Downtown Jeddah

It's been a while since I posted. Thanks to the lovely Saudi Telecom Company, our internet connection was down for a week. Actually, 9 days. Believe me, I was counting. Nowhere in the normal world would an ISP be able to keep service down for so long and still have any customers. But as we all know, this is not part of the normal world. Anyway, it was kindof interesting. For some reason our offices use a different internet connection than the residence, so my office still had connectivity. This means that I spent an ungodly amount of time in my office this past weekend.

ANYWAY, what I came here to discuss an interesting trip we went on the other day. The Ministry of Culture and Tourism in downtown Jeddah is run by a wonderful man who leads the fight to preserve and restore the old historical buildings of Jeddah. By far his biggest success is the restoration of Naseef House into a museum. One of the things he does on the side, and for which the Jeddah community is extremely grateful, is to give tours of Nassef House and the historic district. I have been lucky enough to go on this tour a few times, and it always fascinates me. Today, we were there because of some architects who were visiting us from abroad and who were naturally fascinated by the historic part of the city and the traditional architecture to be found there.

It quickly became clear that our guide was really happy to have the opportunity to ask our architect guests their opinion on something that has been vexing him for a while: the everlasting debate between restoring and preserving using traditional materials and methods, and restoring and preserving using modern materials and methods. Listening to them all talk, it sounds like it's been pretty well established that modern materials and methods don't work. They tried to protect the stained glass of the Notre Dame with plastic, and a century later the plastic had to come out as it was causing more problems than otherwise. Similarly, it sounds like they are trying to convince a French firm not to inject the walls of these houses with concrete. The idea would be to shore them up, but our guide was convinced this would be a disaster, and listening to them talk it sounds like they might be right.

Anyway, I wanted to give you an idea of what the old houses of Jeddah looked like, so here are some of my pictures.

The old houses of Jeddah were generally built about 150-100 years ago by the wealthiest families living in the region. This was before the Saudis had permanently claimed this region, but they still had influence and the families here deferred to them. Naseef House, the oldest of them, is roughly 150 years old and is also the biggest. The Naseef family is still one of the wealthiest here, and at the time they were by far the wealthiest. In fact, when the soon-to-be King of Saudi Arabia was visiting Jeddah, the Naseef family gave him the top floor of their house to stay in.

All the houses are built of coral, which I find fascinating, but makes sense given the fact that we're right on the Red Sea. So they make this sort of cement out of coral and sand, and then use wood supports to hold the "cement" in place (it obviously is not as strong as real cement). The walls get thinner as you go up, so that there's less pressure on the lower floors.

The houses have big windows, both to minimize the weight of the materials on the lower floors and to let the air circulate, and the windows are covered with a patterned wooden grate to protect the privacy of the people within. The grates are colored in a variety of ways (natural brown, green, blue) depending on the whims of the city's mayors when they were built, I think.

We saw, in addition, a mosque built 1400 years ago and renovated consistently since then. The oldest bit, the minaret, is 900 years old.

The highlight of the tour, hands down, is the end. Our guide led us up to the very top of Naseef House and, on the roof, there is a little wooden room that is open to the air. We got up there and sat down just as maghrib prayer started. Just at sunset. It was stunning. We sat up there and looked over the old city as the prayer call from a hundred mosques hit us all at the same time in a beautiful cacophony. It is easy to see how one might be inspired to prayer.