Bejaia
| Bejaia بجاية y ⴱⴳⴰⵢⴻⵜ |
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| Coordinates | 36 ° 44 '50 " N , 5 ° 4' 29" E | ||
| Basic data | |||
| Country | Algeria | ||
| Bejaia | |||
| ISO 3166-2 | DZ-06 | ||
| height | 10 m | ||
| surface | 12 km² | ||
| Residents | 176,139 (2008) | ||
| density | 14,678.3 Ew. / km² | ||
| founding | 1062 | ||
 View of Bejaia
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Bejaia ( Arabic بجاية, Bidschāya , Kabylisch ⴱⴳⴰⵢⴻⵜ, Bgayet , Vgaiet ) is a port city in Kabylia with approx. 190,000 inhabitants on the Mediterranean in the province of the same name in northeast Algeria ; it is at the same time the provincial capital and capital of a municipality ( commune ) with approx. 200,000 inhabitants. The city became famous because Leonardo Fibonacci got to know the Arabic numbers here around 1200 and later promoted their spread in Europe .
Toponym
The names or spellings Asselden , Saldae , al-Naciriya , Bougie , Béjaïa and Bgayte have been handed down. The city has had its current name since 1963, previously it was known as Bougie .
Location and climate
Bejaia is located about 250 km (driving distance) east of the capital Algiers on the west bank of the same name, from the mountains of Tellatlas surrounded bay into which the Oued Soummam opens. The climate is temperate to warm; The rain, which is abundant by Algerian standards (approx. 830 mm / year), falls mainly in the winter months.
population
| year | 1977 | 1987 | 1998 | 2008 |
| Residents | approximately 74,000 | 114,500 | 144.405 | 176.139 |
Since the 1960s, Bejaia has experienced a strong immigration of Berber families from the rural regions of Algeria. One speaks Kabyle , Arabic and French .
economy
In the city itself, traders, craftsmen and service providers of all kinds have settled, who already benefited from trade with Europe (Venice, Genoa, Pisa, Seville, Barcelona) in the Middle Ages. In the outskirts of the city there are numerous companies in the petrochemical industry that benefit from an oil pipeline from the Sahara . The most important export items of the second or third largest port city of Algeria - after Algiers and Oran - are wine, tropical fruits, mineral resources, animal skins and petroleum products.
history
Antiquity
Bejaia stands on the site of the ancient Carthaginian city of Saldae or Civitas Salditana , a small port in Carthaginian , Mauritanian and Roman times (from 42 BC). Originally the area was inhabited by Numidians and Berbers. Augustus gave the city the status of a colonia and left the lands to his veterans . In late antiquity it became an important bishopric in the province of Mauretania Caesarensis (later Mauretania stifensis ). In the 5th century AD this was taken by the Vandals under Geiseric and fortified as the capital of the short-lived Vandal Empire. In 533 the Byzantine general Belisarius took Saldae, whereupon an African prefecture and later the exarchate of Carthage were established.
middle Ages
After the Muslim conquest in the 7th century, the place was re-established as Bejaia and initially sank back to the status of a fishing village, but in 1062 it became the seat of the ruling house of the Hammadids and remained for many years one of the most important and most populous port cities in North Africa and the entire Mediterranean region and at the same time an important cultural center.
Leonardo Fibonacci (around 1170 - around 1250), the son of a Pisan merchant (and possibly a consul ), studied Arabic mathematics (which he called modus indorum ) and the Arabic number system in Bejaia under Almohad rule . He brought these new methods with him to Europe. A mathematical-historical analysis of Fibonacci's environment and ties to Bejaia, at that time an important wax exporter, expressed the thesis that it was the beekeepers of Bejaia and the knowledge of the bee colonies that had inspired the Fibonacci numbers and not rabbit breeding, as it is called in Fibonacci's most important work, the Liber Abaci .
In the 13th century the Hafsids took control of Bejaia.
In 1315 Ramon Llull was stoned in Bejaia , where a few years earlier Peter Armengaudius (Peter Armengol) may have been hanged.
Modern times
After the Spanish occupation, the city was conquered by the Ottomans in 1555 . For almost three centuries, Berber pirates used Bejaia as a base. The city was mainly populated by Arabic-speaking Moors , Moriscos and Jews . Many of the latter fled to Bejaia because of the persecution in Spain by the Inquisition . The Berbers in the surrounding villages only came to town on market days.
Bejaia was in 1833 by the French as part of the colony of Algeria taken . Most of the time, the place served as the administrative seat of its own arrondissement within the Constantine department . In the middle of the 20th century, 513,000 people lived in the arrondissement, 20,000 of them in Bougie / Bejaia itself. In 1957, Bougie itself became a department.
With the alternate occupation of the area by Spaniards and Turks in the 16th century, the importance of the city declined in favor of Algiers, until at the beginning of the 19th century little more than ruins were left. However, after it was captured by the French (1833) it regained some of its former prosperity. The port was expanded and modernized and connected to the Tunis - Oran railway line by a branch line .
During the Second World War , British and American troops landed in North Africa as part of Operation Torch , including a battalion of the British Royal West Kent Regiment, which was stationed in Bejaia on November 11, 1942.
On the same day at 4:40 p.m., 30 Ju 88 bombers and several torpedo bombers of the German Air Force dropped their bombs on Bejaia. The transporters Awatea and Cathay were sunk and the monitor HMS Roberts damaged. The next day the anti- aircraft ship SS Tynwald was torpedoed and sunk, while the transporter Karanja was destroyed by bombs.
After Algerian independence, Bejaia became the capital of the province of the same name in eastern Kabylia .
Church history
With the spread of Christianity , Saldae became a bishopric. His bishop Paschasius was one of those who was called to Carthage by the Arian Vandal King Hunerich in 484 and then exiled.
Christianity survived the Muslim conquest, the disappearance of the old Saldae and the founding of the new city of Bejaia. There is a letter addressed to clero et populo Buzee (clergy and people of Bejaias) from Pope Gregory VII (in office 1073-1085), in which he addresses the inauguration of a bishop named Serandus for Christian North Africa.
Nowadays, Saldae is a titular bishopric of the Roman Catholic Church and has repeatedly had office holders (mostly from the lowest episcopal rank, some from the middle archiepiscopal rank).
List of titular bishops from Bugia / Saldae
- Miguel Morro (1510 -?), Auxiliary Bishop of Mallorca (1510 -?)
- Fernando de Vera y Zuñiga, an Augustinian monk , as auxiliary bishop of Badajoz (February 17, 1614 - November 13, 1628); later Archbishop of Santo Domingo , finally Archbishop of Cusco (July 16, 1629 - death November 9, 1638)
- François Perez (February 5, 1687 - death September 20, 1728), as Apostolic Vicar of Cochin
- Antonio Mauricio Ribeiro (September 27, 1824 - death?), As Auxiliary Bishop of Évora (September 27, 1824 -?)
- George Hilary Brown (5.7.1840 - 22.4.1842), as the only Apostolic Vicar of Lancashire (5.6.1840 - 29.9.1850), later titular Bishop of Tlos (22.4.1842 - 129.9.1850), first Bishop of Liverpool (29.9. 1850.09.29 - death 25.1.1856).
Attractions
Despite its long history, the city has few attractions:
- The Bab el Bahr and the Bab El Bounoud are city gates from the 11th / 12th. Century.
- The dominant building of the city is the fortress ( kasbah ) located on a hill .
- The Musée Bordj Moussa was established in 1989 in a Spanish fortress from 1545. It shows archaeological finds.
- The mosque of the city's saint Sidi Soufi was built in 1889 instead of a previous building from the 16th century and is popular with Muslims. The elongated three-nave interior with its twisted columns for mosques - not only in the Maghreb - completely atypical and retains many a church, although mihrab alcove and wooden minbar pulpit can be clearly seen.
Twin town
The city is twinned with Brest , France.
sons and daughters of the town
- Rachid Natouri (1946-2017), football player
- Mustapha Dahleb (* 1952), football player
- Patrick Birocheau (* 1955), French table tennis player
- Gilles Apap (* 1963), French violinist
- Kenza Farah (* 1986), singer
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Bejaia - population development
- ↑ Bejaia - Map with altitude information
- ↑ Bejaia - climate diagrams
- ↑ Stephen Ramsay: Reading Machines: Toward an Algorithmic Criticism . University of Illinois Press, 2011, p. 64.
- ^ TC Scott, P. Marketos: On the Origin of the Fibonacci Sequence. MacTutor History of Mathematics Archive, University of St Andrews, March 2014
- ↑ a b Stefano Antonio Morcelli, Africa christiana , Volume 1, Brescia 1816, p. 269
- ↑ a b H. Jaubert: Anciens évêchés et ruines chrétiennes de la Numidie et de la Sitifienne . In: Recueil des Notices et Mémoires de la Société archéologique de Constantine , Vol. 46, 1913, pp. 127–129
- ^ J. Frank Henderson: Muslims and the Roman Catholic Liturgical Calendar. Documentation 2003, p. 18
- ^ Atkinson: 2002
- ↑ H. Jaubert: Anciens évêchés et ruines chrétiennes de la Numidie et de la Sitifienne , in Recueil des Notices et Mémoires de la Société archéologique de Constantine , vol. 46, 1913, pp. 127-129
- ^ J. Mesnage, L'Afrique chrétienne , Paris 1912, pp. 8e 268-269
- ↑ Annuario Pontificio 2013 . Libreria Editrice Vaticana 2013, ISBN 978-88-209-9070-1 , p. 963
- ↑ Bejaia - Museums