Jaffa Clock Tower

The tower is built of kurkar, the wind-cemented sandstone the whole Jaffa headland sits on, in three storeys with a copper cap. English-language descriptions usually call the stone limestone; the Hebrew reference account calls it kurkar. Kurkar is a calcareous sandstone, so the two are closer than they sound, but the local name ties the building to the ground it stands on.

The published measurements are specific. The Hebrew account gives 27.8 metres from the base to the tip of the antenna, on a square base 3.8 metres each way, with a clock dial 1.3 metres across. The bell in the copper cap weighs 130 kilograms and strikes on the half hour.

How many clock faces the tower has, and has had, is genuinely muddled in the literature. The Hebrew account says two clocks went in when the building was finished in 1903 and describes two in the copper cap today. The municipality's tourism page says four separate clocks grace the top. English Wikipedia says the tower incorporates two and, in the same paragraph, repeats a claim that the watchmaker installed four, which its editors have flagged as unverified. Counting from the pavement settles the present-day question in about ten seconds, which is more than any of the sources manage.

Who designed it is thinly documented. The Hebrew account, citing a 1979 newspaper piece, says the planner was an Austrian engineer who combined European and eastern elements. English Wikipedia calls the style German with Ottoman influence. No source names the man.

• Height to the tip of the antenna: 27.8 m
• Base: 3.8 m square
• Clock dial: 1.3 m across
• Bell: 130 kg, 60 cm across, 110 cm high, striking every half hour
• Sultan's seal panels: 100 cm by 70 cm

Abdul Hamid II took the Ottoman throne on 31 August 1876. In 1900 an imperial decree instructed provincial governors to build clock towers for the twenty-fifth year of his reign, and they went up in the centres of important cities across the empire as an expression of central authority and of a single official time. Faina Milstein, the Israel Antiquities Authority's conservation architect for Old Jaffa, puts the empire-wide total at more than a hundred and says six are known in this country: Jaffa, Acre, Jerusalem, Haifa, Safed and Nablus, with a seventh at Nazareth about which there is doubt whether it is a clock tower at all. English Wikipedia counts seven in Ottoman Palestine and includes Nazareth without the qualification.

Jaffa's cornerstone was laid on 1 September 1900 before the kaymakam, the Ottoman district governor, along with government officials and representatives of the religious communities. By 1901 the second storey was finished and the third started. The building was completed in 1903 and the clocks installed. The sultan's tughra, his calligraphic seal, was carved into the second storey.

The money came from the city, not from Istanbul. Contributions were raised across Jaffa's communities, and the largest share came from Yosef Bek Moyal, a Jewish businessman whose house stood on nearby HaHalfanim Street and who was also involved in the Jaffa to Jerusalem railway, whose first passenger train had run on 27 August 1892. The Christian merchants Najib Bustros and Iskandar Awad gave alongside him, and the streets beside the square carried their names before the road became Raziel Street.

There is a competing origin story, and it is worth knowing that it is competing. Moritz Schoenberg, a Jewish watchmaker, jeweller and property developer in Jaffa, wrote in his diary that at a meeting at the government house in 1902 he proposed the tower himself, against suggestions such as digging a public well, and specified a clock reading European time on two faces and Arab time on the other two. The Hebrew account reproduces the passage and then notes that the initiative was the central government's jubilee decree, not his.

The date in print is not settled either. Britannica dates the Ottoman clock tower here to 1903 and both Wikipedias agree. The municipality's own tourism service says 1902 and attaches it to the thirtieth anniversary of the sultan's accession rather than the twenty-fifth. A thirtieth anniversary of an 1876 accession falls in 1906, which fits neither a cornerstone laid in 1900 nor a jubilee decree, so the municipal version is the outlier.

The shell is Ottoman and most of the detail is not. By 2016 only one of the four original marble tughra panels was still on the building, on the south face about 12 metres up. Three glass replicas carved with the sultan's seal had gone up in 2001 in place of the marble panels that did not survive.

That last original nearly went too. During a year of conservation and structural strengthening carried out for the municipality by its company Ezra U'Bitzaron, the marble was found cracked, partly detached from the wall and crumbling, with the relief so faded that it was no longer possible to see there was a carving on it. Israel Antiquities Authority conservators cut it free with chisels and took it to the laboratory in Jerusalem, where the conservator Mark Avrahami built it a new support and brought the relief back up with pigments. It went back on the tower in late 2016.

Dr Yoav Arbel of the Antiquities Authority explains what the panel is. The tughra first appeared as the seal of Orhan, the second Ottoman sultan, and afterwards stood for the sultans and for the empire itself: a device combining the ruler's name, his titles, his father's name and a blessing with the empire's symbols, used on documents, public buildings and coinage. The same seal turns up nearby above the gate of the Kishle, the Ottoman police station, and above the sabil facing the old city gate known as Sabil Suleiman, both also conserved by the Authority in recent years.

The building has its own repair history. Newspapers reported in April 1950 that the tower was cracked and in danger of collapse, possibly from the explosion that destroyed the neighbouring Saraya. A municipal budget was approved in 1952, but work did not begin until the end of 1962 and finished in January 1964. A second restoration in 2001, on the initiative of the Government Tourism Company and the municipality, turned up the clock's original mechanism and its bell, and Clock Square was redesigned by the architects Eyal Ziv, Eitan Ido and Rali Parto. When the clock broke down again in 2021 it was repaired by Susanna Kaufmann, a watchmaker who came to Israel from Denmark in the early 1990s.

• 1962 to January 1964: the long-delayed post-1950 restoration
• 2001: second restoration; three glass tughra replicas; the square redesigned
• 2016: the last original marble tughra conserved and reinstalled
• 2021: the clock mechanism repaired again

The most photographed feature of the tower is the youngest thing on it. The ornamental metalwork and the coloured glass in the window openings were made by the artist Arie Koren for the restoration that ran from late 1962 to January 1964. He was chosen after a subcommittee for the improvement of the city assessed proposals from several artists and architects, sitting under Haim Gamzu as chair with the painter Nahum Gutman and the architect Arieh Elhanani. English-language sources date the glass to 1965 or 1966 instead; the Hebrew account works from the contemporary newspaper reports and gives the earlier dates.

The scenes are a list of the stories Jaffa was telling about itself in 1964. The fish delivering Jonah onto dry land. Merchants carrying goods landed at the port on donkeys and camels. The sabil built by Abu Nabbut. Jaffa oranges. The cedars of Lebanon coming through this harbour to the Temple in Jerusalem. And the capture of Jaffa in the 1948 war. The municipality's tourism service describes a similar set, adding ships sunk in the revolt against Rome and Simon the Maccabee, who took the port for the Hasmoneans.

It is a selection, and the seam in it is visible. Five scenes reach for the biblical and Ottoman past the city shares; the sixth is a military event from sixteen years before the glass was made, in a town where most of the pre-1948 population had gone. A plaque on the tower, according to the English Wikipedia article, commemorates the Israelis killed in the battle for it. Read as a document of the decade that made it, the glass is more interesting than as decoration.

The square existed before the tower did. Jaffa's walls came down in the nineteenth century and the ground outside the old gate filled with the machinery of a growing port city: the Saraya, the Ottoman seat of government; the Kishle, the police station; the Greek Market; banks, offices and shops; and a stand for carriages and carts on what is now Beit Eshel Street, from which public transport ran across the country. Britannica describes the city that paid for all this as one of the most active ports on the eastern Mediterranean and the second largest in Palestine, exporting olive-oil soap, sesame, barley, wine and above all oranges.

The clock tower was the civic piece of that ensemble, and it changed what the town listened to. Until it was built, the only bells that rang in Jaffa were on church steeples and minarets. A public clock striking the half hour for everyone, paid for by subscription across the communities and stamped with the sultan's seal, put timekeeping in the hands of the state rather than the religions.

What that actually meant is a live argument among historians, not a settled point. Mehmet Bengu Uluengin, writing in the International Journal of Middle East Studies in 2010, reads the Ottoman clock towers as instruments of modernisation and secularisation and as assertions of state authority over public life. Avner Wishnitzer, in a comment published in the same journal later that year, accepts the layered and contradictory meanings Uluengin identifies but disputes the secularisation framing, pointing out that if neither the Ottoman authorities nor the early republican ones understood the towers that way, it is not obvious why they should still be presented that way. Anyone told confidently here what the tower meant is hearing one side of that.

The square kept reshaping the town after 1903. The municipality's tourism service records that the older marketplace was dispossessed by the Ottoman government from the ground where the tower now stands and moved to part of the site the flea market occupies today. The Saraya was destroyed by an explosion during the 1948 fighting, and the cracks reported in the tower two years later were blamed on it. It has been a busy junction for a century and a quarter and it still is: the tower is on a traffic island, with Jaffa's road traffic running past it on three sides.