Discovering the Casbah of Dellys – Elite d’Or Academy’s Historical Journey Through Our City’s Heritage

A historical and cultural visit to the Casbah of Dellys

History Is Not Always Far Away

We often think of history as something distant — something that happened long ago in faraway places, preserved in museums behind glass and described in textbooks with faded photographs. We travel to Tipaza to touch Roman stones and to the Casbah of Algiers to walk the streets of the Ottoman era. We look outward for history, forgetting sometimes to look down at the ground beneath our own feet.

But Dellys is one of the oldest cities in Algeria. Its stones are ancient. Its streets have been walked by Phoenician merchants, Roman soldiers, Byzantine priests, Arab scholars and Ottoman governors. Its houses have sheltered generations of families whose stories are written not in books but in the walls themselves — in the thickness of the plaster, the arch of a doorway, the depth of a well.

This year, Elite d’Or Academy decided to bring history home. Literally.

The Casbah of Dellys — A Living Monument

The Casbah of Dellys is one of the most significant and least celebrated historical sites on the Algerian coast. Perched on the rocky promontory that gives the city its dramatic profile above the Mediterranean, the Casbah is the ancient heart of a city that has been continuously inhabited for over two thousand years.

The origins of Dellys reach back to the Phoenician era, when the site was known as Rusuccuru — a coastal trading post whose position at the mouth of the Wadi Sebaou made it a natural stopping point for ships navigating the North African coast. The Romans expanded and fortified the settlement, leaving behind traces that archaeologists continue to uncover. Through the Byzantine period, the Arab conquests of the 7th century, the Hammadid dynasty and finally the Ottoman era, the city grew and transformed — each civilization adding its layer to the urban fabric that survives today in the winding streets and dense architecture of the Casbah.

The Casbah quarter itself — the dense, labyrinthine neighborhood of traditional houses, narrow alleyways, arched passages and ancient mosques that occupies the highest part of the city — is a direct inheritance of the Ottoman and post-Ottoman urban tradition. Its architecture follows the principles common to all North African medinas: high exterior walls that offer privacy and protection, interiors organized around a central courtyard, houses built close together to share walls and create shade, and streets designed not for vehicles but for the human body moving at the pace of daily life.

What makes the Casbah of Dellys particularly precious is that it is still alive. Unlike some historic sites that have been emptied of their inhabitants and turned into open-air museums, the Casbah of Dellys is still home to families who live within its ancient walls — carrying on, in their daily lives, an unbroken continuity with the past.

And it is just a short walk from our academy.

A Visit With a Difference

Elite d’Or Academy is not far from the Casbah — a proximity that makes the visit not only possible but almost inevitable. And yet, for many of our students, the Casbah was a familiar silhouette rather than a known place — seen every day, understood barely at all.

We changed that.

Our visit was organized not as a simple walk through historic streets but as a guided historical experience — with teachers and accompanying adults taking the role of guides, explaining at every step the history of what our students were seeing, the people who had built it, the lives that had been lived within it and the civilizations that had left their mark on this corner of the Algerian coast.

As we moved through the Casbah’s narrow streets, our students encountered:

• The urban logic of the medina — the way the streets narrow and wind to create shade and privacy, the way the houses lean toward each other at the top to block the summer sun, the way every detail of the architecture is a response to the climate, the culture and the way of life of its builders
• The mosques and historic religious buildings that mark the spiritual geography of the quarter, their minarets rising above the roofline and their interiors carrying centuries of prayer within their walls
• The traces of different civilizations visible in the stonework, the archways and the foundations of buildings that have been rebuilt, repurposed and reinterpreted across the centuries
• The daily life of the Casbah — the few remaining artisans, the elderly residents who remember the quarter in its more populated days, the children playing in alleyways that their great-grandparents also played in

We wanted our students not simply to see the Casbah but to understand it — to feel, even briefly, the weight of the history they were walking through.

Dressed in History — The Haik and the Chounguey

What transformed this visit from an interesting school trip into something truly memorable was a decision that, in retrospect, was one of the best we have ever made.

We brought traditional costumes.

Before entering the Casbah, our students were dressed in the authentic traditional clothing of Dellys — the garments that the city’s inhabitants wore for generations and that remain among the most beautiful expressions of the city’s cultural identity:

• The Haik — the magnificent traditional outer garment worn by the women and girls of Dellys, a long flowing white fabric of extraordinary elegance that wraps around the body and frames the face, transforming the wearer into a figure that seems to step directly out of another century. The Haik is one of the most distinctive and beautiful traditional garments of coastal Algeria — a symbol of the city’s identity and a living connection to its past.
• The Chounguey — the traditional male garment of the region, worn by the men and boys of our group, completing the picture of a Dellys that existed long before any of us were born.

The effect was immediate and extraordinary.

As our students — dressed in the clothes of their ancestors — moved through the ancient streets of the Casbah, something shifted. The historical distance collapsed. The gap between past and present narrowed. The students were no longer visitors observing history from the outside — they were, at least in appearance and in feeling, part of it.

The photographs taken that day are among the most beautiful we have ever produced — students in traditional dress posed in ancient doorways, against centuries-old stone walls, in the narrow alleyways of the Casbah, with the Mediterranean visible in the distance beyond the rooftops. Images that look like they belong to another era, taken by students who belong entirely to this one.

The joy of the students wearing the costumes was genuine and infectious — there was laughter, there were poses, there was the particular delight of seeing yourself and your friends transformed by clothing into something both foreign and deeply familiar.

Inside the Ancient House — A Thank You to Zakariya

The moment that many of our students will remember longest from this visit was one that required not a ticket or an official itinerary but simply the generosity of a friend.

Through the kindness of our friend Zakariya, whose family home is located within the Casbah, we were given the rare and precious privilege of entering a traditional Casbah house that has been lived in continuously for generations — a home that is itself a monument to the history of Dellys.

We cannot overstate how significant this was. Official museum visits show you objects behind glass. This was something entirely different — a living space, still inhabited, still carrying within its walls the accumulated life of the families who have called it home across the decades and centuries.

As we stepped through the entrance and into the interior, our students discovered the defining feature of the traditional North African house: the central courtyard. Unlike modern homes organized around exterior windows, the traditional Casbah house turns inward — its rooms arranged around an open central space that brings light and air into the heart of the building while maintaining the privacy of the exterior walls.

And at the center of the courtyard — the detail that produced the most wonder in our students — the well.

Every traditional house in the Casbah had its own well, dug deep into the rock and providing the household with its water supply in an era before municipal plumbing. The well of Zakariya’s home still stands exactly where it was placed generations ago — round, stone-lined, deep and dark, its presence in the center of the courtyard a direct, physical connection to the daily life of the people who drew water from it every morning for generations before us.

Our students gathered around it, looking down into its depth, asking questions — How deep is it? Is there still water? Who used to come here every day? — and in asking those questions, they were doing exactly what we had hoped they would do: imagining the lives of the people who came before them.

We extend our deepest and most sincere gratitude to Zakariya for his extraordinary generosity — for opening his family home to us with such warmth and ease, for accompanying us through the visit and for giving our students a gift that no official institution could have offered. You made the history of Dellys real for them in a way that will not be forgotten.

The City Belongs to Those Who Know It

Our students left the Casbah that day with full memory cards, traditional costumes still vivid in their minds and a relationship to their city that was genuinely different from the one they had arrived with.

They had walked streets they had never walked before, despite living minutes away. They had touched walls older than anything they had ever touched. They had stood in a house where generations of Dellysiens had lived, eaten, raised their children and grown old. They had worn the clothes of their ancestors and felt, even briefly, what it might have been like to be them.

At Elite d’Or, we believe that identity is built from knowledge — that loving your city, your culture and your history requires first knowing them. A student who has walked the Casbah in a Haik, who has stood at the edge of a centuries-old well and imagined the lives it sustained, who has seen their city from the inside rather than only the outside — that student carries something with them that will shape how they see the world for the rest of their life.

We are proud to have given our students this experience. We are proud of our city and its extraordinary heritage. And we are grateful — to Zakariya, to the families of the Casbah who keep its history alive simply by continuing to live there, and to the students who walked those ancient streets with open eyes and curious hearts.

Dellys Has Stories to Tell

The Casbah is still there. Its streets are still walkable, its houses still standing, its history still waiting to be discovered by anyone willing to walk a little further and look a little more carefully than usual.

We will return — with new students, new questions and the same traditional costumes that turned a school visit into something that felt, for a few hours, like time travel.

Our city has stories to tell. We intend to keep listening.