Haifa; or, Life in modern Palestine

by Laurence Oliphant

The fact, however, that foreign questions are constantly arising at Haifa, either out of French pretensions or the claims of the German or Jewish colonists, and that no such questions are possible at Acre, where there is but a limited Christian or foreign population, has rendered it desirable in the eyes of the Governor-general of Syria to suggest the removal of the governor of the district to this place. The change has not yet been sanctioned at Constantinople, and the inhabitants of Acre, where property will suffer an immediate depreciation, have been pouring petitions into Constantinople to protest against the change, urging as a reason that they, who were loyal and devoted subjects of his majesty, will suffer; while the population of Haifa, composed principally of Christians and foreigners, will benefit. It is just possible, however, that the government may consider that the loyalty and devotion of the petitioners form the best reasons why the governor should be moved to a place where the loyalty and devotion of the people are not so assured, and should therefore be watched. At all events, there can be no doubt that the change, should it take place, will cause an immediate rise in the value of property here, and that there will be a considerable influx of people from Acre to this town, which has the advantage in summer of being a much cooler and more agreeable place of residence.

Meantime, advantage has been taken of this opportunity to remove the present governor and replace him by a more intelligent and active functionary, a change which has caused great satisfaction, both to Moslems and Christians, as, in spite of his fanaticism, he had contrived to make himself very unpopular with the former, while he altogether failed to keep the peace at Acre between the rival sects of the latter, who, though very limited in number, were constantly engaged in broils. Moreover, it is not the habit of the Turkish government to retain its functionaries, under any circumstances, long at the same post.

The only drawback to Haifa as the new seat of government is its limited water supply. At present the town depends entirely upon its wells, and although an abundance of water can be found at a trifling depth, it is usually a little too brackish to be altogether palatable. Under these circumstances it became of the utmost importance, in view of the proposed change, to try and find a spring, sufficiently copious and near the town to be utilized, and it occurred to a friend and myself that such a one might exist at Rushmea, where are the ruins of an old Crusading fort, which I have described in a former letter, distant about an hour's ride from the town, at an elevation of about seven hundred feet above the level of the sea. There is a well here called the Well of Elias, into which I once descended, and found that it was supplied with water which entered through a tunnel in the rock, but had no outlet; and the shepherds told me that, however much they watered their flocks, the water always remained at the same height, while in winter, although the well was eight feet deep, the water rose in it so high as to overflow the mouth. Under these circumstances it was evident that the well was, in fact, a sort of back-water of some underground stream or rivulet, which found a subterranean channel for itself. This we determined, by excavation, to try and discover.

We therefore commenced digging near the well, and about two feet from the surface struck the roof of a subterranean aqueduct. Uncovering this, we found that the channel had become silted up with mud, which required to be removed. We then found that we were in an arched tunnel, the sides of which were roughly built with stone, while the floor was paved with the same material, in which a channel had been cut, but it was four inches higher than the water in the well. We were therefore obliged to take it up, cutting, altogether, a trench thirty yards long and eight feet deep. On drawing the water off by means of this channel, we uncovered the mouth of the tunnel, by which it entered, sufficiently to send in a man with a light. After wading through the mud for a few paces, he came upon a vault beautifully cemented, thus proving that in ancient times the stream had been utilized. It would have involved a greater expense, however, to clear out than I was prepared to incur, unaided by the community for whose benefit it would have inured. As it was, the stream thus discovered was almost sufficient in volume to be worth conveying to Haifa, a distance of three miles, and could doubtless be much increased. In the course of our excavations we came upon several large blocks of square stone, which had formed part of the ancient tunnel.

The project of the railway from Haifa to Damascus, the concession for which had lapsed in consequence of the combined greed and apathy of the first grantees, is now revived under more favorable auspices, and I have little doubt that the change of the seat of the government to this place will give it a renewed impetus, so that before long it will be carried out.

Meantime, unwonted energy is displayed by the government in improving our communications. Having occasion a few weeks ago to ride to Beyrout, I saw the surveyors at work tracing out a line for a carriage road to connect that important city with Haifa. The distance is about eighty miles, and there are no serious engineering difficulties in the way. This road is sadly needed, especially now, when, owing to the cholera in Europe, no steamer touches here on its way to Beyrout, although we are visited once a fortnight by one coming from that place after it has performed there a quarantine of five days. The habit, unfortunately, of the government of making the road, and postponing to an indefinite period the construction of the bridges, goes far to neutralize its good intentions. The towns through which the road passes are heavily taxed, and then, owing to the want of bridges, it is useless for a great part of the year. Should this road be completed, Beyrout, Damascus, Jaffa, Jerusalem, Nazareth, Haifa, Tyre, and Sidon will all be connected by roads over which stages could run; and this would go far to facilitate travel in Palestine, and enable tourists to dispense with that system of tenting which now renders it so slow and expensive.

[THE IDENTIFICATION OF ANCIENT SITES.]

Haifa, Dec. 13.—The researches which I have been making into the oldest authorities, with the view of identifying the sites of the numerous ancient towns that once formed the homes of the extensive population which in ages long gone by inhabited this coast, have only served to reveal to me the enormous difficulty of the task. This difficulty is created partly by the confusion introduced by the crusading nomenclature and traditions, partly by the inaccuracy of the itineraries of early pilgrims and travellers, and to the discrepancies existing in the most primitive maps, and the contradictions in historical records. Thus between this place and Tantura, a distance of fifteen miles, I have visited the ruins of no fewer than nine ancient towns or villages, some of them of considerable size, not one of which, with the exception of Tantura, which is the Biblical Dor, has been positively identified. I do not include in these the ruins of towns a mile or more inland, which would double the number and convey some idea of the denseness of the population which once inhabited this section of the country. At the same time it is possible, from the varied character of these ruins, that some were far more ancient than the others, and that they may have existed as traces of a still more early people, when other cities, also now in ruin, were rich and flourishing. Thus we have on this coast remains of the early Phœenician period, of the Greek period, of the Roman or Byzantine period, and, lastly, of the crusading period—the latter too modern to be of any archæological interest. They consist merely of constructions built from the materials of the civilizations which had preceded it. Not content with using up these materials, the crusaders gave the towns and forts which they built wrong names, refusing to adopt the Saracen nomenclature, which was generally a corruption of the original Canaanitish or Hebrew, and attempting to identify them according to their own ideas of Biblical topography, or reading of Roman history, thereby introducing inextricable confusion. Thus we have William of Tyre, one of the crusading historiographers, gravely informing us that “Duke Godfrey de Bouillon awarded, with his usual magnanimity, to the generous and noble Tancred the city of Tiberias, on the Lake of Genasereth, as well as of the whole of Galilee and the sea-town of Kaypha (or Haifa), which is otherwise called Porphyria.”

The Carmelite monks still cling to this tradition, although modern research has proved beyond a doubt that the site, at all events of one Roman city of Porphyrion, was at Khan-Yunis, a ruin, eight miles north of Sidon, and at least seventy miles from Haifa. To escape this difficulty some have supposed there were two Porphyrions, and that one was here, basing their argument on the fact that in the Onomasticon of Eusebius and Jerome there is a city marked at the point of Carmel, called Chilzon, and that Chilzon is the Hebrew for the murex, or shellfish which produced the purple dye found there in great quantities; hence Porphyrion, or the purple city.

In carefully examining these ruins, and remarking the great quantity of carved porphyry which is peculiar to them, I have thought it furnished a stronger argument in favor of what would seem an appropriate appellation. The crusaders even confounded the Sea of Galilee with the Mediterranean; thus they supposed a connection to exist between the town of Caiapha, or Caiaphas (the modern Haifa), which Benjamin of Tudela asserts to have been founded by Caiaphas, the high-priest, and Cephas, the Greek name of Simon Peter. Hence near Haifa the crusading clergy showed the rock where Simon Peter fished, called to this day Tell el-Samak, or the Mound of the Fish. Laboring under a similar confusion of idea, they built a fort out of the ruins of a place called at the present day Kefr Lam, a name which, no doubt, dates back before the times of the crusaders, and which they twisted into Capernaum, that place being, as we all know, on the Sea of Galilee. The Capernaum of the crusaders, however, is a village on the Mediterranean shore, thirteen miles down the coast from here.