The buildings are coral. Not decorated with coral, not styled after coral, built out of it, cut in blocks from the nearby reefs and stacked into merchant houses and mosques. When the Swiss traveler Johann Ludwig Burckhardt visited Suakin in the early nineteenth century, two-thirds of those houses were already in ruins. The ruination has continued. What remains on the circular island off Sudan's Red Sea coast is an archaeological impossibility: a medieval Red Sea port that was once considered the height of Islamic luxury, abandoned slowly over centuries, its polished white coral now crumbling back toward the water it came from.
The Beja, whose language is native to this coast, call Suakin Oosook. The name may come from the Arabic suq, meaning market. The locative case of oosook in Beja is isukib, and Suakin might have derived from that. The spelling has drifted over centuries of charts and correspondence. Nineteenth-century British Admiralty maps showed Sauakin. The popular press of the era preferred Suakim. Arabic sources use Sawakin. The variations point back to the same circular harbor at the end of a long inlet, which Ptolemy may have known as the Port of Good Hope, Limen Evangelis. If he did, the name fits. For at least two thousand years, this was a place where ships from the Indian Ocean met caravans from the Nile, and where pilgrims crossed to Arabia for the Hajj.
In 1332, the Moroccan traveler Ibn Battuta arrived in Suakin and met its sultan, al-Sharif Zaid ibn Abi Numayy ibn Ajlan. The sultan was the son of a sharif of Mecca and had inherited his position in Suakin through his mother's Beja uncles, following local inheritance customs that traced authority through the maternal line. The arrangement is a useful window into what Suakin actually was: not a colony of Arabs ruling over Beja, but a hybrid place where Arab newcomers and the indigenous Beja mixed through marriage and trade, producing sultans with one foot in Mecca and the other in the Sudanese coast. Despite a formal submission to the Mamluks in 1317, Suakin remained a center of Christianity well into the thirteenth century before the Banu Kanz and other Muslim immigrants transformed the religious landscape.
In the early 1550s, Ozdemir Pasha occupied Suakin for the Ottoman Empire, which had taken Egypt in 1517 and now sought to control the Red Sea. By 1555 the Ottoman province of Habesh was established with its pasha residing here. For a time Suakin was a linchpin of Ottoman strategy against Portuguese expansion in the Indian Ocean. But the Portuguese found their own sea route around Africa and the bulk trade shifted. Ottoman control loosened. Merchants began to leave. Some trade was kept up with the Sultanate of Sennar upstream, but by the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when Burckhardt came through, Suakin was already a city of more ruins than residents. The British, arriving after the defeat of the Mahdist State, decided that the cost of rebuilding Suakin was higher than the cost of starting over thirty miles north at what became Port Sudan. By 1922 the last of the British had left.
Beneath every political chapter of Suakin's history is the same population: the Beja, who have lived on this coast for thousands of years, and the Arabs who came later to trade and stay. The Beja are not a footnote. Their language, a member of the Cushitic family unrelated to Arabic, is still spoken in the region, and the nineteenth-century comparative vocabularies that recorded Arabic, Hadendoa, and Beni-Amer side by side in Suakin point to a multilingual port where merchants and pilgrims shifted languages as easily as currencies. The coral buildings belonged, in their best years, to families whose wealth came from the ferries across to Jeddah, from caravans inland, and from the pilgrims who passed through on their way to Mecca.
On 17 January 2018, as part of a rapprochement with Sudan, Turkey was granted a ninety-nine-year lease over Suakin island. The stated plan is to restore the ruined Ottoman-era port. For now, ferries still run daily from Suakin to Jeddah, continuing a crossing that has existed for centuries. The adjacent mainland town, the Geyf, had a 2009 estimated population of 43,337 and serves as the working counterpart to the island's archaeological silence. In June 2022, about 15,000 sheep drowned when the livestock carrier Badr 1 sank in the harbor, a reminder that working Red Sea ports are still working, and hazardous. The climate here is among the hottest on the coast: desert heat, humid summers, rare but dramatic autumn storms. In November 1965, 445 millimeters of rain fell. In the year from July 1981 to June 1982, three millimeters did. Suakin keeps its extremes and its patience.
Located at 19.10 N, 37.33 E on Sudan's Red Sea coast. Suakin sits on a circular island at the end of a long inlet, visible from altitude as a distinctive circular form connected to the mainland by a narrow causeway. About 50 km south of Port Sudan. Nearest airport: Port Sudan New International (HSPN), about 50 km north. Flights between the Red Sea and central Africa pass over this coast.