Suakin — Sudan's Historic Port on the Red Sea

Suakin lies on the Red Sea coast, on a flat, roughly circular island inside a shallow lagoon connected to the sea by a natural channel through the coral reefs, and connected to it is a mainland part known as al-Qayf. The Portuguese traveller de Castro described it in 1541 as saying that the whole island is a city and the whole city is an island, as there was no place for a foot in it that was not occupied by houses. This protected location made it a safe natural port at the end of a desert road reaching to the Nile Valley.

Medieval Arabic sources knew Suakin as a trading port, and its importance increased from the tenth to the twelfth century AD as a node in the trade network of the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean. After the decline of the port of Aydhab to the north during the fifteenth century, Suakin became the main port on the Sudanese coast, and the first point of departure for North African pilgrims heading to Mecca via Jeddah, and for Ethiopian Christian pilgrims heading to Jerusalem at the same time.

Suakin came under Ottoman influence after the conquest of Egypt in 1517, then a second Ottoman campaign took place in 1555, following which Özdemir Pasha was appointed the first governor of an Ottoman province of which Suakin was the capital, so the port's role expanded through the following centuries. Suakin remained Sudan's only large port throughout the late medieval and early modern periods, and within the economic and cultural sphere of the Funj Sultanate of Sennar in successive periods, before it experienced a final great prosperity after the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869.

The island's architecture was distinguished by houses and mosques of three and four storeys built from locally quarried coral stone and whitewashed with lime, with protruding wooden windows known as roshan, so that it was nicknamed the White City. With the decision to establish a new port at Port Sudan to the north at the beginning of the twentieth century, Suakin declined rapidly until by the 1920s it had become almost deserted, and its coral buildings deteriorated with time.

Suakin has been listed on Sudan's tentative list for UNESCO World Heritage since 1994, and the list review workshop in 2015 confirmed its retention on it as a historic port on the Red Sea. Since 2002, the "Suakin Project" of the National Corporation for Antiquities and Museums, with the participation of researchers from the universities of Ulster, Cambridge, London and Khartoum, has been working on studying the history of the site and its antiquities and restoring its important buildings, so that Suakin remains a material witness to centuries of trade, pilgrimage and communication across the Red Sea.

📚 Sources: UNESCO — Tentative List of World Heritage in Sudan and Its Review Workshop (2015); University of Southampton — Maritime Endangered Archaeology Project (MarEA), Suakin Case Study; Max van Berchem Foundation — Archaeological Work in Suakin and the Suakin Project (National Corporation for Antiquities and Museums) — Editorial Team