Суакин: История и возрождение порта на Красном море

City on the Red Sea coast in Sudan

Suakin or Sawakin (سواكن, Beja: Oosook) is a port city in northeastern Sudan, on the west coast of the Red Sea. It was formerly the region's chief port, but is now secondary to Port Sudan, about 30 mile (48 km) north. Suakin used to be considered the height of medieval luxury on the Red Sea, but the old city built of coral is now in ruins. In 1983, the adjacent historic mainland town, known as the Geyf, had a population of 18,030 and the 2009 population was estimated at 43,337. Ferries run daily from Suakin to Jeddah in Saudi Arabia.

The Beja name for Suakin is Oosook. This is possibly from the Arabic word suq, meaning market. In Beja, the locative case for this is isukib, whence Suakin might have derived. The spelling on Admiralty charts in the late 19th century was "Sauakin", but in the popular press "Suakim" was predominant.

Suakin was likely Ptolemy's Port of Good Hope, Limen Evangelis, which is similarly described as lying on a circular island at the end of a long inlet. Despite the town's formal submission to the Mamluks in 1317, O. G. S. Crawford believed that the city remained a center of Christianity into the 13th century. Muslim immigrants such as the Banu Kanz gradually transformed this: Ibn Battuta records that in 1332, there was a Muslim "sultan" of Suakin, al Sharif Zaid ibn Abi Numayy ibn 'Ajlan, who was the son of a Meccan sharif. Following the region's inheritance laws, he had inherited the local leadership from his Bejan maternal uncles. In the fifteenth century, Suakin was briefly part of the Adal Sultanate. Suakin was sieged by the Portuguese in 1513 and captured briefly in 1541.

Following the Ottoman conquest of Egypt in 1517, the Ottoman Empire became the major power in the Red Sea. After a brief period of Ottoman Portuguese struggles in the Red Sea, Özdemir Pasha occupied Suakin in the early 1550s. Though it was only loosely controlled, until the Ottoman province of Habesh was established in 1555 with the residence of its pasha in Suakin. As the Portuguese explorers discovered and perfected the sea route around Africa and the Ottomans were unable to stop this trade, the local merchants began to abandon the town. Some trade was kept up with the Sultanate of Sennar, but by the 18th and 19th centuries, the Swiss traveler Johann Ludwig Burckhardt found two thirds of the homes in ruins. After the defeat of the Mahdist State, the British preferred to develop the new Port Sudan, rather than engage in the extensive rebuilding and expansion that would have been necessary to make Suakin comparable. By 1922, the last of the British had left. On 17 January 2018, as part of a rapprochement with Sudan, Turkey was granted a 99 year lease over Suakin island. Turkey plans to restore the ruined Ottoman port city on the island.

text=The buildings of Suakin were largely constructed of madrepore, or rock coral, taken from the sea bed. The vernacular style of construction under the Ottomans was akin to that of Jiddah in Arabia and Mitsiwa in Ethiopia. The houses, which had a white plaster finish, were up to four storeys in height and often built in blocks or terraces of three or more, separated by narrow streets. They had large casement windows (Arab. rushān) and doors of Java teak surmounted by carved stone door hoods and denticulated parapets. From the 1860s an Egyptian style of architecture began to incorporate features from Egypt and Europe. As the buildings had no plaster covering, they decayed quickly and the town fell into ruin.|title=Suakin|source=Grove Art Online

A detailed description of the buildings of Suakin, including measured plans and detailed sketches, can be found in The Coral Buildings of Suakin: Islamic Architecture, Planning, Design and Domestic Arrangements in a Red Sea Port by Jean Pierre Greenlaw, Kegan Paul International, 1995, .

Suakin has a very hot desert climate (Köppen BWh) with brutally hot and humid, though dry, summers and very warm winters. Rainfall is minimal except from October to December, when easterly winds can give occasional downpours: in November 1965 as much as fell, but in the whole year from July 1981 to June 1982 no more than was recorded.