Sur

Sur's history is a history of the sea. Its sheltered lagoon, set where the coast turns south towards the Arabian Sea, made a natural harbour on the sailing routes between Arabia, Persia, India and East Africa, and the town's shipwrights became the best known in Oman. They built ocean-going dhows — the ganjah and the baghlah among them — that carried dates, dried fish, timber and, in the 18th and 19th centuries, slaves and ivory, with Zanzibar and the Swahili coast at the other end of the run. Sur families settled in East Africa, and Swahili words and kin networks came back with them.

The city grew as the medieval port of Qalhat to the north faded, a place Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta had both described and which was already losing its trade to Muscat — earthquakes on the Qalhat fault are one suggested cause — when the Portuguese took it in 1507. Sur's own fortunes turned in the 19th century: Britain's campaign against the slave trade, the separation of Zanzibar from Oman in 1856, and then steamships and the Suez Canal cut away the trade that had sustained the fleet. Many families emigrated, and the population fell.

Modern Sur dates from the 1970s, when roads, schools, hospitals and a deepwater port arrived. In 2000 a liquefied natural gas plant opened down the coast near Qalhat, giving the city an industrial base, and a university college and government offices followed as it became the seat of the South Ash Sharqiyah governorate. A few yards still build wooden dhows, now mostly for museums, collectors and tourism rather than for cargo.

Sur's identity is maritime and it is worn openly: ship models in shop windows, a dhow on the city's emblems, and families who trace their names to voyages to Zanzibar, Basra or the Malabar coast. The craft of building in wood — shaping planks by eye, fastening them with cord or nails, caulking the seams — is passed on in the yards rather than in schools, and the shipwrights are respected accordingly. The seafaring past also left sung work songs, drumming and dance forms with rhythms shared with the Swahili coast.

Socially the city is conservative and Muslim, with both Ibadi and Sunni communities, and daily life turns on family, the mosque and the majlis. Hospitality follows the Omani pattern: long greetings, kahwa poured from a dallah, dates and halwa before business. Men wear the dishdasha with a kummah or massar, women long dresses with a headscarf; dress in public is modest, and visitors are expected to match it.

The year's high points are religious — Ramadan evenings on the corniche, the two Eids, weddings with drumming and the razha sword dance — and national, with Oman's National Day in November. Sur is also known nationally for its halwa, and a box of it is the standard gift carried away by Omani visitors.

Around 110,000 people live in the wilayat of Sur, the seat of the Ash Sharqiyah South governorate. Work divides between the port and fishing fleet, government offices and schools, the liquefied natural gas plant and its contractors down the coast, small trade and a steady flow of tourism to the turtle beaches and the wadis. A large share of the labour force is South Asian, as elsewhere in the Gulf, and Indian, Pakistani and Bangladeshi shops and restaurants are part of the ordinary street.

Most residents live in the newer districts spread along the coast road rather than in the old quarters, in concrete villas with walled yards. Al Ayjah keeps a fishing community across the water, and inland Bilad Sur has palm gardens and older houses. The university college brings students in from across the region.

The day begins at sea: boats come in early and the catch is sold at the fish market in the morning, while shops and offices work through to midday. The afternoon is quiet in the heat, and the corniche fills again in the evening with families, fishermen and men sitting out. Concerns are those of a small coastal city — jobs for young Omanis, the decline of the traditional boatbuilding trade, and the effects of the industrial plant and the port on a place that still thinks of itself as a sailors' town.

Fish rules the table. Kingfish, known locally as kanad, tuna, grouper, sardines, prawns and squid come off the boats and are grilled over charcoal, fried or curried and served with rice, lime and salad. Mashuai, a whole kingfish spit-roasted and served with lemon rice, is the coastal dish of ceremony, and dried and salted fish keep their place in the kitchen from the days when there was no refrigeration. Fish machboos — spiced rice cooked with fish — is everyday food.

Sur's other claim is halwa. The city is famous throughout Oman for it: sugar, starch, ghee, rosewater, saffron, cardamom and nuts stirred for hours in a copper pot over a wood fire until dark and elastic, then sold by weight and served in a shallow dish with kahwa. Refusing the coffee and halwa offered to a guest is close to impossible and not worth attempting.

From the interior come the dishes of the wider Sharqiyah: shuwa, meat rubbed with a date and spice paste and cooked in a pit oven for the Eids; machboos, spiced rice with goat or chicken; and harees, wheat pounded with meat into a thick paste. Dates and dried limes, loomi, are staples, laban, a salty buttermilk, is drunk with meals, and the migrant kitchens of the city add biryani, curries and roti to the everyday choice.