Amazigh, Siliana

The Amazigh of Siliana are a small Berber community in Kesra (Kisra Elaalia), a perched mountain village at about 1,100-1,170 m in the Dorsale of north-central Tunisia, 20 km from Makthar. About 800 of Kesra's roughly 3,000 people are Amazigh families who keep their own identity and home customs; Tunisian and international press still call Kesra a 'Berber village'. Their Berber speech, Chelha, survives only among about 80 elderly people; everyone else speaks Tunisian Arabic at home and learns French at school.

Kesra is one of the oldest settlements of north-western Tunisia. Punic and Latin inscriptions are set in its house walls, dedications to Saturn (Baal Hammon) have been excavated, its stepped lanes date from Roman times when it was the small town of Cusira, and a Byzantine fortress of Justinian's time overlooks it. The village kept a Berber population in its high, well-watered refuge while the plains around it became Arabic-speaking.

To a casual observer the Amazigh of Kesra cannot be told apart from their Arab neighbours: they share the town, its mosque and its public life, and relations are good. Their difference lies in family customs and in the knowledge of who is Amazigh. Pray4Tunisia lists them as one of the country's unreached Amazigh peoples, and Joshua Project lists them as 'Amazigh, Siliana'.

Kesra is built almost entirely on rock: dry-stone houses, paved lanes and streets that climb as stairways, the village's emblem. About twenty springs feed the orchards below through a network of canals, and the village is known for its fruit and prickly pears. The Museum of Traditional Heritage (2001, renovated in 2025) on a terrace above the village shows the tools, costumes, jewellery and festive rites of village life, the women's pottery and weaving, and the customs that mark each passage from birth to death.

The Amazigh families live in public like their Arab neighbours; what sets them apart are the customs and traditions kept at home, which field workers did not describe in detail. Most families farm or keep a few cattle; some work in private trades.

The Amazigh of Kesra are Sunni Muslims of the Maliki school, the same as the Arab Tunisian majority, which sets them apart from the Amazigh of the south with their Ibadi heritage. Practice follows that of rural Tunisia: prayer, the Ramadan fast, Islamic weddings and burials, as practised across rural Tunisia. Joshua Project's profile once described them as Ibadi; the field network that works in the village says they are Maliki.

The Amazigh of Kesra speak Tunisian Arabic, which has the New Testament, the Jesus Film and Global Recordings Network audio. Nothing exists in Chelha, now spoken only by a few elders. Pray4Tunisia lists the Amazigh of Siliana among Tunisia's unengaged, unreached people groups. No believers or fellowship are known.