The Nubian villages

A vernacular of colour

Along the Nile north of Dongola the villages are built of mudbrick and lime plaster, and their façades are painted — geometric borders, plates set into the plaster, doorways framed in colour. The decorated Nubian doorway is the most recognisable domestic architecture in Sudan, and it is domestic rather than monumental: this is how ordinary houses look.

Cool by design

The architecture is a climate technology. Thick mudbrick walls with high ceilings, a shaded interior courtyard, small openings and often a domed or vaulted roof keep rooms usable through a Nubian summer without machinery. The form has been refined over centuries and it works.

The flooding of Wadi Halfa

When the Aswan High Dam was built, the reservoir now called Lake Nubia in Sudan and Lake Nasser in Egypt drowned the whole of Sudanese Nubia's northernmost stretch, including the town of Wadi Halfa. In 1963 and 1964 around fifty thousand Sudanese Nubians were moved roughly a thousand kilometres east to a new scheme at Khashm el-Girba, renamed New Halfa. Many never returned, and the loss of the old riverbank is still a living subject in Nubian song.

What was saved

The international UNESCO campaign that accompanied the dam moved a series of monuments out of the flood zone. Temples from Buhen, Semna and Kumma were rebuilt in the garden of the National Museum in Khartoum. The medieval Christian frescoes of the cathedral at Faras were lifted from the plaster and divided between the National Museum in Khartoum and the National Museum in Warsaw, where the Faras Gallery remains the largest collection of Nubian painting outside Sudan.

Visiting well

These are working villages, not an open-air museum. Ask before photographing a house or its owner. Accept the coffee if it is offered — refusing three rounds is the one real discourtesy available to a visitor here.

Related reading