Algeria – 05 – Sean P Drysdale

Dear Reader (2025-10-19 – posted simultaneously to FB)
Well, I had a pleasant and gratifying conversation with the small group of people who came out to my Artist’s Talk on Thursday. I have also been getting ready to remove the Microsoft word processing, email, and spreadsheet programs from my computer. Next comes the replacement of Adobe products and that is going to be a little more difficult, but I am getting closer to that decision. Both these product families have been feeling more and more like unwanted tentacles, and so I am being dragged kicking and screaming to a change (ah well).

Enough housekeeping! Let us return to Algeria. In the last post I said you and I would leave Algiers for some place else. Our next destination in this series is based on photos I wanted to edit. We stopped at the small town of Djemila for a long lunch, while the heat of the day passed, before going to see the site of some of the best kept Roman ruins in North Africa (also in Djemila). While my travel companions drank after lunch tea, I went for a wee walkabout.

In some of today’s images we see remnants of a past time. The 1990s in Algeria, known as the dark decade, was characterized by a civil war between Islamists and the military. The military won (?). Though the civil war had ended, the noughties were still dark grey. The first signs of tourism in the C21^st didn’t really begin until 2012 / 2015.

Notes on Photos
~ 01 to 09 – Djemila
~ 02, 03 – Access with the help of hat and phone camera
~ 10 to 12 – A taste of the museum in Djemila, which contained amazing mosaics on the walls. The mosaics were recovered from the grounds of the Roman town of Cuicul (present day Djemila).