Keren sits in a wide basin 1,590 meters above sea level, 91 kilometers northwest of Asmara, ringed on all sides by granitic mountains. For most of its history it was a trading settlement, straddling the route between the Red Sea port of Massawa and Sudan. In the mid-nineteenth century the place had maybe 350 huts and 2,000 inhabitants. Traders from Arkiko brought grain on the camels of the Hedareb people. Cotton cloth arrived from Sennar and Egypt; ivory, skins, ostrich feathers, and maize came in from Tigre and Amhara. The market that gave Keren its pulse was not grand. It was functional, persistent, and more enduring than any of the rulers who would try to claim it. The settlement's original Tigre name, Sanhit, still attaches to the hill where the old fort sat.

In 1851, two Lazarist missionaries named Giuseppe Sapeto and Giovanni Stella arrived. Four years later Stella built a stone house and started an Italian agricultural colony. He died in 1869 and the colony dissolved when Rome refused to send any help. Then in 1871, Emperor Yohannes IV cracked down. He arrested the missionaries and - this detail is hard to read in the record - had the hands and feet of their local converts amputated. The Lazarists came back when the Egyptian governor Werner Munzinger took over the region in 1872 and built his fort at Sanhit. Egyptian rule lasted thirteen years. When Egyptian troops withdrew in February 1885, Yohannes seized Keren briefly, then in December 1889 the Italians rushed up from Massawa and took the town. Italian Eritrea was formally proclaimed the next year.

The Italians built. Between 1906 and 1916, the Administration building, the Commercial Bank, Cinema Impero, and the European residential complexes went up. When fascism came, so did Caza Del Fache and Caza Del Majori, meant as recreation and residence for Italian settlers. In 1911 the railroad from Asmara to Massawa was extended toward Keren, and by 1918 the town had its own train station. Greek, Armenian, Arab, and Jewish traders arrived with the Italians, and a Greek church joined the mosque and the church of the local Orthodox community. The architecture tells the story plainly: a colonial grid for the Europeans, an older organic pattern for Eritreans, and a growing unease about which of these would last.

Then came the Second World War. In February and March 1941, British and Indian troops fought one of the toughest campaigns of the African war against Italian defenders dug into the Keren hills. The place called Tenkuluhas, the Bilen name meaning roughly where the gigantic forces wiped each other out, still marks where that fighting was worst. British and Italian military cemeteries in Keren hold the dead from both sides. It was during this battle that Italian soldiers climbed into the hollow baobab tree and the shrine survived. Keren changed hands again during the Eritrean War of Independence. The Eritrean People's Liberation Front took the city in March 1977, lost it to the Ethiopian Army in November 1978, then besieged the Ethiopian garrison until its surrender in May 1991. The war that began as Italian colonial pacification ended only when Eritreans liberated themselves.

Today around 120,000 people live in Keren, the capital of the Anseba Region and Eritrea's second-largest city. The climate is hot and semi-arid, softened by the elevation. Monsoonal rains come in June, July, August, and September; the rest of the year is dry and bright. The Bilen, Tigre, and Tigrinya peoples share the town. The old Tigu fort still stands on its hill. The 1920s railway station still has Italian lettering over its arches. The old mosque and the Sayed Bakri Mausoleum anchor the Muslim quarter. The sixth-century Debre Sina monastery, with its cave dwellings, sits a short drive away. And the baobab with the chapel in its trunk still draws visitors - a tree that remembers more than most monuments, with a shrine inside that has outlived the empire that bombed it.