Bulla Regia
Interesting facts
- In the courtyard of the Temple of Apollo, archaeologists found the remains of a woman still wearing a lead slave collar inscribed with the words adultera meretrix.
- The Memmian Baths were paid for by Julia Memmia, daughter of a local-born Roman consul, and dedicated to the wife of the African-born emperor Septimius Severus.
- The underground House of the Treasure takes its name from a hoard of Byzantine coins discovered inside it.
- The amphitheatre stayed buried until 1960–61, which is why its stone edges and steps still look unusually sharp.
- Excavations began in 1906 partly because the city’s monumental entrance had been destroyed, prompting a rescue of what remained.
- Inscriptions from a temple of the Severan era honour the emperor together with his sons Caracalla and Geta.
- Revived by the Catholic Church as a titular see, Bulla Regia was held from 1968 to 1984 by Ngô Đình Thục, brother of South Vietnam’s first president.
- Another underground villa, the House of the Peacock, is named after the bird depicted in its floor mosaic.
Why it is worth it
Bulla Regia is the Roman town that went underground. To escape the fierce summer heat of northwestern Tunisia, its wealthy citizens built their houses on two levels: an ordinary ground floor that caught the winter sun, and beneath it a complete second storey dug into the earth, arranged around a sunken courtyard and decorated as richly as the rooms above. Many of these subterranean floors survive with their mosaics still in place, so visitors walk down stone stairs into dining rooms and courtyards that look much as they did in the second and third centuries AD. This kind of house is the town's own invention and has no real equivalent elsewhere in the Roman world.
The town is older than Rome's presence. A Berber settlement probably came first; Greek pottery of the fourth century BC has been found, and by the third century BC Carthage controlled the place, whose inhabitants worshipped Baal Hammon and buried their dead in urns in the Punic manner. Its Punic name, recorded on coins, may mean House of Baal. After the Second Punic War the Numidian king Masinissa made it one of his royal seats in 156 BC, which explains the Latin epithet Regia, royal, and a regular grid of streets was laid out over part of the older town. Julius Caesar made Bulla a free city in 46 BC, and under Hadrian it became a Roman colony whose citizens received full citizenship.
The underground houses were built in that prosperous imperial age. Vaults were lightened with hollow terracotta tubes set into the masonry, and water sprinkled on the floors both cooled the rooms and made the colours of the mosaics glow. The best of these mosaics, with their subtle shading and modelled figures, rank among the finest in North Africa; the most famous, in the House of Amphitrite, shows the sea goddess Amphitrite crowned with a halo. Other houses take their names from their floors, among them the House of the Hunt and the House of the Fisherman. Above ground lie a forum excavated in 1949–52, a basilica later turned into a cathedral with an unusual cross-shaped baptismal font, temples including one dedicated in the time of Septimius Severus, and a small amphitheatre that Augustine of Hippo reproached in one of his sermons. The town declined in the Byzantine period and was finally ruined by an earthquake that brought upper floors crashing into the rooms below. Sand covered the site until excavations began in 1906; some of its mosaics are now in the Bardo Museum in Tunis, and a small museum stands at the site.
Getting there
Bulla Regia lies about 7 km from Jendouba, the nearest city, which is on the railway line from Tunis. The nearest airport is Tabarka–Aïn Draham International Airport (TBJ), about 48 km away; Tunis–Carthage International Airport (TUN) is about 136 km away in a straight line.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Bulla Regia was a Berber, Punic, and Roman town near present-day Jendouba, Tunisia. Its surviving ruins and archaeological site are noted for their Hadrianic-era semi-subterranean housing, a protection from the fierce heat and effects of the sun. Many of the mosaic floors have been left in place; others may be seen at the Bardo Museum in Tunis. There is also a small museum connected with the site.
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