Tripoli, 27 October:
The Autumn International Tourism Festival . . .[restrict]of Arts and Heritage starts next Monday in the town of Hun in central Libya.
Known as the City of Dates because of production in the oasis there, Hun had held the annual festival for several years. Previously it was usually held at the end of September.
According to the supervising committee, this year’s festival will include painting, folk art and poetry by local people as well as a number of exhibitions of traditional costumes, furnishings and other items.
On the sidelines of the festival an Autumn Cultural Forum will also be held. It will include story-writing competitions and other areas of culture and literature.
Hun, capital of Jufra district, owes its existence to the presence of a number of natural springs which feed the date palms. The town itself had shifted location at least three times over the past thousand years due to encroaching desert sands. During the Italian colonial period it, rather than Sebha, was the administrative capital of the Fezzan region, then known as the Military Territory of the South.
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