Dâr ‘Aziza

Dâr ‘Aziza, the last remains of the Djenina palace which, according to H. Klein, was a wedding gift from the Bey Hussein to his daughter ‘Aziza when she married the Bey of Constantine. A text from 1721 describes the building as being one of the most beautiful edifices before the earthquake of 1716, which destroyed most of it.

Originally composed of a courtyard giving out onto four bedrooms (which no longer exist), the building is comprised of two levels. The first level encircles four galleries that give onto rooms with fine wooden panelling: wooden windows, doors and ceiling, painted and richly decorated in the Oriental style. The annexes (kitchen, hammam, toilets) complete the palace. The second level, of identical structure, has a double gallery and a main living room, which is the most richly decorated and spacious room, complete with plaster sculptures (stucco) of exceptional grace. L.Golvin sees comparisons here with the throne room of the Zîri palace in Achir (10th century). In both, there is an alcove (a pavilion that takes up a square plan jutting out from the outside wall), the place where the master of the house receives his most important guests. These blocks of half rooms in Algerian homes are an Oriental heritage which goes back to the Iranian îwân, which is more or less equivalent to the European alcove. All the rooms open out onto the galleries by ‘open minded’ doors (these hinged doors under the galleries open towards the outside, towards the patio and thus disappear when opened by folding back behind the room) like those in Moroccan and Andalusian architecture. This system of galleries with ‘open minded’ doors makes for rooms that are indissociable from their protective entries—a characteristic feature of Western Maghreb and Andalusian houses, but different from those in Tunisia and the Orient.

The walls of the palace are decorated in ceramic tiles imported from countries famous for their ceramic productions during the Ottoman era, notably Tunisian tiles with vegetal motifs inspired by Italian art from the workshops of Qallaline and Nabeul in Tunisia.

Like all fine dwellings in Algiers, Dâr ‘Aziza presents a typical floor plan of the Algerian house, characterised by outside influences and those particular traits of the Medina in Algiers. The principal element of this plan is the central courtyard around which all the other rooms are organised, a heritage of the Greco-Roman peristyle; originally this design carried over to the Fatimid and Zirid palaces of Mahdiya and Sabra al-Mansuriyya before spreading to the Muslim western world (Madinat al-Zahra near Córdoba and the Alhambra of Grenada), as well as in the large grouped buildings in Marrakech. This is a recurrent floor plan in all Muslim architecture since the Abbasid era (Samarra, 9th century) that continued all the way up to the 18th century in Algiers. The patio still shows the presence of oversized, broken arcades, like those we see on the Balkan peninsular of the late 12th century, and horseshoe-shaped arches, also widely used in the Arab world. Here in Algiers, the oversized arch is broken for more flexibility in the spacing between columns.