Sarona Colony and Sarona Market

Sarona was founded in August 1871, when members of the Temple Society bought about 600 dunams of land from a Greek monastery near Jaffa. The cornerstone went down that October. The founders were the second generation of the German colony in Jaffa, who wanted farming rather than town life, and they named the place for the plain of Sharon on whose southern edge it sat. One of their own, Theodor Sandel, surveyed and planned it in the cross shape used in several Templer settlements: the main street, then Christoph Hoffmann, is today David Elazar Street, and the sea road is today Kaplan Street.

The houses went up in kurkar, the local coastal sandstone, mostly single storey with an attic above and a basement below, on the pattern of villages in southern Germany. The two plots at the northern crossroads were reserved for public buildings, a community house and a meeting hall, with an olive press and a large winery nearby and around thirty dwellings around them. Thousands of dunams of citrus, vines, olives and wheat lay outside the built village.

The first years were brutal. The English Wikipedia account records that malaria killed 28 of the 125 settlers in 1872 alone, and that the colonists planted 1,300 eucalyptus trees to dry out the marshy ground. By 1889 there were 269 people living in 41 houses, with a communal hall, a winery, workshops, barns and sheds. Templer growers shipped fruit to Germany under the Jaffa oranges name, and the grove planted by Christian Friedrich Lämmle, a gardener from one of the founding families, ran to sixty dunams and was reckoned among the best around Jaffa.

Under the British Mandate the colony did well. Its farmland was extended, businesses opened, the second and third generations built in the International Style alongside the old kurkar houses, and Sarona was declared a local council in 1925. On the eve of the Second World War it held 428 people.

• About 600 dunams bought in August 1871, cornerstone laid that October
• Planned by Theodor Sandel in a cross, on the southern German village model
• Built in kurkar: one storey, attic above, basement below
• 269 residents in 41 houses by 1889
• Declared a local council under the British Mandate in 1925

Relations with the Jewish community around the colony were workable at first, to the point that Sarona's dairymen employed Jewish milkers so that their cheese would be kosher and saleable in Jaffa. Politics ended that. In March 1933, weeks after Hitler took power in Germany, two branches of the Nazi party opened in Mandatory Palestine, one of them at Sarona and Jaffa, and the Jewish community answered with a boycott of Templer produce. The Tel Aviv-Yafo tourism administration states the point without hedging on its own page: from 1933 Sarona became a centre of the Nazi party in the country.

In September 1939 the British declared the German Templers enemy nationals and turned the colony into an internment camp. Some internees were shipped out: 188 residents left for Australia in July 1941 and were held at Tatura in Victoria until 1947, while others were exchanged for Jews from occupied Europe. The High Commissioner abolished the local council in November 1943. On 22 March 1946 Palmach men shot Gotthilf Wagner, the colony's mayor, on the edge of Tel Aviv.

The emptied camp became a British military base and then a target. The Haganah, the Irgun and Lehi all attacked it; a Palmach and Hish raid on 22 February 1946 failed and cost four fighters their lives, and HaArba'a Street is named for them. On 16 December 1947 the British handed the camp over to the Jewish community, which renamed it Camp Yehoshua after Yehoshua Globerman.

From May 1948 the Templer houses held the offices of the new Israeli government, and on David Ben-Gurion's instruction the name Sarona was replaced by HaKirya. Most ministries left for Jerusalem from the end of 1949, but the General Staff of the IDF moved down from Ramat Gan in 1955 and is still in the northern part of the compound. Israel compensated the dispossessed Templer owners under an agreement signed in 1962, at 54 million Deutsche Marks; the payments relating to Sarona itself went out from 1969.

Planning for the southern half of HaKirya began in September 1978, when a steering committee was appointed for roughly 190 dunams bounded by Kaplan, Begin, HaHashmona'im and HaArba'a, and Leonardo da Vinci. The scheme chosen in June 1980, by the architect Kalman Katz, put a large pedestrian space and a park at the centre and pushed vehicle movement and parking underground. Over the next quarter century the demand for offices and flats in central Tel Aviv grew, and so did the standing of conservation, which came to be treated as a lever for reviving a historic fabric rather than only as a cultural duty.

What was finally approved, as plan TA/3000 in September 2006, is a mixed-use ring of about 499,000 square metres of principal floor area wrapped around an urban park containing the listed buildings. The Tel Aviv-Yafo tourism administration says the plan followed a joint campaign by the Council for Conservation of Heritage Sites in Israel and the municipality, and that it covered 36 buildings for preservation. Hebrew Wikipedia describes the compound as made up of about 30 buildings. The two counts are not reconciled in anything published, and the difference probably turns on what is counted as a building.

Five of them are not where they were built. In 2005 five Templer structures standing along Kaplan Street were physically moved about thirty metres to allow the road to be widened, among them the old community house, whose cornerstone was laid in 1871 and which was dedicated in early 1873 as the colony's school. The library of Camp Rabin, on David Elazar Street, was demolished to clear a landing place for it. The widening was finished in 2008, and the ground to the south of the new road was renamed Ganei Sarona.

The heavy conservation work began in 2012, carried out by Bar Orian Architects with the architect Amnon Bar Or, at the same time as the park itself, designed by the landscape practice of Dan Zur and Lior Wolf. The compound reopened to the public in 2014. The management company puts the park at 48 dunams.

Reading a facade here takes some care. The street plan is the original survey, the kurkar shells and roof lines of the Templer houses are genuine and were repaired rather than replaced, and the buildings that were moved were moved intact. Several of the things a visitor is most likely to photograph are new.

The visitor centre is the clearest case. It is not an old building at all: it is a new structure put up as a close reconstruction of the family butcher's shop that stood in the colony. Wikipedia's list of the site's explanatory signs, which covers 31 preserved buildings, marks the Knoll family barn as rebuilt and dates the reconstruction of the Grözinger farm building to 2013.

The community house clock shows the middle case, where something original survives inside something new. During the 2005 work the iron mechanism of the old carillon clock from the building's facade was found. It was shown at the Eretz Israel Museum in 2006, where a visiting descendant of the Templers recognised the maker's signature, the Perrot company of Calw in Germany. Perrot made a new clock for the building, and the repaired original is displayed in the visitor centre.

Underground, at the far end of David Elazar Street, a tunnel runs between the two Templer wineries, cut into the kurkar. It is now presented as the Templers' tunnel and forms part of the visitor centre route, along with the old olive press. The restored bowling lane the colonists played on, and drank beer beside, can be booked for a game.

Sarona Market opened in July 2015 on the ground floors of the three Sarona towers, at the southern edge of the restored colony. Globes reported at the opening that Gindi Holdings had spent more than 530 million shekels on it, that it held 89 businesses across 8,700 square metres, and that the mix was roughly 70 per cent retail to 30 per cent food service. The municipality's own English page gives the floor area as 7,800 square metres instead. The operator's current description of itself is looser again: more than 60 shops, food stalls and chef restaurants.

The claim the operator makes is that this is the largest covered food market in Israel, and Wikipedia's article calls it the first indoor market of its kind in the country, with enclosed markets built elsewhere afterwards. The design is by Kika Braz, Uri Ben Dror and Michael Ankawa of Studio Mo, and the plan is built around long shared tables rather than separate dining rooms, so a group can buy from four counters and sit together.

It is a market in the sense of a hall of specialist counters rather than a produce shuk. The operator lists cheeses, oils, spreads and pickles, fresh meat and fish, vegetables, wines, spices, coffee and tea alongside the street food, and names Eyal Shani, Israel Aharoni, Manal Ismail and Rachel Ben Alul among the chefs whose kitchens work here. Prices are not shuk prices, and the produce side is a delicatessen rather than a greengrocer.

On 8 June 2016 two gunmen opened fire on customers at the Max Brenner restaurant inside the market, killing four people. Reported counts of the wounded differ between contemporary accounts and later summaries. Bag checks at the entrances date from that attack.