Now that I've been in Libya eight months, I decided that it really was time that I paid my respects to the national hero, Omar Mukhtar, particularly since he is entombed only about thirty miles from Benghazi in a rural town called Suluq.
I found it with no difficulty having downloaded a map from Google Maps, and had a very leisurely drive there across a dead flat part of the Benghazi hinterland - quite a change from yesterday's trip. Once I got to Suluq, I asked a shopkeeper for final directions, and after I'd deciphered his broad accent (very Egyptian - he prounounced his g's as 'g', not 'j' as is more common in Libya - roundabout was 'gazeera' rather than 'jazeera'), I got quite close. Fine tuning was helped by a couple of Bulgarians I met, architects on a 5000 house site, who told me that Suluq was OK when the wind wasn't blowing, but because the land was so flat, even light blusters soon lifted up the sand into a gritty fog.
Once I got to the monument, it was locked, but I woke the caretaker, and he showed me around.
Having driven across such a desolate landscape to get here, it was no surprise to find the memorial and its situation so barren, but then I remembered that this was the site of the concentration camp housing 20,000 people. It was here that Omar Mukhtar was hanged whilst the camp inmates, to quote Lonely Planet, looked on "in eerily silent" witness. The defence lawyer at his show trial was locked up for being too sympathetic.
His body was buried here after his death, and the shrine was moved here from Benghazi in 2001:
If you look beyond the memorial to his hanging, you can get a real feel for the utter despair the prisoners must have felt when their inspiration and leader dropped to his death, but Mukhtar was quite sanguine about his fate. He said, when convicted, "From God we have come, and to God we must return":
