Tripoli (Libya)

North Africa — Italki + Berber

Tripoli, the Mediterranean port that is Libya's capital and largest city, was founded by the Phoenicians in the seventh century BCE as Oea, one of the 'three cities' that gave Tripolitania its name. Muslim armies took it around 643, and it was later ruled by dynasties based in Kairouan and in Cairo, including the Fatimids. Held for a time by the Knights of St John, it fell to the Ottomans in 1551 and was colonised by Italy in 1911. Its Jewish community, part of a regional presence going back to antiquity, was revived in the mid-sixteenth century by the Spanish-born kabbalist Shimon Lavi, author of the Zohar commentary Ketem Paz; most Libyan Jews emigrated after the Second World War.

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