Chronicle No. 11 · History

The Kitchen That Has Been Feeding Jerusalem Since 1552

A sultan's wife endowed a soup kitchen, a hospice and an inn a block from the Via Dolorosa — and the pots never went cold.

In 1552, in Ottoman Jerusalem, a complex went up on the slope of Aqbat al-Sitt, one block south of the Via Dolorosa. Its founder was Haseki Hürrem Sultan — known in Europe as Roxelana — the wife of Suleiman the Magnificent.

It was not a monument. It was a working plant for looking after strangers.

The complex brought together, behind one set of walls:

• a mosque
• a pilgrim hospice of 55 rooms
• a caravanserai and stables for travellers and their animals
• a bakery, a woodshed and a bathhouse
• the imaret itself: the public kitchen

The kitchen served two hot meals a day with bread, and is recorded as feeding at least 500 people twice daily. The list of who could eat is the interesting part. Not only the city's poor, but orphans, students, dervishes and travellers — anyone whose position in Jerusalem was temporary or precarious.

What kept it running was the waqf, the endowment. Hürrem Sultan settled on it a portfolio of income: land in Palestine and Tripoli, shops, public bathhouses, soap factories and flour mills. The meals were not a gift renewed each year by a generous ruler. They were a claim on a permanent revenue stream, written down and legally binding.

That is why the kitchen is still there, close to five centuries on, widely described as the oldest continuously operating public kitchen in the world.

Grand gestures are easy in hospitality. Grand gestures that survive the person who made them are rare, and they survive for unglamorous reasons: a properly funded structure, a written brief, and a clear answer to the question of who exactly is entitled to be fed.

Lesson: Hospitality only outlives its founder when someone builds the funding for it as carefully as the building itself.