Silk by Aarathi Prasad

Author:Aarathi Prasad [Prasad, Aarathi]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollinsPublishers
Published: 2023-06-02T12:00:00+00:00

15

SLKY

THE ISLAND OF SANT’ANTIOCO IS CELEBRATED FOR ITS CAVERNOUS catacombs and Bronze Age nuraghes, towers built of enormous stone blocks; a Phoenician Tophet in which lie the burned bones of babies still interred on a hillside inside terracotta urns; a basilica that held the relics of the martyr for which the island was renamed; and its golden-handed weavers.

The island, with its main town of the same name, is reached by crossing a narrow strip of land from the southwest coast of Sardinia, formed by an artificial isthmus originally built by the Romans. This region, now called Sulcis, had been populated by a prehistoric people for twenty thousand years, and then by whoever had built its nuraghes for at least a thousand years, a group who may have gone on to mix with Mycenaean, Levantine and Cypriot traders. It had been named SLKY, or Sulki, by Phoenicians from present-day Lebanon and northern Palestine in the eighth century BCE; was occupied by Punics expanding from Carthage on the North African coast of present-day Tunisia two hundred years later; and was conquered by the Romans four hundred years after that.

No one knows the real name of the Phoenician people, but it was the Romans who first called them ‘Phoenician’, or ‘Punic’, from the Greek word φοῖνιξ – phoenix – which was also the name given to a highly prized deep purple dye tinged with red. These ‘Phoenicians’ had perfected the extraction of the colour, which would become the preserve of royalty and nobility, from the small, long-spined murex mollusc, and were responsible for the trade in this valuable commodity from the sea. Later, in honour of another commodity from deep below the earth, the Romans would change the name of their territory from SLKY to Plumbaria, with a rapacious eye on the island’s lead deposits, which the Christian St Antioch would be made to mine after he was tortured in more traditional ways for inciting the locals to convert. After that the blood of the people of Sant’Antioco would be presented a fine opportunity to blend with sailors of all colours from naval frigates and pirate ships and luggers, Byzantines and Saracens, French and North Africans, Spaniards, Pisanos and the Genoese.

In the north of the island is the town of Calasetta, built by a people who had fled from the Tunisian islet of Tabarka, which was part of the Republic of Genoa until its capture in 1741 by the Bey of Tunis, Abu’l-Hasan Ali I. Calasetta is a name which claims a number of derivations, one of which is, some say, for the cala, or bay, which surrounds it, and seta, the Italian for silk. Among the shellfish of this island is the Pinna nobilis, called nacchera for the large quantity of the inner pearlescent nacre that lines its shell, and which in days gone by, put tough, unpalatable, but enormous steaks of mollusc meat fried in cheap oil on the plates of its most impoverished inhabitants. At that time the waters of

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