Acre, Israel

• 1. Introduction

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  On the 4th of May 1947, members of the Jewish underground group Irgun broke into a prison in Acre, on Israel's Mediterranean coast. They freed fellow fighters held inside, and more than two hundred Arab inmates escaped in the same breakout. That prison sat inside a citadel that had already outlasted pharaohs, caliphs, and crusading kings.

  Acre's first settlement rose during the Early Bronze Age, and a second wave of settlers built a lasting town there in the Middle Bronze Age. Historians count the city among the oldest continuously inhabited places on Earth. Over the centuries it wore names given by Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, and Crusaders alike.

  The city was leveled more than once and rebuilt more than once, its rulers ranging from Persian kings to Mamluk sultans. What is it about this stretch of Mediterranean coastline that has drawn conquest after conquest? And how did a battered fishing town become sacred ground for an entire faith?

• 2. A City of Many Names

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  Egyptian execration texts from around 1800 BC record the earliest known form of Acre's name, written as ʿky. Linguist Anson F. Rainey reconstructed the underlying pronunciation as ʿAkkâ-ya, tracing a Northwest Semitic root whose ultimate meaning is still unknown. The Amarna letters, diplomatic correspondence from the mid-14th century BC, mention a ruler of Akka. Scholar Shmuel Aḥituv gives the Canaanite form of the name as ʿAkā. By the 7th century, an Akkadian form, Akku, was in use, and the Hebrew Bible calls the city עַכּוֹ, ʻAkkō.

  That shift from long a to long o has been read as evidence of the Canaanite sound shift, though it was not universal. Several scholars note a final long a form persisted well into the first half of the first millennium CE. A Jewish Palestinian Aramaic spelling, עכה, also kept that long a. The Greeks called the city Ákē, a homonym for their word for cure. Legend held that Hercules discovered curative herbs there after one of his fights. Writers Latinized this as Ace or Acce, the form used by Pliny.

  Under the Ptolemaic Kingdom, the city was renamed Ptolemaïs. The rival Seleucid Empire called it Antioch instead. Since both names were shared by many other towns, Syrians distinguished this one as Antioch in Ptolemais. Under Emperor Claudius it briefly carried a third label, Germanicia in Ptolemais, before becoming a Roman colony known for short as Colonia Ptolemais. The city's original West Semitic name survived in the Arabic Akka and was revived as the official name after the Muslim conquest of Syria. It was the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem that inserted an 'r' into the Latin form, producing Acre. The Knights Hospitaller's headquarters there gave rise to the name Saint-Jean-d'Acre. That name stayed popular across Christian Europe for centuries. It was translated into English as Saint John of Acre, Spanish as San Juan de Acre, Catalan as Sant Joan d'Acre, and Italian as San Giovanni d'Acri.

  That French-flavored name outlived the Crusader kingdom that coined it, staying popular in the Christian world into modern times, long after Islamic rulers had returned to calling the city Akka.

• 3. Empires on the Coast

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  Around 3000 BC, people built the first known settlement at Acre, during the Early Bronze Age. It stood abandoned within a few centuries, likely because Mediterranean flooding had ruined its farmland. A new town rose in the Middle Bronze Age, between roughly 2000 and 1550 BC. Egyptian execration texts from the 18th century BC record one of its rulers by name, Tūra-ʿAmmu.

  By the reign of Egyptian pharaoh Thutmose III, Acre appeared on his conquest lists under the name Aak. Around 1350 BC, the Amarna letters capture a diplomatic scandal at Acre. King Biridiya of Megiddo wrote to Egypt accusing Acre's ruler of treason. The charge was releasing a captured rebel king, Labaya of Shechem, instead of handing him to Egypt. Excavations show the city's industry then centred on pottery and metalwork. Centuries later, around 725 BC, Acre joined Sidon and Tyre in revolt against the Assyrian emperor Shalmaneser V. A destruction layer found in the ruins likely dates to that century.

  Under Persian rule, Acre served as a major regional port, and the geographer Strabo credited it with a role in campaigns against Egypt. Strabo and Diodorus Siculus both wrote that Cambyses II massed a huge army on the plains near Acre before invading Egypt. The Persians expanded the town westward and likely improved its harbor and defenses. In December 2018, archaeologists digging at Tell Keisan uncovered a Persian military outpost that may have supported the 525 BC Achaemenid invasion of Egypt. Those Persian-era fortifications were later heavily damaged during Alexander the Great's fourth-century BC campaign to drive the Achaemenids from the Levant.

  Ptolemy II held the city in the 260s BC, part of the Ptolemaic dynasty's control over the region after Alexander's death. Antiochus III conquered it for the Seleucids in 200 BC. In the late 170s or early 160s BC, Antiochus IV founded a Greek colony there. Around 165 BC, the Jewish rebel leader Judas Maccabeus defeated Seleucid forces in Galilee and drove them back into the city. By 153 BC, Alexander Balas seized the city amid a succession dispute with his rival Demetrius. Demetrius offered the Maccabees the city's tax revenues for Jerusalem's Temple to win their support, but failed. Jonathan Apphus backed Alexander instead and was received there with great honour in 150 BC. Years later, a Seleucid officer named Tryphon lured Jonathan into the city and took him prisoner.

  Herod the Great built a gymnasium in the city during his reign. Around 37 BC, the Romans conquered the Hellenized Phoenician port city. It became a colony in southern Roman Phoenicia, part of Roman rule that lasted nearly seven centuries, until Muslim Arabs conquered it in 636 AD. In 4 BC, the Roman proconsul Publius Quinctilius Varus assembled his army in the city to suppress revolts following Herod's death. The Romans built a breakwater and expanded the harbor, and the city minted its own coins as one of the region's main gateways. Roman legions passed through the port on their way to crush the Jewish revolt in 67 AD. The Book of Acts records the apostle Paul stopping there for a day, greeting fellow believers before continuing his journey. Under Claudius, the city saw a building drive as army veterans settled there. It became one of four Roman veteran colonies in the ancient Levant, alongside Berytus, Aelia Capitolina, and Caesarea Maritima. During the Great Jewish Revolt of 66 to 73 CE, Acre served as a staging ground for the campaigns of both Cestius and Vespasian. The population remained mostly local Phoenicians and Jews, who assimilated the original Roman colonists' descendants within two centuries. Even so, it grew past 20,000 residents under Emperor Hadrian in the second century.

  After Rome's permanent division in 395 AD, the Byzantine Empire took over administering the city, by then called Ptolemais. It steadily lost importance, and by the seventh century it had shrunk to a small settlement of fewer than a thousand people.

  In 638, the Rashidun Caliphate took control of Acre after the Byzantine defeat at the Battle of Yarmouk and Jerusalem's surrender to Caliph Umar. According to the early chronicler al-Baladhuri, a commander named Shurahbil ibn Hasana led the conquest, and the city likely surrendered without a fight. Arab rule revived the town, which became the main port of Palestine through the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates and into Crusader rule. The first Umayyad caliph, Muawiyah I, strengthened Acre's fortifications and settled Persian migrants there. From its docks, he launched an attack on Byzantine-held Cyprus. When Byzantine forces struck coastal cities in 669, Muawiyah sent shipbuilders and carpenters to rebuild Acre's fleet. Historian al-Baladhuri also records that Akka and Tyre were rebuilt under Caliph Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan, who ruled from 685 to 705. Both cities had fallen into ruin, likely from earlier Byzantine assaults. Acre remained the main naval base of Jund al-Urdunn, the 'Military District of Jordan.' Caliph Hisham ibn Abd al-Malik later moved the shipyards north to Tyre, in the early 8th century. Under the Abbasids, Caliph al-Mutawakkil rebuilt Acre into a major naval base in 861, stocking it with battleships and troops. The Jerusalemite geographer Al-Maqdisi described the city as unfortified until the autonomous Egyptian emir Ibn Tulun added fortifications after annexing it in the 870s. When Al-Maqdisi visited again in 985, under the early Fatimid Caliphate, he described a fortified coastal city with a large mosque and an olive grove. The Persian traveller Nasir Khusraw visited in 1047 and described a large marble mosque, with the tomb of the Prophet Salih just to its south. Khusraw measured the city at roughly 1.24 kilometers long and 300 meters wide. That made Acre larger then than today's Old City, most of which was built in the 18th and 19th centuries.

  Within decades of Khusraw's visit, that same coastline would draw a new set of conquerors, this time arriving from Europe by sea.

• 4. The Double Siege

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  In 1104, Acre fell to King Baldwin I of Jerusalem after a four-year siege, becoming the Crusaders' new chief port. The chronicler Fulcher recorded staying in the city with Baldwin's army on the way to Jerusalem. Even that early, Acre anchored the Crusaders' advance into the region. The port gave Crusaders access to the lucrative Asiatic spice trade. By the 1130s, its population reached around 25,000, matched in the kingdom only by Jerusalem itself.

  Around 1170, Acre became the main port of the eastern Mediterranean. Contemporaries in the west regarded the kingdom of Jerusalem as immensely wealthy largely because of it. One English writer at the time claimed the port brought the Crusader crown more revenue than the entire kingdom of England. The Jewish explorer Benjamin of Tudela, visiting in the late 12th century, recorded around two hundred Jewish families living in Acre. Its commercial prosperity under Crusader rule seems to have drawn Jewish immigrants, including scholars from Europe. By the late 13th century, some sources suggest the Jewish community there had grown wealthy enough to own slaves. Jewish migrants who later settled in Fatimid Egypt kept identifying themselves for generations as the 'people of Acco.' The Andalusian geographer Ibn Jubayr, writing in 1185, found a Muslim community still worshipping there in a small mosque.

  Acre surrendered without a fight to the Ayyubid sultan Saladin in 1187, following his victory at Hattin and the fall of Jerusalem. Two years later, in August 1189, King Guy of Lusignan unexpectedly besieged the city with Pisan naval and ground support. What followed was unusual even for the Crusades: Saladin's troops besieged the besiegers in turn, trapping Guy's forces outside Acre's walls. The city held out until July 1191. Then the armies of the Third Crusade, led by King Richard I of England and King Philip II of France, finally broke the siege. During that siege, German merchants from Lübeck and Bremen founded a field hospital that grew into the Teutonic Order. Acre then briefly served as the de facto capital of what remained of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, in 1192.

  Under the Sixth Crusade, administration of the city passed to the Knights Hospitaller. In 1232, amid the War of the Lombards between local barons and Emperor Frederick II, Acre organized itself as a commune under mayor John of Ibelin. Acre remained the Crusaders' last major stronghold as Mamluk forces swept across the rest of the Levantine coast. In 1291, Sultan Al-Ashraf Khalil's army finally took the city, ending nearly two centuries of Crusader rule in the Holy Land.

  As part of standing Mamluk policy against coastal fortresses, Sultan al-Ashraf Khalil's forces then leveled the city entirely, sparing only two sites considered sacred: the Nabi Salih tomb and the Ayn Bakar spring.

• 5. Ruin and Revival

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  In 1321, the Syrian geographer Abu'l-Fida described Acre as 'a beautiful city,' though still lying in ruins after the Mamluk conquest three decades before. Its 'spacious' port, he noted, remained in use, and the city was full of artisans. Throughout the Mamluk era, from 1260 to 1517, the town of Safed replaced Acre as the region's principal city.

  The Ottomans absorbed Acre into their empire in 1517. A census in 1596 counted just 81 households and 15 bachelors, all of them Muslim. They paid a fixed tax rate of 25 percent on agricultural goods: wheat, barley, cotton, goats, beehives, and water buffaloes. The total came to 20,500 akçe, half of which went to a religious endowment, a waqf. When the English scholar Henry Maundrell passed through in 1697, he found little more than a ruin. What remained was a khan occupied by French merchants, a mosque, and a scattering of poor cottages.

  Late in the 18th century, Daher al-Umar, the Arab ruler of the Galilee, revived Acre as the capital of his autonomous sheikhdom. He rebuilt its fortifications using stone salvaged from the city's medieval ruins, and died outside its walls in 1775 during an Ottoman offensive against him. His successor, Jazzar Pasha, fortified the walls further and moved the capital of the province of Sidon to Acre. Around 1780, Jazzar expelled the French trading colony outright, ignoring protests from the French government and refusing to receive a consul. He and Daher between them raised caravanserais, mosques, and public baths across the city. Their projects included the Al-Jazzar Mosque, built from stones taken from the ruins of Caesarea and Atlit, and the Khan al-Umdan. Under Jazzar, Acre grew into the third-largest city in Ottoman Syria, its population, swelled largely by migrants, reaching around twenty thousand.

  In 1799, Napoleon appeared before Acre's walls, hoping to spark a Syrian revolt against Ottoman rule. He laid siege for two months, from March to May, but Ottoman defenders repulsed him, aided by Sir Sidney Smith and British sailors. Having already lost his siege cannons to Smith, Napoleon attempted a direct assault on the 20th of March 1799 using only infantry and light artillery. The attack failed, and he retreated on the 21st of May 1799.

  Jazzar's successor, his mamluk Sulayman Pasha al-Adil, ruled more gently, and the city prospered until his death in 1819. His adviser, Haim Farhi, then paid heavy bribes to secure the appointment of Abdullah Pasha, a man he had known since youth. The new ruler repaid him by having him assassinated. Abdullah Pasha governed until 1831, when Ibrahim Pasha besieged the town and destroyed its buildings. During the Oriental Crisis of 1840, British, Austrian, and French warships bombarded the city on the 4th of November. Turkish rule was restored the following year. A branch line linking Acre to the Hejaz Railway from Haifa in 1913 helped restore some of its former prosperity. By 1914, Ottoman statistics counted 40,852 residents in the city. They included 31,800 Muslims, 4,316 Catholic Greeks, 3,959 Orthodox Greeks, 332 Protestants, 268 Latins, 106 Jews, 67 Maronites, and four Armenians. Acre served as capital of the Akka Sanjak within the Beirut Vilayet. British forces captured the city on the 23rd of September 1918, during the First World War.

  That 1918 handover placed Acre under a new colonial administration, one that would govern the city for the next three decades before its fate was decided by war.

• 6. A City Remade

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  By 1947, Acre's population stood at 13,665: 10,930 Muslim, 2,490 Christian, and 105 Jewish, in the final years of Mandatory Palestine. The city's old fort had by then become a prison. The British held members of the Jewish underground there, including Ze'ev Jabotinsky, Shlomo Ben-Yosef, and Dov Gruner. Ben-Yosef and Gruner were both executed there.

  Under the 1947 United Nations Partition Plan, Acre was designated part of a future Arab state. On the 18th of March 1948, an Arab ambush detonated a mine on a route east of the city, near the Moslem cemetery. Four technicians from the Palestine Electric Company and five British soldiers escorting them were killed. The Haganah retaliated by blowing up a bridge and derailing a train. Before the war formally broke out, the Carmeli Brigade's 21st Battalion had already damaged the Al-Kabri aqueduct that supplied Acre's water. When Arab repair crews restored the flow, Jewish forces poured flasks of typhoid and dysentery bacteria into the aqueduct. It was part of a biological warfare program called Operation Cast Thy Bread. In late April or early May 1948, Jewish forces also cut the electricity powering the city's water pumps, and a typhoid epidemic broke out. Israeli officials later credited the town's fall partly to the demoralization that epidemic caused.

  Carmeli forces attacked on the 16th of May 1948. An ultimatum warned that unless the town surrendered, 'we will destroy you to the last man and utterly.' Local notables signed the surrender on the night of 17-the 18th of May. Sixty bodies were found afterward, and roughly three quarters of the Arab population, 13,510 out of 17,395 people, were displaced.

  Through the 1950s, new Jewish neighborhoods rose in Acre's northern and eastern districts. The town became a development center absorbing new immigrants, many of them Jews from Morocco. Baruch Noy, the city's first Jewish mayor, organized its municipal services and worked to improve conditions for both new immigrants and Arab residents. He encouraged Arabs to run for municipal council and established the practice of electing an Arab deputy mayor.

  In the 1990s, Acre absorbed thousands of Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union. Within a few years, though, the balance shifted again. Jewish residents left the northern neighborhoods for new housing in nearby Nahariya, while Arab residents moved in from surrounding villages. The city kept a clear Jewish majority even so; by 2011 its population of 46,000 included 30,000 Jews and 14,000 Arabs.

  During Noy's tenure, groundwork was also laid for what would grow into the neighboring town of Kfar Ata.

• 7. Beneath the Old City

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  Archaeologists began excavating Tell Akko, the city's ancient mound, in 1973. In 2012, a team working at the foot of the southern seawall uncovered a quay and other remains of a 2,300-year-old port. Mooring stones weighing 250 to 300 kilograms each lay at the edge of a five-meter stone platform, carved in Phoenician style. Researchers believe the installation once helped haul military vessels from the water onto the shore.

  Beneath the citadel and prison of Acre lies a much older complex of halls, built and used by the Knights Hospitaller. Today's street level sits eight meters above the Crusader-era floor, leaving the fortress buried deep underground. Four wings enclose an open courtyard spanning 1,200 square meters, with a well four meters deep and two plastered pools for drinking and washing. The northern wing alone holds nine long halls across two floors, roofed with barrel vaults ten meters high. Its outer walls run 3.5 meters thick, and the halls once served as warehouses and a rainwater reservoir. One three-story building, the Sugar Refinery Hall, held a lower reservoir of two connected pools 7.5 meters deep. Above it stood a main hall seven meters high. It once stored hundreds of clay vessels used in sugar production, which gave the hall its name. The western wing's Columned Hall, a ten-meter dining room with a ribbed vault, rests on three stone columns each three meters across. The Pillar Hall in the eastern wing covers 1,400 square meters beneath a cross-vaulted ceiling, and once hosted knightly meetings and ceremonies.

  In March 2017, marine archaeologists from Haifa University announced the discovery of a Crusader shipwreck carrying treasure, dated between 1062 and 1250 AD. Alongside it, excavation teams recovered ceramic bowls and jugs from Syria, Cyprus, and southern Italy. Researchers believe the gold coins aboard may have been meant as a bribe to boat owners, to buy safe passage in an escape. Robert Kool of the Israel Antiquities Authority identified the thirty coins as florins.

  Above ground, medieval European traces survive too, like the Church of Saint George at Genovese Square, once home to merchant quarters run by traders from Pisa and Amalfi.

• 8. A City of Faiths

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  UNESCO has designated the Old City of Acre a World Heritage Site, and roughly 48,000 people live in the city today. Acre remains one of Israel's mixed cities, with Arab residents making up 32 percent of the population. In the Old City itself, 95 percent of residents were Arab as of 2000. Only about 15 percent of today's Arab population descends from families who lived there before 1948. By 2022, the city's population broke down as 56.5 percent Jewish, 29.5 percent Muslim, 2.7 percent Christian, 0.2 percent Druze, and 11.1 percent other.

  Acre is also the holiest city of the Baháʼí Faith in Israel, and it draws pilgrims every year. Baháʼu'lláh, the faith's founder, was imprisoned in the city's Citadel under Ottoman rule. He spent his final years at the Mansion of Bahjí just outside the city, still formally a prisoner of the Ottoman Empire. He died there on the 29th of May 1892. The Shrine of Baháʼu'lláh, built near where he died, holds his remains and serves as the Qiblih, the direction Baháʼís worldwide face during daily prayer. Other holy sites in the city include the House of ʻAbbúd, where Baháʼu'lláh lived with his family. Nearby is the House of ʻAbdu'lláh Páshá, later home to his successor, ʻAbdu'l-Bahá. In 2008, these Baháʼí holy places in Acre and Haifa were added to the UNESCO World Heritage List.

  On the 8th of October 2008, an Arab resident of Acre drove through a predominantly Jewish neighborhood during the Yom Kippur holiday, setting off five days of violence between Arab and Jewish residents.

  Every year, Baháʼí pilgrims still make the journey to the Shrine at Bahjí, just outside Acre's walls. That small patch of ground now anchors the direction of daily prayer for a faith practiced far beyond this coastline.