Tlemcen

Sister cities

• Bursa
• Sarajevo
• Granada
• Montpellier
• Florence
• Kairouan
• Nanterre
• Fez

History

The areas surrounding Tlemcen were inhabited during the Neolithic period, as evidenced by the discovery of polished axes in the caves of Boudghene by Gustave-Marie Bleicher in 1875. There are three important prehistoric sites in the region: lake Karar, located one kilometer south of Remchi; the rock shelters of Mouilah, 5 km north of Maghnia; and the deposit called "d'Ouzidan", 2 km west of Aïn El Hout. The shelters found at the Mouilah and Boudghene show evidence of long periods of pre-historic human habitation. In AD 17, Tacfarinas led the Gaetuli to revolt against the Romans. Tlemcen became a military outpost of Ancient Rome in the 2nd century CE under the name of Pomaria. It was then an important city in the North Africa see of the Roman Catholic Church, where it was the center of a diocese. Its bishop, Victor, was a prominent representative at the Council of Carthage (411), and its bishop Honoratus was exiled in 484 by the Vandal king Huneric for denying Arianism. It was a center of a large Christian population for many centuries after the city's Arab conquest in 708 AD. In the later eighth century and the ninth century, the city became a Kingdom of Banu Ifran with a Sufri Kharijite orientation. These same Berber Kharijis also began to develop various small Saharan oases and to link them into regular trans-Saharan caravan routes terminating at Tlemcen, beginning a process that would determine Tlemcen's historical role for almost all of the next millennium. In the late 8th century a settlement named Agadir existed on the site of former Roman Pomaria. Idris I founded a congregational mosque here, the Great Mosque of Agadir, circa 790 (no longer extant). The fusion of the two settlements of Tagrart and Agadir over time became what is now Tlemcen.…