Dongola

New Dongola and the River

There are two Dongolas, which takes some getting used to. New Dongola — the modern administrative town — sits on the Nile’s west bank and is where people actually live and the market operates. Old Dongola, the medieval capital of the Nubian Christian kingdom of Makuria, is about 70 kilometers south on the opposite bank, and the ruins there are among the most historically significant in Sudan.

New Dongola first. The Nile here is wide and moves with the authority it builds up over thousands of kilometers. Date palms line both banks in a dense green strip that makes the contrast with the surrounding desert absolute — you cross from sand to shade in a single step. The dates produced in this region are considered the finest in Sudan; I bought a small sack in the Dongola market and rationed them poorly, finishing them in a single afternoon.

The town operates at a pace calibrated to the heat. Things happen in the morning, slow to nearly nothing in the early afternoon, and resume in the evening. I adjusted to this within half a day because fighting it seemed exhausting and also wrong.

Old Dongola and the Christian Kingdom

The ruins at Old Dongola require a vehicle — a short ferry crossing and then a drive along a rough track — and the effort is repaid considerably. Makuria was a Christian Nubian kingdom that survived from around the 6th century CE until the early 14th century, outlasting the Byzantine Empire and weathering multiple Arab invasions before finally converting to Islam. At its height it was powerful enough to sign treaties with the Abbasid Caliphate. Almost none of this is known outside of academic circles, which makes standing in the ruins of its capital a peculiar kind of discovery.

The main surviving structure is a large brick building called the Throne Hall, its walls still standing several stories in some sections, its interior shadowed and cool. Archaeological excavations have uncovered floor mosaics and painted wall plaster that now live in the Sudan National Museum in Khartoum. The shell of the building retains a gravity that all the museum objects can’t quite replicate.

A Polish archaeological team has been working Old Dongola for decades. Their camp was visible on my visit, though they weren’t in active excavation season.

The Nubian Villages

Between Dongola and the north, the Nile’s banks are lined with small Nubian villages where the architecture follows patterns different from the rest of Sudan — lower, flatter houses often painted in bright colors, with painted decorations on the exterior walls. Nubian culture has its own distinct aesthetic, its own language (or rather family of languages), and its own deeply felt relationship with the Nile. The villages have a pride and a rootedness that comes through even in brief conversations with people who have no particular reason to spend time with a passing French traveler.

A family in one village invited Lia and me in for tea when we stopped to ask directions. The tea was sweet and spiced with ginger. The grandmother of the household communicated approval of something — our arrival, our manners, the universe in general — through a sustained humming sound and a look of benign satisfaction.

The Sunset Protocol

Every evening in Dongola I went to the riverbank and watched the sunset over the Nile. This is not a remarkable sentence but it was a remarkable activity. The light here does something specific at the end of the day: it catches the dust particles that are always present in the upper atmosphere and renders the horizon in gradients that don’t appear in other places. Orange fading into deep red fading into a purple that has some quality of depth to it. I photographed it every evening and the photographs don’t have it.

When to go: November through February. The Dongola region sits in the core of Sudan’s desert zone and summer temperatures are extreme — 40–45°C or above. Winter days reach 28–33°C, and evenings drop to 15°C or lower, which feels remarkable after the afternoon heat. The date harvest happens in late summer (August–October), which brings its own energy to the market if you can manage the heat.