Akko

I almost skipped Akko. Everyone in Tel Aviv told me to go north for Haifa and the Baha’i Gardens and left it at that, like Akko was a footnote twenty minutes up the coast. It is not a footnote. It might be the single densest concentration of layered history I found anywhere in Israel, and I say that having spent four days getting lost in Jerusalem’s Old City.

The trick to understanding Akko is that it’s basically two cities stacked vertically. What you walk through at street level is the Ottoman town — souks, a hammam, the imposing Al-Jazzar Mosque with its green dome catching the afternoon light. But underneath, literally beneath your feet, is the Crusader city that the Ottomans built over rather than demolished. The Knights’ Halls, a subterranean complex of Gothic vaults belonging to the Hospitaller Knights, were excavated only in the twentieth century after being buried under rubble and later construction for six hundred years. Walking through those cool stone corridors, low ceilings ribbed with vaulting, after standing in a sunbaked Ottoman square ten minutes earlier, gave me actual vertigo about what a city even is.

The market above ground is where I spent most of my actual time, though. Akko’s Old City is still mostly Arab, and the souk sells fish straight off the boats a few hundred meters away, along with knafeh so sweet and orange it practically glows, and spice stalls where the owners will talk your ear off about their grandfather’s shop if you show even mild interest. I bought a bag of za’atar I didn’t need because the man selling it asked me three separate times whether I’d tried his olive oil, and by the third time it felt rude to say no.

What stayed with me longest, though, was the seawall at dusk. The old fishing harbor still functions, small boats coming in as the light goes copper over the Mediterranean, and the Ottoman-era lighthouse and fortifications catch that last light in a way that made me sit on the harbor wall for far longer than I’d planned, doing nothing but watching men mend nets and kids jump off the breakwater into water that was clearly too cold for October.

When to go: Spring and autumn keep the old city’s narrow alleys bearable — summer heat pools between the stone walls with nowhere to go. Fridays bring the market to its liveliest, busiest version of itself, right before everything slows down for Shabbat.