Barley

Barley flour makes bazeen – a dense, dome-shaped dough served with a spicy sauce and regarded as Libya’s national dish.

An annual cereal of the grass family with upright stems and flattened ears bearing long, rough awns. Three spikelets grow at each node of the ear’s axis, and the grains are usually fused to their husks. Barley ripens faster than wheat and tolerates drought, heat and salty soils better, so it is grown even on the edge of the desert. The grain yields flour, groats, malt and animal feed.

Significance in the country

Since antiquity barley has been Libya’s main cereal, because it copes with drought and poor soils better than wheat. Bazeen, served with tomato sauce, meat and eggs, is eaten especially on holidays and at family celebrations, and roasted barley flour is also used to make traditional zummeita.

Where it grows

Grown mainly without irrigation on the coast and the plateaus of northern Libya – on the Jafara plain, in the Nafusa Mountains and on Jabal al Akhdar in Cyrenaica – and on irrigated fields in the oases.

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