On an official visit to Tunisia, the Director General of Unesco, Audrey Azoulay called on Tuesday to protect the "
treasure
" that is the remains of Carthage.
The city ruled over a Mediterranean empire until the 1st century BC.
"
It's a treasure,
" "
a book that we haven't finished reading, there is still research to be done
," she said in an interview with France 24.
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The main archaeological sites of Carthage, located in the affluent outskirts of the capital Tunis, are regularly eaten away by residential buildings or rudimentary constructions.
"
We are very close to a large metropolis, there is the issue of sometimes illegal constructions
", she underlined, indicating that Unesco regularly alerts the Tunisian government concerning the Punic site, which was one of the first classified as World Heritage, in 1979.
Read also: A Bronze Age sword exhumed in very good condition from a Danish archaeological site
Monday, the first day of her visit to Tunisia which lasts until Wednesday, Audrey Azoulay called on the international community to mobilize to explore and protect underwater heritage.
"
The waters constitute the" largest museum in the world "
", with their three million wrecks to explore, she declared on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the vote of a convention governing underwater archeology .
She announced forthcoming explorations off Tunisia and Sicily, on the banks of Skerki where five Roman wrecks dating from a period between the 1st century BC and the 4th century AD were discovered by Italy in 2018. Eight countries will participate in this first exploration mission, she said.
Audrey Azoulay is also due to go to Zarzis (south) on Wednesday, near the Libyan border, to visit a wooded cemetery recently created by an Algerian artist to give migrants who died at sea a place worthy of burial.
As of June 7, at least 784 people had died trying to reach Europe via the central Mediterranean since the start of the year, according to the UN refugee agency, against 1,400 for the whole of 2020.
