As part of the Holland month, the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in Tunisia is organizing a cultural meeting devoted to the presentation of the Book La Tulipe and the Jasmine of Mr. Hatem Bourial, Tuesday May 22, 2012 at 7 p.m. at the Sophonisbe space in Carthage.
The event will take place in the presence of Mr. Willem Weijland, director of the Leiden Antiquities Museum in the Netherlands and Professor Ruurd Halbertsma, curator at the same museum and author of a book on Jean-Emile Humbert.
Based on the work of Dutch and Tunisian historians, tulip and jasmine is trying to reconstruct the backdrop of diplomatic and cultural relations between Tunisia and the Netherlands since the seventeenth century.
Over the pages, the author leads us to meet surprising barbaric corsairs, Dutch scholars and their descriptions of the regency of Tunis, painters and engravers drawing their Dutch prints in Tunisia.
In its momentum, the author invites us to discover the saga of the first consuls of The Hague in Tunis, the development of the port of La Goulette by Dutch engineers during the reign of Hamouda Pasha, the archaeological discoveries of Jean-Emile Humbert as well as a Noria of vessels and ships in the Mediterranean.
Finally, the tulip and the jasmine returns to the trip of Khéreddine to the Hague in 1867 and invites us to leaf through the Tunisian works of great writers of the Netherlands, like Louis Coupeus or Cees Nooteboom.
Tulip and jasmine is thus a book which, for the first time, brings together in the same work dispersed and difficult to access information. The presentation of the book will be followed by a debate.
