Giarabùb: una zāwiya fortificata fondata in Libia nella metà dell’Ottocento

at the oasis of Giarabùb, from which it took its name, located in the Cyrenaic desert on the border with Egypt, and about three hundred kilometers from the Mediterranean coast. Under Muhàmmad al-Màhdī, Giarabùb became the largest of the settlements built on Libyan territory, a veritable fortified village enclosed by high walls. Until 1895, the year of decadence, religious, educational, residential, and commercial functions coexisted in the village in a perfect synthesis. At the end of the 18th century, European explorers bore witness to the peculiar territory of the oasis of Jarabùb. Travelers during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries returned to the impression made on them by seeing a walled city in the middle of the desert, with a large mosque and its houses. The intention here is to focus on the architecture of the fortified settlement of Giarabùb, a newly founded city comparable in Libyan history only to the villages of the Italian colonisation of 1930. The research was supported by archival and photographic sources and drawings viewed, such as the one made by Lieutenant Amedeo Virgilio in 1917. This drawing is the first graphic representation of the zāwiya’s schematisation of buildings and spaces. No less interesting is the history of Giarabùb after the Italian occupation in 1926, because due to its strategic location, it assumed the role of a defensive border fort until the final fall of the garrison in March 1941. The Giarabùb zāwiya was destroyed in 1984.