Acre

Acre is one of the oldest ports on the eastern Mediterranean. The earliest city stood at Tel Akko, a mound east of the present town, and is named in Egyptian texts of the second millennium BC; the harbour shifted to the rocky peninsula in the Hellenistic period, when the city was refounded as Ptolemais. Under Rome it was a colony, and the apostle Paul is recorded as stopping there.

The Crusaders took the port in 1104 and made it the main link between Europe and the Latin East. Saladin retook it in 1187, but the Third Crusade won it back in 1191, and for the next century Acre served as the capital of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, divided into quarters run by the Hospitallers, the Templars and the merchant republics of Venice, Pisa and Genoa. Its fall to the Mamluks in 1291 ended Crusader rule in the Holy Land, and the sultans left the harbour in ruins.

Revival came in the 18th century under Daher al-Umar, who rebuilt the walls and made Acre the centre of a Galilee cotton trade, and then under Ahmad Pasha al-Jazzar, who raised the great mosque, the bathhouse and the khans and withstood Napoleon's siege of 1799. An Egyptian siege in 1831–32 and a European naval attack in 1840 damaged the town, after which it slipped behind the rising port of Haifa. Under British rule the citadel became a prison, the site of a celebrated escape in 1947. In 1948 most of the Arab population left and Jewish immigrants settled the new town; the Old City was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2001.

Acre is one of Israel's mixed cities, with an Arab majority in the Old City and a largely Jewish new town, and the two populations meet in the markets, schools and municipal life. Arabic and Hebrew are both heard everywhere, and the rhythms of the week are doubled: the call to prayer and Friday closures inside the walls, Shabbat quiet outside them.

The Old City is also a place of pilgrimage for more than one faith. The al-Jazzar Mosque holds a relic revered by Muslims, and the Bahá'í faith's holiest place, the shrine at Bahjí where Bahá'u'lláh is buried, lies just north of the town; he spent his last years in and around Acre after being exiled there by the Ottomans in 1868, which is why the Bahá'í world centre grew up between Acre and Haifa.

Culturally the city is best known for the Acre Festival of Alternative Israeli Theatre, held in autumn since 1980, which turns vaulted halls and courtyards into stages and draws experimental companies from across the country. Fishing families still work the harbour, and a strong local identity attaches to the food, the sea and the walls. Visitors are expected to dress and behave modestly in the lanes, which are residential streets as much as tourist routes.

About 53,000 people live in Acre, roughly a third of them Arab citizens of Israel, with the Old City almost entirely Arab and the eastern neighbourhoods mostly Jewish, including many families who came from North Africa and, since the 1990s, from the former Soviet Union. The municipality covers both, and coexistence is an everyday fact rather than a project, though tensions have surfaced in difficult years.

The economy rests on the port and fishing, light industry in the bay area shared with Haifa, public services, and tourism to the Old City. Steel works and other plants around the Haifa bay employ commuters, and the train makes daily travel to Haifa straightforward. Wages are below the national average and the Old City has long struggled with crowded, poorly maintained housing, some of it restored as guesthouses as visitor numbers grew.

The day begins early at the harbour, with boats in before the market fills; the souk is busiest in the morning, the ramparts and promenade in the late afternoon. Families gather on the northern beaches in summer. Rocket sirens and border tension in the north have disrupted ordinary life repeatedly since 2023, and tourism, on which much of the Old City depends, has fallen sharply as a result.

Acre's reputation rests on two things: hummus and fish. The Old City's hummus counters open early and often sell out by the early afternoon, serving the chickpea purée warm with olive oil and whole chickpeas, with ful — stewed broad beans — or masabacha, and pickles, raw onion and fresh pita to scoop it. Around the harbour, restaurants grill the day's catch and serve it with a spread of mezze salads, tahini and lemon.

The wider table is Galilean Arab: kubbeh, the cracked-wheat shell filled with spiced lamb and pine nuts; stuffed vegetables and vine leaves; grilled skewers of chicken and lamb; and rice dishes such as maqluba, turned out of the pot upside down. Za'atar and labneh appear at breakfast, and arak, the aniseed spirit, is drunk with mezze.

The souk supplies it all — spices sold from open sacks, olives and pickles, sheep's cheeses, coffee roasted with cardamom, and fish landed a few metres away. Sweet shops make knafeh, shredded pastry over soft white cheese soaked in sugar syrup and dusted with pistachio, along with baklava and semolina cakes. Fresh juice stands and small cafés serving strong coffee and mint tea fill the gaps between the market lanes.