Sanaa

Sanaa is among the oldest continuously inhabited cities on earth, and local tradition credits its founding to Shem, son of Noah. It appears in South Arabian inscriptions as a fortified settlement of the Sabaean and later Himyarite period, dominated by the towered palace of Ghumdan, whose height and lantern-lit upper storey became a wonder in early Arabic writing. In the 6th century the Aksumite-backed ruler Abraha is said to have built a great church here, al-Qalis, in tradition intended to draw pilgrims away from Mecca. Islam reached the city in the Prophet's lifetime, and the Great Mosque, one of the oldest in the Muslim world, was founded then and enlarged in the 8th century.

For the next thousand years Sanaa passed between highland dynasties, Zaydi imams and outside powers. The Ottomans took it in the 16th century and again in 1872, building barracks, the Bakiriyya mosque and a new administrative quarter, before Imam Yahya made it the capital of an independent kingdom after the First World War. The old city's tower-houses, bath houses, caravanserais and markets took their present form over these centuries.

The revolution of 1962 made Sanaa capital of the Yemen Arab Republic, and after unification in 1990 the capital of Yemen. The city expanded far beyond its walls as villages were swallowed by new districts. UNESCO listed the old city in 1986 and added it to the list of World Heritage in Danger in 2015. The Houthi movement took the city in 2014–15, and it has since been struck repeatedly from the air; floods in 2020 damaged historic houses, and the resumption of fighting in July 2026 included strikes on the airport.

Sanaa has an urban culture distinct from the tribal countryside around it. The Song of Sanaa, a tradition of sung poetry accompanied by the lute and a copper tray struck as a drum, is recognised by UNESCO as intangible cultural heritage and was long performed at weddings and in the evening gatherings of the old city. Its poetry, the humayni, mixes classical Arabic with the spoken highland dialect.

Domestic life is organised around the tower-house. Families occupy several floors, with storerooms at the bottom and, at the top, the mafraj, a long room lined with cushions and lit by qamariya windows of stained glass set in gypsum tracery, where men gather through the afternoon to chew qat and talk. Women hold their own gatherings, the tafrita. The afternoon chew structures the working day, and much business, mediation and gossip happens there.

Craft traditions are strong: silverwork, once largely in the hands of the city's Jewish community before its emigration around 1950, the making of jambiya daggers with hilts and belts that signal status, gypsum window tracery, stone-cutting and the weaving of belts and shawls. Zaydi Shia and Shafi'i Sunni Yemenis have long prayed in the same mosques. Both Eids are the year's great gatherings, and weddings run for days with processions, drumming and dancing with the jambiya held aloft.

Sanaa is by far the largest city in Yemen, with a population put at about 3.3 million in recent estimates, swollen by people displaced from other parts of the country and difficult to count because no full census has been possible for many years. Neighbourhoods of concrete flats and walled villas spread across the basin, while the old city remains densely inhabited rather than preserved as a museum.

Water is the defining problem. The Sanaa basin's aquifer is being drawn down several metres a year, largely to irrigate qat, and many households buy water by tanker. Power cuts are routine and solar panels have appeared on rooftops across the city. Public-sector salaries have often gone unpaid, prices for fuel and flour swing with the war, and families rely on aid, remittances from relatives abroad and small trade.

The day starts early, with bread and sweet tea and the markets open soon after dawn; offices, schools and shops work through the morning, and by the early afternoon much of the city moves to the qat markets and then to private gatherings that last until evening. Friday is the day of rest and of the main congregational prayers. Universities, hospitals and ministries continue to function in reduced form, and the city has absorbed large numbers of displaced families into rented rooms and unfinished buildings.

Sanaa's defining dish is saltah, eaten at midday: a broth of meat and vegetables, often built on a spiced stew called maraq, served bubbling in a black soapstone pot called a madhra and crowned with hulba, fenugreek seed soaked and whipped into a pale froth. Fahsa is its lamb version, richer and stringier with shredded meat. Both are eaten with the hands, using torn pieces of malooj, a leavened flatbread baked against the wall of a clay tannur oven.

Around them sits a wider highland table: shafut, flatbread soaked in spiced buttermilk or yoghurt with herbs and eaten cold as a starter; aseed, a stiff wheat dough served in a pool of broth or with honey and butter; bean dishes and grilled meats; and rice with lamb or chicken for celebrations. The great sweet is bint al-sahn, the "daughter of the plate", a pile of thin buttered pastry layers baked and poured with honey and black seed, brought out for guests and for Eid.

Drinks follow the coffee terraces of the highlands, though much of the bean crop is exported: the everyday cup is qishr, an amber infusion of coffee husks with ginger and sometimes cinnamon, while sweet tea, often with milk and cardamom, is drunk at all hours. The old city markets sell raisins, dates, almonds, honey from the eastern valleys, and the spice blend hawaij and the herb sauce zhug, which give Yemeni cooking its character. Alcohol is effectively absent.