We drove from Kairouan to El Djem to see their Roman amphitheater. It’s the third largest amphitheater in the world that’s still in existence. The Colosseum in Rome holds 50,000 people. The ruined theater in Capua, Italy was also larger. The El Djem amphitheater holds 35,000 people. It was built in the 3rd century and still hosts the El Djem International Symphony Festival.

This theater was a gladiator venue and also used for small-scale chariot races. It remained almost entirely intact from the 3rd to the 17th century. Then people started to steal stones to build the nearby village and for the Great Mosque in Kairouan. The worst damage came from the Ottoman Turks using canons to flush rebels out of the theater.

It’s still in great shape and was declared a World Heritage site in 1979. It would take many posts to show all the underground and behind the seats areas as this is a huge and very complex theater. They had to handle water, sewage, horses, chariots, and of course, for the upper crust of the periods to be made highly comfortable. The only real disappointment was some graffiti that we found carved onto rocks. By who? By U.S. soldiers stationed here during World War II.

These are only big picture photos of the El Djem amphitheater.

The first photo is from the coffee shop across the street where we relaxed before tackling walking the entire amphitheater.

The second photo is a small section of the outside at one end of the theater. Notice how thick the walls, which is why it’s still standing today.

The third photo is inside the outer wall but you can see that there is still lots of infrastructure within the theater.

I think Vicky is indicating that she feels slightly insignificant standing in the middle of the arena.

This was probably my best top-row photo. You can see a couple of people standing in the arena to gain perspective. We went up and down all sides of the arena and theater and that was a lot of steps up and down.