Eritreaኤርትራ

The highlands of today's Eritrea and northern Ethiopia share a deep past. Pre-Aksumite towns appear in the first millennium BC, and from the first century AD the kingdom of Aksum traded through Adulis, a port on the Gulf of Zula south of Massawa. Ivory, gold and incense went out; glass, wine and cloth came in from Rome, Egypt, Arabia and India. The ruins of Qohaito on the plateau, with a dam, temples and rock art nearby, date from these centuries.

Islam reached the coast early, and the Dahlak islands became a Muslim sultanate whose cemeteries hold Arabic inscriptions from the 10th century onwards. The highlands, meanwhile, were Christian, and their rulers — the Bahr Negash, 'lord of the sea' — owed loose allegiance to the Ethiopian emperors.

In 1557 the Ottomans took Massawa, and the port passed to Egypt in the 19th century. Coral-stone houses with wooden balconies, mosques and the old customs buildings of Massawa date from these Ottoman and Egyptian layers, damaged in later wars but still standing in parts.

Italy bought a foothold at Assab in 1869, took Massawa in 1885 and declared the colony of Eritrea — named after the Latin for the Red Sea — in 1890. The capital moved up to Asmara in 1897. Italians built a railway up the escarpment, an aerial cableway to carry goods, and a grid of streets and villas, while Eritreans served as askari soldiers in Italy's colonial wars.

The great building boom came in the late 1930s, when Asmara was the base for Mussolini's invasion of Ethiopia. Tens of thousands of Italians arrived, and architects given a free hand built in every modern style: Rationalist offices, Art Deco cinemas, Futurist petrol stations and Novecento villas. The Fiat Tagliero service station of 1938, with its concrete wings, is the best-known example.

Britain took Eritrea in 1941 and ran it until 1952, dismantling some industry while the United Nations decided its future. Italian residents stayed in large numbers until the 1970s. Because later governments had little money to rebuild, the colonial centre survived almost intact, and in 2017 UNESCO listed Asmara as a World Heritage site — a modernist city on the African plateau.

In 1952 the UN joined Eritrea to Ethiopia in a federation, with its own parliament and flag. Emperor Haile Selassie eroded that autonomy step by step and dissolved it in 1962, annexing Eritrea as a province. An armed struggle had already begun in 1961 in the western lowlands under the Eritrean Liberation Front.

The Eritrean People's Liberation Front, formed in the 1970s, became the dominant force after a civil war between the fronts. Its fighters — about a third of them women — held out in the mountain town of Nakfa through repeated Ethiopian offensives, ran schools and hospitals in the trenches, and built underground workshops. In February 1990 the EPLF took Massawa, and in May 1991 it entered Asmara as the Derg collapsed in Addis Ababa.

A referendum in 1993 gave 99.8 per cent for independence. The war, which cost tens of thousands of fighters and many more civilians, remains the founding story of the state: Martyrs' Day on 20 June, the Nakfa currency named after the siege town, and the rusted tanks at Asmara's edge all recall it.

Independent Eritrea began with high hopes and a disciplined, self-reliant ethos. A constitution was ratified in 1997 but never implemented, and elections planned for 1997 and later never took place. President Isaias Afwerki and the People's Front for Democracy and Justice have ruled since independence.

A border war with Ethiopia in 1998–2000 killed tens of thousands and was followed by 18 years of 'no war, no peace'. In 2001 the government arrested senior critics and closed the private press; none of those detained has been tried. National service, officially 18 months, became open-ended for many, and hundreds of thousands of Eritreans left the country, many on dangerous routes to Europe.

In 2018 a peace deal with Ethiopia's new prime minister reopened the border and flights, but the crossings closed again within months. Eritrean troops fought alongside Ethiopia in the Tigray war of 2020–22; afterwards relations between Asmara and Addis Ababa soured again, with Ethiopia speaking openly of its wish for Red Sea access. Visitors meet a calm, orderly country with very low street crime, but also one of the most closed political systems in the world.

Eritrea is small but steep. The central plateau around Asmara lies at about 2,000–2,400 m with a mild climate; to the east the escarpment falls to the Red Sea in about 70 km, catching rain in winter on its green flanks around Filfil. The coastal plain is among the hottest inhabited places on earth, and the south-east runs into the Danakil depression. The western lowlands are savannah that drains towards Sudan.

Nine ethnic groups are officially recognised. Tigrinya speakers, mostly Orthodox Christian farmers, dominate the highlands; the Tigre, mostly Muslim, live in the north and west; the Saho and Afar in the east and along the coast; the Bilen around Keren; the Kunama and Nara in the west; the Hedareb in the north-west; and the Rashaida, Arabic-speaking camel herders, along the northern coast.

Religion divides roughly in half between Christians and Muslims, and the state recognises only four faiths: Eritrean Orthodox, Sunni Islam, Catholic and Lutheran. Mosques and churches stand side by side in Asmara's centre, and religious tolerance between the two main faiths is a point of national pride.

Eritrean home cooking shares its base with northern Ethiopia: taita (injera) made from teff or sorghum, zigni stews in berbere, shiro and lentils for the Orthodox fasting days, and coffee roasted and brewed in a clay jebena. Breakfast is often ful, silsi or kicha fit-fit, eaten with bread.

The Italian years added a second kitchen. Pasta al sugo is standard lunch food, pizza and lasagne are everywhere in Asmara, and bakeries sell bombolini and cornetti. Cafés — Bar Zilli, Crispi, Impero and dozens more — serve macchiato and cappuccino from old Italian machines, and the evening passeggiata on Harnet Avenue is the city's social hour.

On the coast, food shifts towards Yemen and the Red Sea: fish rubbed with chilli and baked in a clay oven, flat breads, spiced tea. In Keren and the lowlands, Muslim restaurants serve goat and rice. Asmara Beer from the state brewery and home-brewed suwa are the local beers; mies is honey wine.