Sur, Oman
“We continued our voyage for a day and a night and came to the roadstead of a large village on the seashore called Sur, from which we saw the city of Qalhut on the slope of a hill, and seeming to us to be close by. “
Sur is no longer a village but a small and delightful town, I immediately liked its laid-back charm and its lovely old port. Sur is not on the itinerary of most tourists which is both a bit of a blessing and a curse for the town. In Ibn Battuta’s day Qalhat, a few miles up the coast, was clearly the more important city of the two, so he devotes few words to Sur.
View of Sur towards the Gulf of Oman
Sur means ‘fortified wall’ in Arabic so it comes as no surprise to see lots of crenellated walls even on modest, modern houses, having become something of a leitmotif of the city. I decided to visit two of the city’s forts despite the fact that neither of them had been built in Ibn Battuta’s day. In the 18th century, having seen off 200 years of Portuguese rule, Bilad castle was built to defend Sur from land attack from discontented tribes further inland, and Sunaysilah fort was built overlooking the sea to defend from sea-borne attack from everyone else. The former was closed, and I was the only visitor at the latter. A classic square-built fort with a round tower with arrow slits and cannon holes at each corner, it has been extensively renovated and the only complaint is that you cannot get on to the upper levels where the views out over the sea must be delightful.
The renovated upper courtyard interior of the fort.
The town has long been famous for dhow-building and although dhows are still built in many places, most are now made of fiber glass because it is both cheaper and requires less maintenance. But from time to time wooden dhows are being built and one was under construction in Sur before having been entirely gutted by fire only a few weeks earlier. Along from the dhow yards was a little museum-to-be adjacent to which was a beautifully restored dhow the Fatah al-Khair, along with smaller traditional boats such as booms and sumbuqs. Until the 1960s most ports were too shallow to accommodate shipping vessels that drew more than a few feet, so smaller boats would go out to meet the larger ocean-going ships anchored off-shore and transfer the cargo to the quayside. Ibn Battuta notes this on several occasions in different places.
The Fatah al-Khair - a traditional wooden built dhow.
The land in Sur is very saline which is destructive to most modern building materials. A common sight in town is one of peeling paint and yellowish discoloring at the bottom of walls - a distinctive sign of salt erosion. As the salt seeps into the cement, the walls literally crumble. One wonders if this would have happened with coral slag, the traditional building material of most coastal communities in the Gulf, the Red Sea and the East African coast. But old Sur is charming – both the old merchants houses and port area of Ayajh on the other side of the creek over which a bridge is about to be built, and the old section of Sur itself with its narrow alleyways, crenellated old houses and neighborhood mosques, each of which has a minaret quite different from the other.
“The city of Qalhut is on the seacoast; it has fine bazaars and one of the most beautiful mosques. Its walls are lined with qashani which is like zalij, and it occupies a lofty situation from which it commands a view of the sea and the anchorage. It was built by a saintly woman called Bibi Maryam….”
There is nothing left of Qalhat save the mausoleum of the famed Bibi Maryam which is itself in a rather parlous state. Of the mosque nothing remains although the substantial ruins behind the mausoleum may or may not be it – they do command a fine view of the sea and in its heyday the setting would have been spectacular. But I was reminded of what I had found earlier this year on the other side of the Gulf in Iran – earthquake, bombardment, war and time have consigned the 14th century in this part of the world to history.
The square mausoleum of Bibi Maryam.
Ibn Battuta writes about the difficulties of reaching Qalhat of which he was unaware when he set out on foot from Sur;
“we went on, thinking that the city was close at hand, whereas in reality we were separated from it by nullahs through which we walked for many miles.”
The nullahs are the steep-sided wadis which indent this part of the coastline, and these difficulties are soon to be overcome; a brand new highway is being built along the coast which traverses a series of wadis via high bridges on massive piers. The area around Qalhat was badly affected by the cyclone which hit the Omani coast in June this year, and clean-up work was still going on with palm fronds, uprooted trees, and broken branches being burned in little pyres along the shore. Entire roads had been washed away, and parts of the new highway had been damaged before it was even opened.
Cyclone-hit coastline near Wadi Tiwi.
“In the vicinity of Qalhat is the village of Tibi, one of the loveliest of villages and most striking in beauty, with flowing streams and verdant trees and abundant orchards".
The village of Tiwi as it is now known, is no longer quite so delectable, but Wadi Tiwi, and the next-door Wadi Shab are still idyllic; jade and turquoise pools, little bubbling rills, stately mango trees, swaying palms and pink oleander present a visual delight to the accompaniment of the twittering of warblers and bee-eaters - it is tranquil and sublime.
“I ate in this city fish such as I have never eaten in any other region; I preferred it to all kinds of flesh and used to eat nothing else.”
I too ate fish the whole of my time in Oman as it is always freshly caught and however it is prepared, is invariably delicious. Ibn B also wrote about eating shir mahi with dried dates, something local people still do especially in Dhofar and along the Arabian Sea coast. Shihr mahi means ‘lion fish’ in Persian and the fish to which he refers is probably the locally-named sharee, - its real name is the ‘spangled emperor’ which is the best name for a fish that I have ever come across…….
Obeid Said, a fisherman at Nafun on the Arabian Sea coast with part of the day's catch, a spangled emperor.
