LA GOULETTE, Tunisia — Our Lady of Trapani attracted hundreds of Tunisians, sub-Saharan African migrants, and visiting Europeans to the square outside the Saint Augustin and Saint Fidèle church this year for a procession on Assumption Day in this coastal suburb north of Tunis. A revived Catholic feast has become an unlikely testament to coexistence and the politics of contested migration in North Africa, Nov. 23, 2025.
The 19th-century church filled for afternoon Mass before the procession of Our Lady of Trapani, which poured out into the street. At dusk, the flower-strewn statue emerged from the doorway on parishioners’ shoulders and turned around a filled square to hymns, ululations, and the flutter of a red-and-white Tunisian flag.
Most of those who sang and shot the scene were young Tunisians and sub-Saharan Africans, part of what has become Tunisia’s dwindling Christian community. The statue was taken just a short distance outside the gates on Aug. 15, 2025, a tentative step in a revival that at one time took the procession right down to the harbor.
“It’s the Holy Virgin that brought us here today,” said Isaac Lusafu, a pilgrim from the Democratic Republic of Congo who is a parishioner at La Goulette. Witnessing Tunisians, Africans, and Europeans walking hand in hand around the shrine, he said in broken French, “The Virgin Mary has united us all.”
Among them were local Muslims, some of whom quietly entered and sat at the back of the church or along the railings outside. Some said they had come out of respect for Mary, who is revered in the Quran, and to stand with friends and neighbors who were participating in the procession.
In the nave, a mural inspired by the feast depicts the Virgin sheltering Tunisians, Sicilians, and sub-Saharan Africans under her mantle, with passports floating around her. It mediates between powerful nations that keep hunters and borders, but powerless migrants who throw away their identity papers as they cross borders, relying on the protection of Mary, he said. “Their situation is similar to ours: It’s confusing,” Parish priest Father Narcisse added.
The origins of the feast date back to the 19th century, when Sicilian migrants brought a statue of the Madonna from Trapani and settled in what would become “Little Sicily.” In a 2022 Al-Monitor report, researchers stated that the earliest recorded processions date back to 1885, following the donation of land by Muslim ruler Ahmed Bey to the church in 1848.
For generations, Sicilian fishermen, Maltese laborers, Sephardic Jews, and Muslim truck drivers lived cheek by jowl in La Goulette, commingling at each other’s feasts and funerals. The anthropologist Carmelo Russo describes the procession as an “interreligious crossing” of worship, in which Jews and Muslims walked alongside Catholics, bringing the statue to the sea and blessing fishing boats.
The tradition ended after independence, with a 1964 agreement between Tunisia and the Vatican that prohibited public Christian ceremonies and relegated Aug. 15 to a discreet Mass inside the church. In 2017, when authorities once again allowed the statue onto the streets, they conducted their reclamation of Taksim as though charting a cautious yet optimistic course, as described in a Guardian feature.
By 2019, the crowds had swelled so much that the Tunis suburb was once again called “little Sicily” during the feast, with Italian, Arabic, and French songs ringing out from its narrow streets. Coverage in The Arab Weekly showed how the statue’s return stirred memories among aging Tunisian-Sicilian families and their Muslim neighbors.
In 2022, a report in the Maltese newspaper Newsbook mentioned hundreds of Christians and Muslims walking together at the back of the statue; it added that some Muslims had even taken part in Mass. The point, the article emphasized, is that what differentiates Trapani from its Tunisian counterpart is the mix of participants, from migrant workers to long-time residents.
A year later, after inflammatory political speeches and mass expulsions from the port city of Sfax led to a backlash against sub-Saharan migrants in Tunisia, African and Tunisian worshippers participated again side by side. The procession was described in an Africanews report as a plea for “living together” and a silent condemnation of growing xenophobia.
That message was compounded this year. The archbishop of Tunis, Nicolas Lhernould, described the ceremony as “a unique event” which, in another time, marked the relationship between Sicily and his country but now unites Tunisians, Africans, Europeans, locals, as well as migrants and tourists.” His words demonstrate that Our Lady of Trapani has become a patroness both for new presentations and for those that are already established.
For the migrants who now occupy the pews at Saint Augustin and Saint Fidèle, however, it is a personally resonant one. Some have traveled over deserts and seas in search of work or a path to Europe, only to become lost in Tunisia’s limbo. At the procession, they pray to Our Lady of Trapani to protect their tenuous steps, as she did those of Sicilian fishermen in centuries past.
Because local residents view the feast as a reflection of their own multifaceted history, pressing out landmarks like fossilized leaves, where Muslim-Jewish-Christian memories intersect with Mediterranean trade routes and migrant trails. As the statue is replaced in its niche every August, the humble walk through the square indexes a vision of La Goulette as home for all who live there, not just a place en route.
In a nation grappling with joblessness, security threats, and politics of departure, this small procession stands as a testament to resilience. For as long as the statue of Our Lady of Trapani keeps emerging from church doors, many here say, Tunisia’s tradition of taking care of strangers has not entirely disappeared.
