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Zitouna
- the Great mosque
Zitouna
means ‘olive tree’. This name was derived from the
mosque's founder who taught the Koran under an olive tree.
This is the main mosque of Tunis, and so it has been
almost all the time Tunis has been a Muslim city. The city has
been modeled with the mosque as the center
 The
Aghlabid rulers first erected it in the 9th century. But its
most famous part, the minaret is a 19th century addition.
While the
mosque today serves mainly as a house of worship, it was also
a house of higher learning from times before the first
European universities, and until the 1950's when Tunis'
universities started to take over.
 It
is said that each teacher had his own column. The teacher sat
next to it, with his students around him.
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