Mila Province
Mila's Byzantine walls (6th century) still stand, sheltering Algeria's oldest mosque (675 AD). Two millennia of continuous habitation from Roman Milevum to modern olive country.
Mila demonstrates cultural layering that spans two millennia. The Romans called it Milevum and made it part of the Four Colonies confederation alongside Cirta, Collo, and Rusicade. In the 6th century, Byzantine Emperor Justinian enclosed it with fortified walls—walls that still stand today, 1,500 years later, forming the rampart of the modern city.
But Mila's defining moment came in 675 AD when the Umayyad commander Abu al-Muhajir Dinar conquered the city and built the Sidi Ghanem Mosque—considered the oldest in Algeria. That mosque still functions, making Mila a living archive of North African Islam's earliest architecture. The city passed through Zirid, Almoravid, and Ottoman hands, each layer depositing new cultural sediment on Roman and Byzantine foundations.
The modern province was carved from Constantine, Jijel, Oum el Bouaghi, and Sétif provinces in 1984—an administrative birth from ancient tissue. Today 766,866 people live here, the economy structured around olive oil and agriculture. The site sits on UNESCO's Tentative World Heritage list, recognition that Mila's continuous habitation from Numidia to the present constitutes an archaeological treasury few places can match.