Sufes was a town in the late Roman province of Byzacena, which became a Christian bishopric that is included in the Catholic Church's list of titular sees.
The town
The ruins of Roman Sufes are found near Sbiba a village in Tunisia's province of Kasserine. It was a small town from which Roman roads branched out to neighboring towns. It was on several hills sloped towards the plain, and covered a portion of the plain itself with a perimeter of about .
There are few surviving records of Sufes. It is mentioned in the Antonine Itinerary as twenty five miles from Tucca Terebintha, and Victor Guérin discovered an inscription at the Sufes site, which described it as "" and showed further on that Hercules was the genius loci, a type of tutelary deity, of Sufes.
It is not known when Sufes was founded, but it was known as a castellum in the history of Roman-era Tunisia during the early Empire, and probably became a colonia about the time of Marcus Aurelius, who reigned between 161 and 180, as its name colonia Aurelia Sufetana indicates. It had been a bishopric since at least AD 255 but the majority of its inhabitants were still pagan. In AD 411, both a Catholic and a Donatist bishopric were located there.
At the beginning of the 4th century, pagans outnumbered Christians. Punics formed the predominant population of towns and retained the Punic language until the 6th century; in certain towns the Christian bishops were obliged to know Punic, since it was the only language that the people understood.
Alexander Graham quoted Al-Andalus geographer and historian Al-Bakri, who wrote in the 11th century that, "We arrived at Sbiba, a town of great antiquity, built of stone, and containing a college and several baths. The whole country around is covered with gardens, and produces a saffron of the greatest excellence." René Louiche Desfontaines, in 1784, wrote that for several hours he marched through a forest of pines and Phoenician juniper before descending into the verdant plain in which Sbiba is situated. In 1862, Victor Guérin wrote that, it was long deserted and uninhabited; he commented that, on this vast site he could not find a "miserable hamlet of five or six huts", and only a "dozen tents belonging to the Madjer tribe". Robert Lambert Playfair, while travelling the same route taken by Desfontaines in 1877, wrote the forests which Desfontaines alluded to have disappeared. By 1886, Graham wrote, the site was an abandoned village, with no settlement within , in an old field wilderness.
Although, in Latin, Sufetula is a diminutive of Sufes. Sufes should not be confused with Sufetula, both a different titular see, Sufetula (), and a different site further south near Subaytilah. It was there that in AD 647, a major battle, between the Byzantine and Berber army led by Gregory the Patrician and the Rashidun Caliphate army led by Abdullah ibn Saad, ended in a decisive Muslim victory.
Ruins
The ruins of Sufes consist of a basilica, converted after the seventh century into a mosque; a Roman temple, of which only the foundation survives; a Byzantine fort, built by Solomon, a praetorian prefect of Africa under Justinian I, of which only one wall survives and was built on a former Roman fort; and, a town wall. The fort, measured by , had four corner towers, and was, like the other ancient ruins, dismantled for recycled construction material used in the rebuilding of the modern village.
Graham wrote that the Byzantine citadel, or walled enclosure, was constructed entirely of the stones of the Roman city. A huge mass of rubble is all that remains of a large thermae; and, a large semicircular nymphaeum, decorated with columns and statues, is only represented by the stone blocks which formed the base of the superstructure. The whole site is strewn with blocks of cut stone, fragments of moldings, and sculptured ornament. The nymphaeum was supplied with water drawn from wadi Sbiba through a aqueduct.
As part of a systematic survey, during the French protectorate of Tunisia, five location were listed on a 8 May 1895 state protection decree as three items for the site: the Sidi Okba mosque; rectangular enclosures A, B, C; and, the semicircular nymphaeum. There are more unexcavated ruins.