Medina of Tunis
| Medina of Tunis | |
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| Name as inscribed on the World Heritage List | |
Roofs of the medina
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| Location | Tunis, Tunisia |
| Type | Cultural |
| Criteria | ii, iii, v |
| Reference | 36 |
| UNESCO region | Arab States |
| Coordinates | 36°49′00″N 10°10′00″E / 36.81667°N 10.16667°E |
| Inscription history | |
| Inscription | 1979 (3rd Session) |
 Location in Tunisia
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The medina of Tunis is the medina quarter of Tunis, capital of Tunisia. It has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1979.
The Medina contains some 700 monuments, including palaces, mosques, mausoleums, madrasas and fountains dating from the Almohad and the Hafsid periods.
Founded in 698 around the original core of the Zitouna Mosque, the Medina of Tunis developed its urban fabric throughout the Middle Ages. Expansions to the north and south divided the main Medina into two suburbs north (Bab Souika) and south (Bab El Jazira).
Tunis became the capital of a powerful kingdom in Hafsid period; a religious, intellectual center and economic center of the Middle East, the Maghreb, Africa and Europe, it adopts many monuments mingling the styles of Ifriqiya, Andalusian and Oriental influences, but also borrowing some of the columns and capitals of Roman and Byzantine monuments.
In fact, the term "Arab-Muslim architecture", especially in the case of the medina of Tunis, is null and void because besides its ambiguous generalization, it denotes a reductive vision of wealth and cultural variety experienced by different communities who adopted Islam as religion. The ethnocentric vision of Europe has indeed often overlooked other cultures and if it addressed them, she was confined in the globalities who do have that secondary and unimportant characters (horseshoe arches, abundant ornamentation, etc. )
The Medina of Tunis as this specific constant to be both a homogeneous as a whole and a juxtaposition of subsets each having the same characteristic: each district is somehow a "reduction" of the city in all its concepts. Natural conditions (topography and geology), economic (cost of construction materials), political (feudal society) and security key for development of the Medina, what it is worth to mention is the climatic and religious characteristics in the following :
The charia : (sets of legal provisions) organizes individual property as a participation in an organization (city), especially in the case of the participation in the water regime that is inextricably linked to land ownership.
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