Wadi Nisnas

The neighbourhood occupies a shallow watercourse running down the lower slope of Mount Carmel, bounded roughly by Herzl Street, Shabtai Levi Street and HaNevi'im Street, with the German Colony and Ben Gurion Boulevard below it and the dense inter-war district of Hadar above. It is the joint between Haifa's lowest and middle tiers, which is exactly why the older guidebooks describe it as a village dropped into the middle of a city: the houses are limestone, the balconies are arched, the lanes are too narrow for two cars, and the connections to the streets above are flights of public steps rather than roads.

Those steps are what first-time visitors misjudge. The Haifa Trail's twentieth section walks the descent as a single 4.8 km leg from the Bahai gardens observation point on Yefe Nof Street, at 265 m above sea level, to UNESCO Square at 45 m: a drop of 220 m, taken partly on named stairways including the Gedera, Koresh and Bunyak steps. Coming in from above means some version of that. Coming in from the German Colony means walking on the level.

The name is straightforwardly descriptive. Wadi is a valley; nisnas is the Arabic for the mongoose that was native to it, and there is no agreed English transliteration, which is why the neighbourhood turns up spelled several different ways on maps. The Carmelit's HaNevi'im and Solel Boneh stations sit on the streets directly above, which makes the wadi an easy add-on to a day spent on the Carmel ridge.

Wadi Nisnas grew at the end of the nineteenth century as a Christian Arab neighbourhood outside the walls of the Ottoman town, at a moment when Haifa was expanding fast in every direction: the German Templers laid out their colony at the foot of the mountain in 1868, the port trade was growing, and the old walled town could not hold the population. The Hebrew reference account describes the wadi's original character as working class rather than merchant, which fits the housing: small stone dwellings packed tight along the valley floor, with vines and pomegranates in the yards.

The churches followed the people, and they are the most substantial buildings here. The Melkite Greek Catholic cathedral of St Elijah, designed by the architect Sammihom Atallah, was begun in 1938 and finished in 1939, with the biblical story of the prophet Elijah worked into its portal. It became the seat of the Melkite Archeparchy of Akka after 1948, when most of the community moved down into the lower city. An Anglican church of St John the Baptist and the Sisters of Nazareth convent school stand nearby, and the Haifa Museum of Art is on Shabtai Levi Street at the upper edge.

What the wadi did not have, and still does not have, is a monumental centre: no square, no gate, no set-piece frontage. It was built as housing and it reads as housing. A visitor who comes looking for a landmark will not find one; a visitor who comes looking for a working residential quarter of a Middle Eastern port city will find that in full.

Haganah forces took Arab Haifa on 22 April 1948. Most of the city's Arab residents left or were expelled in the days around it, in one of the largest single displacements of the war, and the remnant was gathered into the wadi. Britannica states the outcome without ornament: of more than 50,000 Arabs living in Haifa before the war, only about 3,000 subsequently chose to remain under Israeli rule. The Hebrew reference account gives roughly 3,500 and specifies that they were concentrated into Wadi Nisnas and Wadi Salib. Neither figure is a census, so the honest reading is that a city's Arab population fell by something like ninety-four per cent inside a month.

The word used for what followed is contested. The English reference account describes the concentration of the remaining population into this one neighbourhood as a process of ghettoisation; Israeli official accounts describe the same period as consolidation under military administration. Researchers still differ over how much of the movement was ordered, how much was the effect of curfews and closed zones, and how much was people choosing to be near what was left of their community. The site does not need to settle that to tell a visitor why an Arab quarter of 8,000 people sits inside a city of nearly 300,000.

What survives is unusually intact for the period, and that is largely negative luck. Wadi Salib, immediately to the east, was progressively emptied and much of it demolished. Wadi Nisnas stayed occupied and stayed standing, so its late-Ottoman and Mandate-era housing is still there in bulk, including buildings shut since 1948 and never reoccupied. Some of those blank facades are exactly where the neighbourhood's murals were later painted, which is not an accident and is not presented as one.

The Museum Without Walls is a permanent outdoor exhibition threaded through the neighbourhood's streets, courtyards and stairways, run by Beit Hagefen, the Arab-Jewish cultural centre at 2 HaGefen Street, founded in 1963 by the Haifa mayor Abba Hushi. Beit Hagefen describes it on its own site as a platform for research and production of artworks in public space, and puts about 30 works on the route, saying it began in 1993 alongside the first Holiday of Holidays.

Independent accounts count it differently. Middle East Eye dates the project to 1996, describes more than 60 permanent outdoor works, and says over 800 works by 500 artists have been shown along it, more than a hundred of them repeatedly. The gap between about 30 and more than 60 is probably the difference between the signed route and everything still physically attached to the neighbourhood; the gap between 1993 and 1996 is simply unresolved.

What is not in dispute is the character of it. The works are fixed to the walls of houses people live in, to the risers of public steps, and to buildings that have stood empty since 1948. They are by Arab and Jewish artists, Israeli and foreign, and the project was one of the first venues in the country to show established and emerging Arab Palestinian and Jewish artists together as a matter of routine. There is no ticket and no closing time, because there is no building: the exhibition is the street.

Beit Hagefen itself is worth ten minutes. Its contemporary art gallery opens Sunday to Thursday 10:00 to 15:00 and Friday 10:00 to 14:00 on the centre's own published hours, and it runs guided tours of the wadi under its Keys to Haifa programme.

• Beit Hagefen's own count: about 30 works on the route, begun 1993
• Middle East Eye's count: more than 60 permanent outdoor works, project dated 1996
• More than 800 works by 500 artists shown since the project began

The market is not a hall and has no perimeter. It runs along HaWadi Street and Yohanan HaKadosh Street and spills into the alleys off them: greengrocers, spice sellers, butchers, fishmongers, bakeries turning out za'atar and cheese pastry, coffee roasters, sweet shops and prepared food. Haifa municipality, which has no obvious reason to undersell its other markets, calls this the smallest and most worthwhile market in the country. Time Out Israel supplies the hours the municipality does not: roughly 09:00 to 19:00 daily, with some shops shut on Sundays. There is no official timetable, because every trader sets their own.

The falafel is the neighbourhood's own claim to fame and it is a rivalry rather than a single address. Falafel HaZkenim was opened in 1950 by George and Najala Afara and had neither sign nor name for years: Jewish customers called it the old folks' place, Arab customers named it for Najala, and when a sign finally went up it carried both. The childless couple sold the stand, and the recipe, to a long-standing customer, Afif Sabit, in 1984, and every guest still gets a free ball dipped in tahini on arrival. A competing counter faces it across the street. Which of the two is better is a Haifa argument of long standing that no one has ever settled, and the correct response to it is to eat at both.

Because the traders are overwhelmingly Christian and Muslim, the market keeps working on Saturday, when much of Jewish Haifa is closed. That single fact explains most of the weekend crowd, and it is why the quiet day here is Sunday. Morning is when the produce is on the pavement; by late afternoon a good deal of it has packed up.

The Holiday of Holidays has been staged in Haifa every December since 1993, launched jointly by the municipality and Beit Hagefen and timed to the weeks when Hanukkah, Christmas and, in some years, Ramadan run close together. Wikipedia's account of Beit Hagefen dates the first festival to 1994 rather than 1993, a one-year discrepancy that has never been tidied up. The events run on December weekends across Beit Hagefen, Wadi Nisnas and the German Colony, and by 2019 attendance had reached about 150,000 visitors per weekend.

For the wadi itself this is transformative and not always comfortable. The lanes are residential and narrow, and a festival weekend puts tens of thousands of people through them; residents of the adjoining German Colony have complained publicly about the congestion and noise. Anyone coming for the market rather than the festival should pick a different weekend.

The festival also carries a live argument about what it is for. The anthropologist Rolly Rosen and the Palestinian activist Shahira Shalabi have argued that it functions mainly as commercial tourism branding and obscures the national tensions underneath it, and attendees have noted how few specifically Islamic elements appear in the programme against a great deal of northern European Christmas imagery: snow, reindeer, trees. Haifa's reputation for coexistence is genuine, long-standing and contested all at once, and Wadi Nisnas is where all three of those things are most visible.

The neighbourhood has one more claim on the country's imagination, and it is a novel. Sami Michael set A Trumpet in the Wadi here in 1987, a love story between a Russian Jewish immigrant and an Arab Christian woman in these streets on the eve of the 1982 Lebanon war. It was adapted five times for the stage and filmed in 2001 by Lena and Slava Chaplin, taking the Israeli Academy award for best drama. For a great many Israeli readers, the wadi is that book before it is anything else.