Landmark of my country – Nalut Palace
Nalut Palace or Lalut Palace in the Old City The palace occupies a location in the center of the old town of Nalut.. It is one of the oldest “Amazigh palaces” in Libya and is located on the edge of Mount Nafusa and at an altitude of 640 meters above sea level. It also overlooks or monitors the main road linking Tripoli and Ghadames. There is no accurate recorded date for the establishment of the palace, but it is believed that the date of construction of a number of palaces scattered in the region dates back to the tenth or eleventh centuries AD.
It is rectangular in shape. This palace appears to the observer to be similar to the building of a fort, except that it differs from it in the presence of small openings distributed on the outer wall, to provide the rooms with light and ventilation. This palace was not given many details by the writers who mentioned it. Mondadori, for example, says that the palace looks like a castle and consists of 300 rooms. There is no ladder inside the palace, but rather small pieces of wood embedded in the walls. Each room is one meter wide and high. The contents of these rooms are barley, wheat and oil. It is enough for one family for a whole year.
(There is a man guarding this palace, and his presence is as if he were nonexistent, because no one would think of stealing from his neighbor. Despite the narrowness of the place, markets were held in the courtyard of this palace. This phenomenon arose since the Amazighs reluctantly surrendered to the overpowering forces. But Nalut did not return. Today it is a Amazigh village, while its fortified palace is associated with many legends.
The Storage Palace in Nalut is still in good condition, and its only entrance is located on the northeastern side. Its width is approximately 1.10 m, and its height is approximately 2.10 m. The entrance itself consists of a semi-rectangular shape, and is represented in a hall approximately 3.43 m long, surrounded on both sides by a stone block attached to the wall. Another building appears in the middle of this palace, the walls of which rise to a higher level than the palace walls. This building is surrounded by a corridor about 1.70 meters wide. This building, like the rest of the palace, consists of storage rooms, which represent five floors on one side of the palace, and on the other side, it consists of six floors.
What draws attention is the absence of a staircase that leads to the upper floors of the palace. It was replaced by placing small pieces of tree trunks in the walls. These pieces were, and still are, the means of ascending to the rooms. The only way to get the belongings or place them in the rooms depends on one climbing these wooden pieces to the desired room, where the climber places a piece of rectangular wood on top of the two logs fixed to the bottom of the entrance to the room, then uses the rope to raise or lower what he wants.
Local materials consisting of clay, gypsum, and tree trunks were used to build the palace. This palace does not differ in its basic architectural elements from the rest of the storage palaces in Jebel Nafusa. It is worth clarifying that the historical sources we have do not help us determine a specific date for the construction of this palace. In the absence of historical and archaeological evidence, the proposed dates remain open to all possibilities.
Source : sites Internet