Before Salmiya, there was Al-Demnah: a fishing village five miles south of town
Abdulaziz Al-Rasheed knew it as a fishermen's shore; Awazem families settled on it, and in 1953 the place took a new name.
Long before Salmiya meant towers, cafés and the Gulf Road traffic, the place had another name: Al-Demnah. In his History of Kuwait, Abdulaziz Al-Rasheed puts it about five miles south of Kuwait Town, on the shore between Al-Ras and Al-Shaab.
From the earliest days of Kuwait, he writes, it was a spot for fishermen, and it stayed that way until a group from the Awazem began building houses there, not long before he was writing. The village grew around the sea and the catch, not around a market or a palace.
Who lived there before 1950
The researcher Khaled Al-Mubailesh, who indexed the families of Kuwait’s old districts and villages, lists Al-Demnah’s residents up to 1950. Four Al-Sabah sheikhs are on it, among them Sheikh Sabah Al-Salem, later Amir of Kuwait, and Sheikh Fahad Al-Salem.
Then come 45 families, several of them branches of the Awazem named one by one: Al-Jabaa, Al-Habib, Al-Rumaih, Al-Maayouf, Bin Dhaban, Bin Raihan, Shnaif and the family of Zaid bin Rashid. It squares with Al-Rasheed’s note about the Awazem who built the village.
Three names, two explanations
Al-Demnah did not survive as a name. Al-Mubailesh says Salmiya was named after the family of Sheikh Salem Al-Mubarak Al-Sabah, who lived there. Hamad Mohammed Al-Saeedan’s Concise Kuwaiti Encyclopedia tells it differently: first Al-Demnah, then an attempt to call it Al-Anbara that never caught on, and in 1953 the name Salmiya, after Sheikh Abdullah Al-Salem, under whose rule the area was planned.
The two accounts meet in one family: Abdullah, Fahad and Sabah Al-Salem were all sons of Sheikh Salem Al-Mubarak.
From 38,000 to 67,000
Once the plots were drawn, people came fast. The same encyclopedia gives Salmiya 38,648 residents in 1965 and 67,374 in 1970: the fishermen’s shore nearly doubled in five years.
Photo: Salmiya’s waterfront today, at dusk. By Paldorje Tamang, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Source: Abdulaziz Al-Rasheed, History of Kuwait; Khaled Al-Mubailesh, “Al-Demnah (now Salmiya)“, from the companion site to his book on the families of Kuwait’s old districts; Hamad Mohammed Al-Saeedan, Concise Kuwaiti Encyclopedia, 2nd edition, 1981, vol. 2, p. 719, as quoted on the Kuwait History forum.
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