Acre

Acre assaults you through the smell before anything else. Coming through the land gate into the Ottoman old city, the air shifts immediately: sea salt from the Mediterranean battling with the spice stalls in the market, charcoal from the fish restaurants along the harbor, something deeper underneath — the damp stone smell of very old walls that have been wet by the sea for centuries. I came from Haifa in the late morning on a bus that took forty minutes and cost almost nothing, and the transition from the modern city to the old town took approximately thirty seconds and about five hundred years.

The thing that stops you first is the scale of what is underground. The Crusader city of Acre — known then as Acre Saint Jean d’Acre, capital of the Crusader Kingdom after the fall of Jerusalem — was built in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries on a level that now lies meters beneath the Ottoman streets. When the Mamluks conquered the city in 1291, they buried the Crusader quarter under rubble and built their own city on top of it. The Ottomans built on top of the Mamluks. The result is that the medieval city is intact underground, sealed like an archaeological time capsule, and you can walk through it. The Knights’ Halls — the main Crusader complex — are immense: Gothic vaulted ceilings twelve meters high, halls large enough to stable two hundred horses, a refectory where the Hospitallers ate and where you can still see the original stone carving of the Order’s emblem above the doorway. The underground city is so large that it takes an hour to walk properly, and even then you are only seeing a fraction of what has been excavated.

Above ground, the Ottoman city that replaced the Crusader one is one of the best-preserved in the region. The main Khan el-Umdan — the caravanserai of the columns — is a courtyard the size of a city block, with Roman columns salvaged from Caesarea holding up its Ottoman arches, a clock tower added by the Turks in 1906 still keeping approximate time. The market nearby is a proper souk: spice merchants, fabric sellers, a man who has been sharpening knives from the same corner stall for forty years, according to the man who told me this, who was buying a kilo of sumac and clearly knew everyone. I spent money on dried lemon powder, Galilean za’atar, and a small clay pot that the vendor assured me had come from a local kiln and which, when I got it home, turned out to have a sticker on the bottom saying “Made in China.”

The hummus is the other thing Acre is famous for, and the argument about who makes the best bowl has been running for decades. The main contenders are in the old city near the harbor, and the serious eaters arrive at opening time — eight or nine in the morning — when the hummus is freshest, still warm from the pot, with a quality of texture that cools hummus never achieves. I ate mine with ful — fava beans in olive oil with cumin — and a plate of raw onion and pickled vegetables, at a plastic table in a room the size of a freight elevator, and it was the best hummus I ate in a year of traveling.

Walk the sea walls at sunset. They run along the western and northern edges of the old city, built by the Ottoman governor Jazzar Pasha in the eighteenth century and still largely intact. From the northern wall you can see the full sweep of Haifa Bay, the Carmel range rising behind the city across the water, and directly below — fifteen meters below the ramparts — the Mediterranean breaking against the ancient stone. Local kids jump from a particular section of the wall into the water in summer, the same spot their parents and grandparents jumped from. Some places accumulate meaning in ways that have nothing to do with history books.

When to go: October to April for comfortable temperatures. The old city is best on weekday mornings when the tour groups are thinner. Arrive for hummus at eight or nine in the morning when the restaurants first open. The underground Crusader halls are worth checking opening hours for in advance, as they sometimes close for private events.