The Arab Souk and the Old City markets

Nothing here is signposted as the Arab Souk, because the thing has no single name in Arabic. What a visitor experiences as one continuous bazaar is a set of separately named suqs that happen to join up, each with its own history, its own owner and, historically, its own trade.

Two entrances feed it. From Jaffa Gate, David Street runs east and downhill in shallow steps along the seam between the Christian and Armenian quarters. It is the most heavily walked lane in the Old City and the most expensive, because it carries worshippers heading to the Western Wall, pilgrims heading to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and almost every visitor arriving on a coach. From Damascus Gate, Suq Khan az-Zait runs south towards the Holy Sepulchre and the Jewish Quarter, and it is where the Old City does its own shopping. Its name means the street of the oil merchants, after a khan on it used to store olive oil from the Mamluk period onward; a Mamluk olive press survives at the spot. The seventh Station of the Cross is on this street, which is why processions and vegetable crates share it.

At the junction of those two axes the market splits into the three parallel covered lanes usually called the three markets, and beyond them David Street continues east as Tariq Bab al-Silsila. Two set-piece markets sit off the spine and are worth the diversion: Suq al-Qattanin, the Mamluk cotton merchants' market opening east onto the Haram, and Suq Aftimos in the western half of the Muristan.

• David Street: from Jaffa Gate, stepped, souvenirs and textiles at tourist prices.
• Suq Khan az-Zait (Beit HaBad Street): from Damascus Gate, about 400 metres, food, spices, sweets and cloth, 108 retail units counted in 2019.
• The three markets: Suq al-Lahhamin (butchers'), Suq al-Attarin (perfumers') and Suq al-Khawajat, three roofed lanes side by side over the line of the Roman Cardo.
• Tariq Bab al-Silsila: 308 metres east from David Street to the Chain Gate of the Haram, a suq of 110 shops among Mamluk mausoleums and schools.
• Suq al-Qattanin: the cotton merchants' market of 1336–37, 95 metres of barrel vault with 60 shops, a khan and two bathhouses.
• Suq Aftimos: a small planned market of 1903 inside the Muristan, now largely leather goods and cafes.

The three markets are the clearest surviving fossil of Roman Jerusalem anywhere above ground. Hadrian's Aelia Capitolina had a colonnaded Cardo Maximus running south from what is now Damascus Gate, and the street beneath the butchers' market has been dated to about 70 CE, remaining a single roadway through the Byzantine period. At some point after that, the avenue was subdivided lengthways into three narrow parallel streets and roofed. Jerusalem's own tourism site notes the giveaway: the combined width of the three lanes is the width of the Roman and Byzantine Cardo. It is not certain when the division happened, and the early Muslim period and the Crusader period are both proposed.

The best documented moment is 1152, when Melisende, Queen of Jerusalem, established what the sources call the Triple Market: three street markets adjoining one another, arranged east to west along the Cardo. Adrian Boas records that she employed Muslim labourers from Magna Mahomeria, the village now called al-Bireh, to build it. The western lane was not then a meat market at all but the Rue des Herbes, the Street of Herbs. Meron Benvenisti's account of it lists fish, eggs, poultry, cheese, condiments and fruit, sold by Frankish and Syrian shopkeepers working side by side.

The middle lane had the better name. The Crusaders called it the Malquisinat, which translates as bad cooking or evil cooking, and it sold ready-cooked meals, most plausibly to pilgrims with nowhere to cook. Its ceiling was pierced with shafts to let the smoke out, covered with stone arches or louvres so the rain stayed out. The name stuck: in the fifteenth century the chronicler Mujir al-Din still called it Suq al-Tabbakhin, the cooks' market, and it appears under that name in waqf documents. It is the lane now known as Suq al-Attarin, the perfumers' market, so the smell has changed completely and the building has not.

In 1188, the year after taking the city, Saladin placed the market in a waqf, and it has belonged to one ever since. That is why the Jerusalem waqf, not a municipality or a company, maintains these lanes today.

The honest answer to what is original here is: the roof and the walls, and very little else. Meron Benvenisti's 1970 assessment of the butchers' market was that the Crusader vaults and shops had been preserved but that the paving and the shopfronts had been altered beyond recognition, and that is still the right way to look at all three lanes. Above head height the twelfth century is intact. Below head height it is roller shutters, tiling, strip lighting and stock.

The measurements are worth carrying in your head, because they explain why the lanes feel the way they do. The butchers' market runs 125 metres and is 3.71 metres wide, its groin vaults springing from pointed arches carried on 28 columns, with the crown of the vault 6.1 metres above the street, all of it in Turonian limestone. There are 83 shops, 41 on the west side and 42 on the east. The perfumers' market runs about 150 metres over roughly 8 dunams, is covered by cross vaults with openings punched in the centres to let daylight down, and has four ways in.

There is Crusader graffiti in plain sight for anyone who looks up at the doorways. Some shop arches in the perfumers' market carry the letter T inside a triangular shield, read as a Templar property mark, and others carry a T inside a circle, attributed to the Teutonic Order. Others again are inscribed in Gothic lettering with SCA ANNA: these shops most likely belonged to the estates of the Church of Saint Anne, which drew income from them. After Saladin converted that church into the Salahiyya Madrasa, the same shop rents were redirected to endow the madrasa.

Not everything above the shutters is Crusader, and that is where visitors go wrong. Amnon Cohen's work on the Ottoman court records shows the perfumers' market substantially rebuilt in 1565, in documents that call it the new spice-dealers' market. The coppersmiths' market moved into the northern end of the butchers' market in 1860, and the copper plating for the gates of the Qibli Mosque and the Dome of the Rock was worked there. Suq Aftimos is 1903 town planning on ground assigned to the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate in 1868. The least altered building of the lot is not Crusader at all: Suq al-Qattanin, put up in 1336–37 for the Mamluk sultan al-Nasir Muhammad by his viceroy Tankiz, has undergone no fundamental change since it was built, on Discover Islamic Art's assessment.

The names are historical labels, not shopping directories, and a visitor who takes them literally will spend an afternoon confused. Ottoman regulation once made them accurate: records from 1582 list seven markets each assigned a single trade, and all spices arriving in Jerusalem were required to be sold in the perfumers' market. The rule was broken almost immediately, and a butcher is documented trading in the perfumers' market in the sixteenth century.

The drift since is easy to trace. The butchers' market has 100 shops on the historic count and most are not butchers: a 1987 survey by the geographer Norman Dlin found 13 of 81 still working as butchers. Suq al-Khawajat, the eastern lane, was the goldsmiths' and cloth merchants' market; today only its southern half is open, mostly carpets and textiles. Suq al-Attarin still sells spices, aromatics and folk remedies, the one label that has held: the Swiss physician Titus Tobler counted 67 different medicinal substances in a single shop there in the nineteenth century and called it Jerusalem's drug market.

The trades that have grown are those aimed at people passing through. Suq al-Qattanin, built for cotton, now sells gifts, rosaries and clothing to people on their way to al-Aqsa, and its khan houses offices of the Islamic Awqaf Department and Al-Quds University. Suq Aftimos has gone over largely to leather. On Tariq Bab al-Silsila the handicraft workshops gave way through the twentieth century to grocers, restaurants and cafes, and after 1967 to souvenir shops serving the Western Wall and the Haram.

The exception, and the reason to come on a Friday morning, is Suq Khan az-Zait. Farmers bring produce in to sell along it, and the street still carries the butchered meat, cloth, sweets and spice trade that the Old City's own households buy from. It is the least performed part of the market.

• Suq al-Lahhamin: named for butchers, 100 shops historically, most now selling meat, vegetables and household goods rather than meat alone.
• Suq al-Attarin: perfumes, spices, aromatics and medicinal herbs, alongside jewellery, electronics and clothing.
• Suq al-Khawajat: goldsmiths and cloth merchants historically, now carpets and textiles in the southern half only.
• Suq al-Qattanin: cotton until the Mamluk period, souvenirs and devotional goods now.
• Suq Aftimos: leather goods, craft shops and a few cafes around a fountain.

The souk has been shrinking for longer than the current crisis, and the traders name the same causes each time they are asked. Arnona, the municipal property rate, comes first: it falls on floor area whether or not anything is sold. Access comes second. Al Jazeera and The New Arab have both reported that the annexation of East Jerusalem in 1967, the checkpoints and the West Bank barrier cut the perfumers' market off from the West Bank customers it was built to serve. In 2016 Al Jazeera Arabic reported 68 of the butchers' market's 100 shops closed, under the headline that the market was drawing its last breath, and named rising taxes and relocation to Musrara as the reasons. It ran a similar report in 2025.

Then came the collapse in visitors. Jerusalem received 4.4 million of them in 2019 and 330,000 in 2024. Jerusalem Story, writing in October 2025, put the share of Old City businesses that had ceased operating at 80 per cent, in a district where 5,920 economic establishments are counted and about 40 per cent of them live off tourism. Hijazi Rashq of the Jerusalem Chamber of Commerce and Industry gives a shop closure rate in the market of around 30 per cent in 2020, rising significantly after October 2023. East Jerusalem's hotel stock has gone from more than 40 hotels and hostels to 24, per Raed Sa'ada of the Palestinian Tourism Association.

Even the size of the thing is contested. A field survey in 2019 and 2020 counted 2,075 stores in the market; the Palestinian Chamber of Commerce estimates about 1,400; Israeli authorities counted 1,896 businesses in the 1990s. Unofficial estimates put the number working in the market at between 2,600 and 3,700. No body publishes a figure it will stand behind, so any number quoted for the souk's size should be read as an estimate with a date on it.

There is money coming the other way, in small amounts. In 2023 the Kuwait Chamber of Commerce and Industry funded the renovation and reopening of 16 shops in the butchers' market, at a reported cost of about 300,000 US dollars. What that means for a particular shutter on a particular lane, nobody can currently say, which is the reason to arrive expecting part of the market to be shut.