After years of international isolation, Libya has in recent years welcomed more and more visitors. What they find is not what they might expect, as Dan Hayes reports

Three firecrackers lie in the gutter. Two explode with loud cracks, the third fizzles for a few seconds while people pass by seemingly unconcerned. Then the firework goes off – the explosion reverberating along September 1 Street and making any unaccustomed visitors flinch.

Tripoli is celebrating the Prophet Mohammed’s birthday and the city is alive with noise. Girls in headscarves lob bangers out of first-floor windows onto the roofs of passing cars and, in the Souk el-Aattareen, shops are closing early as traders hurry to get home to their families.

Crossing Green Square, where Colonel Ghadaffi gives his annual speech on the anniversary of the 1969 revolution, I am overtaken by a tall man hurrying to meet his wife and young son in the middle of the square. Clutched in his arms is what appears to be a semi-wrapped, metre-high Christmas tree. The little boy is bouncing up and down with delight.

The atmosphere is one of frivolous excitement and the only authority figures obviously on show are a pair of short-fused traffic policemen attempting to keep the vehicles circulating around the square. Theirs is not an easy task, with cars and cabs picking up and setting down at will. The whole scene is not what you might expect in a strict Islamic nation such as Libya, where the secret police are said to lurk on every corner.

Then again, there are all sorts of aspects to this country that you would not necessarily expect. Alcohol is strictly forbidden, but café society is a feature of life. Ghadaffi’s image is everywhere, but not generally in the oppressive fashion associated with absolute rulers. Admittedly, it is his smiling visage that greets you at the airport – watching benevolently over the image of an aeroplane leaving the ground – but generally, at least in central Tripoli, he makes his appearance in a more commercialised fashion – on T-shirts, watches and posters.

Potentially, he could rule over a country that receives many more visitors than it does today – Libya has kilometre after kilometre of white, sandy Mediterranean beaches – but the UN embargo, earned by terrorist activities such as the 1988 Lockerbie bombing and the shooting on a London street of a woman police officer in 1984, was only lifted in 2003 and Libya is today busy cashing in on its oil reserves.

The country does not discourage tourism, but it does not seem particularly to encourage it either. For the visitors that do come here that is in many ways good news. In Tripoli’s souks, not only are you not given the hard sell, you actually have to work hard to gain stallholders’ attention. One expat I talk to (over an alcohol-free Becks beer) in the city’s one five-star hotel, the Corinthia Bab Africa, tells me this is just the Libyan way:

‘People are not as in your face as in other North African countries. That’s partly because they haven’t seen many Westerners and the ones they have seen tend to be better educated and more appreciative of the culture, partly because that’s just the way the local people are.’

It makes sense. The few leisure visitors who come to Libya now are generally on cultural tours, often to the country’s exceptional and well-nigh deserted Roman sites. This is brought home to me one afternoon in the amphitheatre at the long-abandoned Roman city of Leptis Magna. Excavated and restored by Italian archeologists in the 1920s it is so complete, so quiet and so redolent of the blood-soaked entertainments which it hosted that it makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand on end.

The tunnels and chambers where gladiators and prisoners would have prepared for their (often final) moments in the arena are silent. There is nobody else on the entire site. Walls and sand floors have turned a pinkish grey in the afternoon sunlight. It only takes an iota of imagination to visualise the scenes that would have taken place here, prior to the walk along the passageway, the turn into the tunnel and the steps through the arched gateway into the dazzling arena, where a 16,000-strong crowd was waiting.

Having survived that experience, I join Mohammed Tabbal, of tour company Dar Sahara and an accomplished amateur historian, in the highest tier of seats, from which you can see the ocean shimmering beyond the far wall.

‘The Romans loved violence,’ he says in a rather apologetic manner, as if he cannot quite equate their other skills so obvious in this region – architecture, engineering, trade and the rest – with their bloodlust. ‘People would get here for about 10am, although the main event would start much later, and make a day of it. The arena could be transformed into woodland or a lake to provide a backdrop for wild beasts or for naval battles and there would be a variety of entertainments.’

These would include criminals and, later, Christians being attacked by wild animals, whose sally-ports can still be seen in the arena walls – large for lions and tigers, medium for hyenas, warthogs and goodness knows what else. There would also be re-enactments of famous battles and one-on-one gladiatorial combat. Some of these reached epic proportions, adds Tabbal: ‘One description records a fight between two gladiators lasting 19 hours.’ You cannot help wondering if the crowd stuck around for the final result – which was a draw, apparently.

The main city of Leptis Magna, about 2km distant from this out-of-town stadium, is an exceptional site. Abandoned in 523AD it was rapidly swallowed by the desert, leaving the remarkably intact remains of a Romano-Byzantine city to be uncovered by the archeologists of the Twenties. Semi-restored by the Italians during Benito Mussolini’s own brief and ill-starred empire, it tells a tale of spectacular rise and inevitable fall.

Leptis was the birthplace of emperor Septimus Severus (AD145-211) and grew rich on his beneficence – and the trade in olive oil, slaves and wild beasts for the empire’s arenas. The scale of baths, forum and streets is still mind-boggling even in a ruined form.

The city was struck by an earthquake in 365AD and that, combined with a general decline in Rome’s fortunes, was the beginning of the end. The Byzantine city, occupied in the fifth and six centuries, is much smaller than its earlier forebear – hemmed in with the sea to its back, its walls facing a creeping desert and the hostile tribes that eventually brought its downfall.

A similar fate befell its neighbour, Sabratha, 200km along the coast. Here fish slabs, olive oil vats and even communal toilets look as if they could easily be put into service once again. In the bathhouse attached to the massive theatre, where performers would once have removed makeup and wished each other the Latin equivalent of ‘break a leg’, you can even walk across a Roman mosaic floor.

What would induce aneurysms in European curators is positively encouraged here. ‘They say it helps keep the mosaic pressed into the ground,’ says Tabbal – managing to sound authoritative yet not entirely convinced all at the same time. ‘Otherwise, pieces might lift up in the wind.’

Maybe that is true, but if Libya ever goes all out to encourage visitors to these exceptional sites just across the water from Europe, one of the first additions will surely be multi-lingual ‘keep-off-the-remains’ signs.

Where to stay
The five-star Corinthia Bab Africa hotel is within walking distance of Tripoli’s souks and its old town, where street names recall the foreign embassies that were an important part of the 19th-century city.
www.corinthiahotels.com

How to get there
Cox & Kings runs an eight-day Libya excursion that takes in the major sites, including the Roman remains at Leptis Magna, Sabratha and Cyrene plus the cities of Tripoli and Benghazi.
www.coxandkings.co.uk