The Ottoman Clock Tower, known in Arabic as برج الساعة and locally as al-Manara, was erected in 1318 AH/1900–01 to mark the silver jubilee of Sultan Abdul…
The Ottoman Clock Tower, known in Arabic as برج الساعة and locally as al-Manara, was erected in 1318 AH/1900–01 to mark the silver jubilee of Sultan Abdul Hamid II. It occupies al-Manara Square, formerly known as Bab al-Saha, at the centre of Nablus’s Old City. The square adjoins al-Nasr Street and al-Nasr Mosque, within the commercial streets that developed when Nablus was a major administrative and trading centre of Ottoman Palestine. The Hamidian clock towers of Palestine Sultan Abdul Hamid II presented Nablus with a large clock as part of a programme commemorating twenty-five years since his accession to the Ottoman throne in 1876. Similar clocks and towers appeared in Jerusalem, Yaffa, Akka, Haifa, Safad and Nazareth, linking public timekeeping with the municipal institutions and communications systems then spreading through the empire. The people of Nablus financed the tower, while land connected with the al-Nimr and Tuqan waqf—an Islamic charitable endowment—was acquired for the square. The municipal council had been established in 1869, and the project belonged to a period in which the city gained new public services, including postal and telegraph connections. The tower at Bab al-Saha The five-level tower was designed so that the clock could be read from four directions. Its southern entrance carries a marble foundation inscription commemorating Sultan Abdul Hamid II’s silver jubilee, together with the Ottoman tughra, the sultan’s official calligraphic emblem. The clock’s mechanism was maintained by a specially appointed employee. Nablus Municipality restored the structure in cooperation with Turkish institutions in 2013, and further renovation was completed in 2019. The tower was subsequently incorporated into the municipality’s emblem.