat, and harees, wheat pounded with meat into a smooth thick paste, are served at the same occasions. Everyday food is simpler — rice with chicken, Indian curries and breads in the town's restaurants, grilled meat and salads, and laban, a salty buttermilk, to drink.

The souq supplies the rest: dried limes, called loomi, that give rice dishes and soups their sour edge; local honey; limes and bananas grown under the palms; and fruit brought down from the terraces of the Hajar in season. Bahla's own pottery is part of the food culture too, since unglazed clay jars keep drinking water cool through the summer.