The Jaffa Clock Tower, برج الساعة في يافا, was built from 1900 to 1903 for the silver jubilee of Sultan Abdul Hamid II’s accession to the Ottoman throne. Its…
The Jaffa Clock Tower, برج الساعة في يافا, was built from 1900 to 1903 for the silver jubilee of Sultan Abdul Hamid II’s accession to the Ottoman throne. Its construction belonged to a wider programme of clock towers raised across the Ottoman Empire at the turn of the twentieth century. Public clocks expressed a new civic order in which government offices, transport, trade and daily business increasingly followed standardised time. A new centre beyond Jaffa’s walls The tower appeared while Jaffa was being transformed from a fortified port into one of Palestine’s principal commercial cities. The old defences had been dismantled, new roads crossed the surrounding land, and urban life was expanding beyond the historic walled town. Clock Tower Square developed northeast of the old city beside several major Ottoman institutions. The Mahmoudiya Mosque and the Qishla police and prison compound stood to the west, while the New Saraya, the governor’s administrative headquarters completed in the late nineteenth century, faced the square from the east. The tower therefore marked a centre of government, commerce and public movement rather than an isolated monument. The city-funded tower Jaffa businessman Joseph Bey Moyal led the project, and residents from the city’s Muslim, Christian, Jewish and Armenian communities contributed to its cost. The foundation stone was laid in September 1900, and the tower was completed in 1903. Built of local stone, it rises in three stages and carries clocks beneath its upper roof. It was one of a group of Hamidian clock towers erected in Palestinian cities, including Nablus, Acre, Haifa, Nazareth and Safad; another later stood above Bab al-Khalil in Jerusalem. Alterations made during restoration in the 1960s included new clocks and stained-glass panels depicting episodes from Jaffa’s history. Further conservation work was undertaken in 2001. The tower remains at the northern end of Yefet Street, beside the Ottoman civic buildings that shaped Jaffa’s expanding town centre.