Time seems to stand still in the town of Harar, entrenched behind its encircling wall. Yet the market and mosques are pulsing with life.

Perched at an altitude of more than 1800 metres, the town is surrounded by a fortified wall four metres high, cut through by five gates. Inside is a maze of 362 alleys bordered by small traditional houses, with broken-down old cars circulating wearily in their midst. Welcome to Harar, located more than 500 kilometres east of Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital.

Less known that other towns in the country like Aksum, Lalibela or Gondar, it is nonetheless “one of the rare examples of a still intact pre-industrial town,” notes Jara Hailй Mariam of the Ethiopian Authority for Research and Conservation of Cultural Heritage. The proof is in the incessant click-clack of old sewing machines heard during the day in the tailors’ district, and the blazing red of the forges gathered together in the district alongside the Buda gate.

At dawn, the call of the muezzins resounds in the town with 82 mosques. Not for nothing is Harar considered the fourth holiest city of Islam. In the 16th century, it became the capital of an independent Muslim kingdom, at the price of merciless struggle against the Christian emperors then ruling the country. A significant vestige of this period of rebellion is the encircling wall or Jugol that still surrounds the city.

As in the past, the gates are shut at nightfall. Each has a name: Choa ber, Buda ber, Erer ber, Fellana ber.

Traders would come in and out of the gates in the days when Harar was the point of access to Ethiopia, arriving from the Gulf of Aden coast. Several commodities made Harar famous: ivory, leather and particularly coffee. Trade in the precious bean was in fact what brought an unusual travelling salesman to the town at the end of the 19th century. His name: Arthur Rimbaud. The French poet began his stay in 1880. It was a time when the caravans brought merchandise from the Abyssinian mountains in the west and the trading posts of the Gulf of Aden. When the Addis-Ababa-Djibouti railway line was opened at the beginning of the 20th century, it heralded the town’s decline.