Hafun
| Xaafuun Hafun |
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| Coordinates | 10 ° 25 ' N , 51 ° 16' E | ||
| Basic data | |||
| Country | Somalia | ||
also claimed by Puntland
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| Bari | |||
| ISO 3166-2 | SO-BR | ||
| District | Hafun | ||
| Residents | 2000 (2013 (calculated)) | ||
 Satellite image of Ras Hafun, 1995
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Hafun (Somali spelling: Xaafuun ) is a fishing village in northeast Somalia with around 2000 inhabitants. It is located in the Bari region , which is part of the internationally unrecognized Puntland .
geography
Hafun is located on a promontory in the Indian Ocean , which is called Ras Hafun , Raas Xaafuun , also known as the Cape of Spices (in antiquity) or Cape Hafun and - next to Cape Guardafui - is considered the most easterly point of Africa. A 20 km long, 1 to 3 km wide and a maximum of 5 m high sand bridge, a tombolo , connects the island on which it is located with the mainland. Hafun is at the eastern end of this land bridge, where the springs Cade and Meyro are, the fishing village of Foar at the western. The land bridge forms a large, shallow lagoon ( hurdiyo ) to the north of it between the island and the mainland. On the northwestern bank of the lagoon, near the village of Hordio, are the remains of large salt pans . The lagoon is still open to the north. Cape Kartuush is the northeasternmost point of the peninsula, which protrudes into Gancanka Xaafuun Waq bay . To the south of the raffle, Gacanka Xaafuun Koof bay opens up to the ocean.
history
Antiquity (opone)
It is believed that the trading center Opone (Οπώνη) mentioned in antiquity was on Ras Hafun. In the 1st century AD this is mentioned by an anonymous Alexandrian traveling salesman in his work Periplus Maris Erythraei . Opone was strategically located on the trade routes through the Red Sea and served as a trading post for traders from Yemen , Phenicia , Nabataea , Greece , ancient Rome and Azania . Indonesian and Malay traders also stopped here, selling spices, silk and other goods. Around 50 AD Opone was known as the center of the cinnamon trade as well as the trade in cloves and other spices, ivory, exotic animal skins and fragrances.
Archaeologists under the direction of Henry T. Wright of the University of Michigan found ceramics from Egypt, Rome and the Persian Gulf region at Hafun in 1976.
Colonial times
During the Italian colonial period (1889-1941 and 1950-1960) the place was called Dante . The loading facility of the Milanese company “Società Saline e Industrie della Somalia Settentrionale 'Migiurtinia'”, which had a concession for the use of one of the largest salt pans in the world at the time, has been located there since the 1920s . The saltworks near Hordio on the northwestern shore of the Hafun lagoon produced around 240,000 tons of salt annually, mainly for export to Japan .
The salt was treated with a 27.5 km long cableway from the salines ( 10 ° 32 '46 " N , 51 ° 5' 18.6" O ) about 14 km far above the lagoon to an angle station on the opposite bank ( 10 ° 28 ′ 36.4 ″ N , 51 ° 11 ′ 58.8 ″ E ) and then transported to the processing plant ( 10 ° 25 ′ 19 ″ N , 51 ° 15 ′ 46.5 ″ E ) at Dante. From there the cable car went to the loading facilities, which stretched up to 1.5 km into the sea. The cable car was built around 1925 by the Society for Conveyor Systems Ernst Heckel , Saarbrücken. The facilities were destroyed by British shelling and bombing during World War II. Ruins of the company buildings are still standing, the bases of the cable car in the lagoon and in the water in front of Hafun are still there today and can be seen on Google Earth.
Today's Hafun
Today the population of Hafun, a few thousand people, lives mainly from fishing, but salt is still extracted in the lagoon's evaporation basins.
The place was badly hit by the tsunami on December 26, 2004 . 19 people are known to have died, around 160 were missing, and around 85% of the infrastructure was destroyed. The sand bridge that connects Hafun with the Somali mainland, however, was not flooded. Many residents fled temporarily to higher areas on the nearby mainland.
education
According to UNICEF , there was a classroom for the 460 6–12 year old children in the village before the tsunami; 50 children attended the class, including 15 girls. Now, with the support of UNICEF and in cooperation with the city government, the educational opportunities are to be expanded.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ bevölkerungsstatistik.de (2013 calculation)
- ^ Lionel Casson: The Periplus Maris Erythraei: text, translation, and commentary Princeton University Press, Princeton 1989. pp. 45 f.
- ↑ Gacanka Xaafuun Waq and Gacanka Xaafuun Koof at GeoNames , geonames.org. Retrieved August 10, 2020
- ↑ University of Bern: Indian Ocean - Opônê ( Memento of the original from March 4, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ Guardia di Finanza, Museo Storico, Archivio Storico: Bolletino d'Archivio , Vol. 1, No. 1, Rome, June 2005, p. 31 (PDF) ( page no longer available , search in web archives ) Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ Alberto Alöpozzi: Hafun, la più grande del mondo salina. On: L'Italia coloniale, wordpress.com
- ^ Advertisement of the company in: The Schauinsland Railway. Festschrift for the opening of the Schauinsland cable car on Thursday, July 17th in the year of the Rhineland liberation in 1930.
- ↑ BBC News: Somalia wave victims 'forgotten' (here a population of "2,500 fishermen" is given for Hafun)
- ↑ BBC News: Somalis struggle to rebuild lives
- ↑ Denise Shepherd-Johnson: Post-tsunami school project galvanizes Hafun, Somalia on unicef.org (here a total population of 5,000 is given)
