Kedumim Square

The square sits on the summit of the kurkar hill, between the alleys of the artists' quarter to the west and Mifratz Shlomo Street and HaPisga garden to the east. From the port the approach is a climb up Shimon HaBursekai Street and then a wide flight of steps, with the public lavatories at the foot of them. From the clock tower it is level along Ruslan Street, then downhill through the Jerusalem Gate.

What occupies the square is short to list. St Peter's Church stands at the north end with a plaza of Ottoman cannons in front of it, the zodiac fountain stands in the open middle, and the entrance to the visitor centre is set into the paving. The perimeter buildings hold restaurants, cafés and souvenir shops. Beyond that, the square is the place the alleys drop away from toward the harbour.

The name is descriptive, not historical. Kedumim means antiquities, and the municipality states the square was named for the archaeological remains hidden under the modern paving.

In April 1936 a general strike began in Jaffa and armed men used the dense lanes of the old town to fire on the road to the port. The British answer was to remove the lanes. Under what became known as Operation Anchor, sappers blew a broad swath through the old city from east to west in June 1936 and a second from north to south at the end of the month, leaving a cleared shape that from the air resembled an anchor. The municipality's own route says residents were ordered out and more than two hundred houses went this way.

The archaeology confirms it from below. When the Israel Antiquities Authority dug a small area of the square in January 2010, the excavator concluded from historical sources and photographs that the late Ottoman walls, floors and drains he had found belonged to a residential building destroyed in Operation Anchor, and that the square now stands on the course of one of the new roads. The dig, the report says, clearly illustrates the extent of the damage done here.

What 1936 began, 1948 and the 1950s finished. The IAA's 2025 report records hundreds of houses destroyed here in 1936 and more during and after the 1948 war. In the 1960s the municipality cleared the remaining population of a quarter that had become poor and neglected and rebuilt Old Jaffa for artists and tourism, which is the plan the square belongs to; the city states this on its own pages, eviction included. So the most spacious part of Old Jaffa is the part where the town was destroyed, and the intact fabric is in the alleys around it.

• June 1936: Operation Anchor cuts two broad roads through the old town
• More than 200 houses demolished, per the Tel Aviv-Yafo municipality
• Hundreds destroyed in 1936 and more in and after 1948, per the Israel Antiquities Authority
• 1960s: the municipality clears the remaining residents and rebuilds the quarter for artists and tourism
• Kikar Qedumim occupies the line of one of the 1936 roads, per the 2010 salvage excavation

The excavation under the square is the one archaeologists call Area C. Jacob Kaplan opened it in 1961 for the Jaffa Museum of Antiquities, making it one of the larger areas dug on the summit of the tell, and returned for a second season in 1965. Work was later resumed by E. Brand for the Israel Antiquities Authority to prepare the ground for a roofed visitor centre, which is why the excavation is indoors today. The centre reopened in April 2011 with the remains built into it.

The centrepiece is a square room of ashlar headers and stretchers. Kaplan read it as the courtyard of a cellar or catacomb and dated the masonry to the early Hellenistic period, but left the western half undug, so its dimensions were unknown until the Jaffa Cultural Heritage Project, a UCLA and Israel Antiquities Authority partnership founded in 2007, sank four probes inside the visitor centre in July 2008. The missing west wall turned up standing nine courses against the north wall's twelve, and the room resolved as 3.4 m on a side and about 2.5 m tall, with ledges along two walls on which the beams of an upper floor had rested. Beneath the north wall lay an earlier wall of undressed stone, tentatively assigned to the Persian period.

That season also identified something long read as ancient and not. A stepped stone structure cutting across the middle of the room proved to be a modern mantle with modern debris beneath it, probably laid in the 1970s to stop an Early Roman wall eroding. Not everything stacked underground here was stacked in antiquity.

The 2009 follow-up produced the published headline. Aaron Burke, Martin Peilstöcker and George Pierce reported in Palestine Exploration Quarterly in 2014 that the work inside the visitor centre exposed one of the best preserved examples of Hellenistic architecture in the southern Levant, and confirmed a Hippodamian grid plan at Jaffa from as early as the late Persian period. A sounding out in the square met architecture immediately below the modern flagstones that the excavators thought probably Early Islamic, though too little pottery came up to date it.

• 1961 and 1965: Jacob Kaplan digs Area C for the Jaffa Museum of Antiquities
• Later: E. Brand digs for the IAA to prepare the ground for a roofed visitor centre
• July 2008: the Jaffa Cultural Heritage Project reopens the area, licence G-35/2008
• 2009: the season published in Palestine Exploration Quarterly in 2014
• April 2011: the visitor centre reopens with the remains incorporated

The first research excavation ever carried out on the tell was dug on this ground, and its report waited seventy-five years. From November 1948 through 1949 and 1950, P.L.O. Guy dug for the new Department of Antiquities in the open space southeast of St Peter's Church that would become Kedumim Square; Yoav Arbel published the surviving records in 2025. Guy's Trench C, 15 by 20 m, held a slanting wall 15.5 m long standing up to fifteen courses, which Arbel reads as a glacis buttress and probably the Ottoman fortress that stood here before the church.

Two finds are worth carrying underground. In 1949 a hoard of 851 intact coins of the Hasmonean king Alexander Jannaeus came out of the ground; Arie Kindler, publishing it in 1954, argued they were struck at Jaffa itself between 90 and 85 BCE by hands less skilled than the Jerusalem mint's, with inscriptions surviving on 208. And among five Hellenistic stamped amphora handles photographed in 1948, one carries the title of market supervisor with no name and a year equivalent to 129/130 BCE, which Arbel takes as evidence that Jews in Hasmonean Jaffa drank wine sealed by Gentile cities on the coast. The visitor centre's presentation is narrated by a character described as superintendent of the local market; neither publisher connects the two.

The most recent work is the most substantial. In April 2026 the Israel Antiquities Authority journal 'Atiqot published Avraham Tendler on a Qedumim Square excavation reaching Iron II, Persian, Hellenistic and Early Roman, Byzantine, Early Islamic, Crusader and late Ottoman to Mandate remains, including two segments of a fortification wall probably belonging to an Umayyad fortress of the seventh century CE, and a late Ottoman paved street with a drainage and sewage channel beneath it. Itamar Taxel's companion pottery study in the same volume dates those features and reads part of the assemblage as hinting at foreign residents among the local population.

One gap deserves flagging because tour patter papers over it. Crusader Jaffa is richly documented in writing and has left almost nothing stratified on the tell, which is why the Crusader glazed bowls in Guy's material stand out at all. Part of the reason is the excavators: the 2010 report states plainly that earlier digs here concentrated on the ancient remains and removed the later ones without documentation, so a complete stratigraphic sequence for the site can no longer be assembled.

The zodiac runs through the whole quarter, and it is 1960s planning rather than folklore. When the municipality restored the emptied houses and handed them to artists and craftspeople, the alleys were repaved in stone and each named after a sign of the zodiac, the main lane as Netiv HaMazalot, the path of the signs. Mazal Dagim, Mazal Aryeh and the rest are ordinary street names on the map. The wishing bridge over Mifratz Shlomo Street to HaPisga garden carries zodiac plaques, and the tradition is that a wish made while holding your own sign comes true.

The fountain completes the set. Its twelve signs were carved in limestone by the sculptors Varda Ghivoly and Ilan Gelber in 2011, to designs by Navot Gil, combining water, lighting and stonework. The tourism description circulated through the Israeli government data portal adds that archaeological finds beneath it support an old legend of a magical wishing well on this spot.

The excavation record says something more prosaic and more interesting. In January 2010, before the fountain went up, the Israel Antiquities Authority dug 62.5 square metres of the square to about 1.5 m, the depth the works would disturb, in a job underwritten by the Old Jaffa Development Company. What came up was a late Ottoman building: a plastered cistern with a square opening 0.46 by 0.48 m on a supporting arch and an interior 2.4 m deep, two stone-covered drains, a limestone pavement laid over the cistern later, corner pillars of the kind used to carry Ottoman vaults, clay pipes, a hookah top, European porcelain coffee cups and an 81 mm iron round shot. Almost all the pottery was nineteenth century.

So there is a plastered water installation under the fountain, and it is a domestic cistern in a house demolished in 1936. The excavation report does not name the fountain it was clearing the way for, and the artists' credit does not mention the excavation.

The Franciscan church of St Peter dominates the north end and has its own page, so only the part bearing on the square belongs here. The municipality dates the present building to 1888, notes that it faces west rather than east, and reads the choice as a gesture toward Rome. A rounded structure at its right-hand end encloses a small room surviving from the Crusader citadel the church was built on; by the friars' tradition Napoleon lodged in it in 1799.

The cannons ranged on the church plaza are explained by almost every guide as Napoleon's. The municipality's own route corrects it: his soldiers never fired a shot from them, and they were Ottoman guns used to defend the city against him.

West and downhill the zodiac alleys begin, narrow, stepped in places, lined with galleries and studios, and end at Jaffa Port. The projecting wooden balconies overhead are Ottoman and were functional as well as decorative: the municipality notes they were often used to store food, with the sea breeze doing the cooling. Going down is easy. Coming back up is the part people underestimate, and there is no lift or shuttle.