When the Portuguese priest Francisco Alvares sailed into the bay in 1520, the two thousand residents of Arkiko learned that the strangers on the ship were Christians like themselves, and - according to Alvares - they jumped into the sea and tried to haul the vessel to shore with their bare hands. The town sat then at a hinge point of Indian Ocean trade, a mainland port just across a narrow channel from the island of Massawa. Gold, ivory, honey, wax, and enslaved people moved through Arkiko on their way out of Ethiopia. Today it is a small place in the Northern Red Sea region of Eritrea, its port role gone, its old Ottoman fort reduced to foundation stones, its name remembered mostly by historians. The Saho people who still live here call it Hirg-Higo.
The oldest name for the town is Dokono, which in both the Saho and Afar languages means elephant. The Ethiopian historian Richard Pankhurst connected this to the ivory trade that built Arkiko's early prosperity. Caravans from the Ethiopian highlands would bring tusks down the escarpment to this point on the coast, and the word itself recorded what was being carried. In Saho the name Hirg-Higo translates roughly as legend of legends, a phrase that suggests the town's reputation among the people who actually lived in and around it. The Saho clan of the Dasamo have been the principal inhabitants of this stretch of coast for centuries. When European and Ottoman accounts reduced the town to a commercial or military asset, the Saho names remembered the longer story.
For much of the medieval period, Arkiko on the mainland and Massawa on its offshore island operated as a single economy with two rulers. In the 1520s, Arkiko answered to the Christian Bahr Negash - the Ethiopian court title for the lord of the sea - while Massawa belonged to the Muslim sultan of Dahlak. The arrangement worked because both sides needed it to. Ethiopian gold and ivory could not reach Arab and Indian buyers without a port; the Dahlak sultanate could not tax trade it could not reach. Then, in 1557, the Ottoman Empire swallowed both ports. A fort went up at Arkiko and a Turkish garrison moved in. Emperor Sarsa Dengel refused to accept the change. In 1579 he marched an army to the coast, captured Arkiko, destroyed the fort, and sacked Massawa, killing - according to Ottoman records - forty of the hundred Turks defending it.
A second Ethiopian attempt to retake Arkiko, in 1589, failed. But the Ottomans were tired of the place. They pulled back, left a skeleton garrison at Massawa, and handed Arkiko over to a local Balaw chieftain from the Samhar region, giving him the title of naib - deputy. The title stuck, and so did the family. For more than two centuries, the Naibs of Arkiko ran the town as an Ottoman-affiliated dynasty, collecting trade dues, brokering between highland Christians and coastal Muslims, and spreading Islam through Eritrea using land grants from the Ras of Tigray. When the Egyptians briefly took over the coast in the nineteenth century, a Naib was made Sirdar - commander - of the troops at Massawa. The family that started as an Ottoman convenience became an indigenous institution.
The Scottish traveler James Bruce visited in the 1770s and counted about 400 houses. The Ottoman fort had decayed, he wrote, into no more than a small clay hut with a single unmounted swivel-gun on the ground beside it, fired only with great trepidation and some danger. Arkiko owed its importance to being a mainland equivalent of Massawa - a place where you did not need a boat. In the 1870s, the Egyptian rulers of the coast built a causeway linking Massawa's island directly to the mainland, and Arkiko's reason for existing collapsed. The 1938 Italian colonial guide described it as a large village with a 370-meter landing stage and a few warehouses - the kind of place you drive past. Then, in 1975, during the Eritrean War of Independence, the Dergue military junta of Ethiopia massacred civilians at Arkiko. Eritreans have not forgotten it.
Today Arkiko is the site of Eritrea's largest power generation plant, damaged during the 1998-2000 Eritrean-Ethiopian War and since repaired. Something stranger is also happening here. Along the Red Sea coast, where original mangrove forests were destroyed centuries ago by camel overgrazing and firewood cutting, the Eritrean Ministry of Fisheries is replanting. The method uses low-cost, slow-release packs of nitrogen, phosphorus, and iron to feed young trees on ground too poor to sustain them otherwise. The region outside Arkiko is one of the hottest inhabited places on earth - temperatures above forty degrees Celsius for much of the year, annual rainfall of less than two centimeters - and a returning mangrove coastline would feed livestock, protect fisheries, and slow the march of salt and sand. Arkiko's past was about what was taken out through its port. Its quiet present may be about what can be grown back.
Arkiko sits at 15.533 N, 39.45 E on Eritrea's Red Sea coast, about 7 km south of Massawa. Massawa International Airport (HHMS) lies within 10 km and serves the area, though Asmara International (HHAS) is the country's primary gateway. The coastal terrain is flat and hot - expect significant density altitude in summer, with surface temperatures above 40 C. Afternoon sea breezes moderate conditions near the coast. Visual navigation is excellent in clear weather; the Dahlak Archipelago lies offshore to the east. Eritrean airspace requires advance coordination.