In Tunisia, there is a story we tell without even remembering when we first learned it. It drifts through childhood like a familiar breeze, part legend, part memory, part truth.

It begins in a ruined city on the far side of the Mediterranean. It begins with Troy, burning.

When the walls fell, a man named Aeneas gathered a handful of survivors and fled into the sea. The waves pushed him toward our shores, and the first great harbor he found was Carthage, the rising city of Queen Dido.

She welcomed him. She fed him. She offered him land, and a future among her people. For a fleeting moment, the refugees of Troy could have become Tunisian.

But Aeneas stayed only long enough for love to bloom, and long enough for it to wither. He slipped away in the night, bound for Italy and a destiny that outweighed his heart: the founding of Rome.

When Dido saw his sails on the horizon, she climbed onto a pyre and cast a curse upon the wind: “Let there be no love between our peoples. And from my ashes, let an avenger rise.”

The Mediterranean carried her words farther than she ever imagined.

Centuries later, when Hannibal Barca crossed the Alps and thundered into Italy, the ancient world whispered: “This must be him.” He terrified Rome, he wounded Rome, he humiliated Rome. For a time, it seemed the prophecy had found its voice.

But Rome did not fall.

The story I was given ends there. The missing part, and perhaps the most important one, begins here.

Long after Hannibal was gone, another people arrived: the Vandals. They were Germanic tribes, warriors from the north who knew nothing of our history. But Tunisia possesses a strange alchemy; it has a way of turning strangers into sons. They settled, they planted roots, and in time, they became of the land.

And then, one day in 455 CE, they sailed north and did what Hannibal never could.

They sacked Rome.

For two weeks, they stripped the Eternal City of its treasures. Gold, silver, the sacred vessels once taken from Jerusalem and paraded in Roman triumph. A prophecy spoken by Dido was completed by people who were hers only by choice and by soil. Inheritors of a curse they had never been taught, written into a story they did not know they carried.

That is the charm of this story: a promise that slept for centuries, a curse that changed hands, and an ending no one predicted. A chain of peoples: Amazigh, Phoenician, Roman, Vandal. Each layer settling over the last. A chain of cities: Troy, Carthage, Rome. Bound together by fire and by a queen’s last words. All of it tied to the land we now call Tunisia.

And inside that land, a quieter truth. Stories do not ask for passports. They do not stop at blood. Those who arrive from far away, who decide to stay, to work, to love, are eventually woven into the same long fabric.

This second ending is the one we have to pass on. Not only that we come from kings and queens and lost cities, but that a homeland is also made of those who join us along the way. That whoever chooses a place, cares for it and is cared for in return, becomes part of its story.

And inherits its unfinished business.