Street Scenes, Tiberias
The modern Tiberias—Tubariyeh—lies toward the north, close upon the water’s edge. N. B. Tristram, in his “Travels in Palestine,” says: “The houses of Tiberias are placed without order or arrangement, as though they had been pitched down from a sand cloud, but for the most part looked clean within.” Upon visiting the Jewish quarter on Friday evening, when the Sabbath had begun, and the synagogue services were going on, he adds: “The houses, with their open doors, looked clean and bright inside for the Sabbath; the people were well dressed in their best—the women somewhat like the Jewesses of Algiers. The men wore shabby broad-brimmed hats, and long silk dressing gowns, with a girdle.”
Tiberias is almost exclusively a Jewish town. The streets are lined in some quarters with booths and bazaars, the merchants making a fine display of their bright-colored fabrics and oriental wares. Fruit venders under their canvas canopies, fish and vegetable dealers in their respective markets, Jews, Moslems, Syrians and Europeans move in and out among the booths, and business is carried on in a fashion that would amuse and interest any European or American. The women, “with rich frocks and gold lace fronts, but with elegant long sleeves, and a white kefiyeh over the head, were generally handsome, and some of the girls were beautiful and fair.” Upon overhanging balconies were groups of happy children in quaint oriental costumes, while mingling with the crowd were the more humble peasants, returning from the field, “almost wholly enveloped in enormous faggots of tall thistle stems carefully collected for fuel—a most precious commodity in these parts.” The moving panorama, in all its detail, combines to make the business street a center of interest to the visitor.
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