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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 October 2014
This article examines the political and social tensions of late Ottoman Haifa through the history of the Hejaz Railway and a particular monument, the ‘Exalted Column’ (Sütūn-u ʿĀlī), a monument erected in 1903 to commemorate the beginning of Ottoman construction on the Haifa railway branch. By first establishing the use of railways and railway architecture as a means of exerting state power in a comparative and local perspective, the railway structures in Haifa are analysed in the context of that city's other monumental buildings. This then leads to a discussion of the Sütūn-u ʿĀlī as a celebration of Ottoman authority and modernity, and of the developing Ottoman–German alliance. The symbolism of the column's iconography is shown to reflect a variety of problems that the Ottoman state faced in Haifa at the turn of the twentieth century.
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48 Consular Reports: Commerce, Manufactures, etc, 72:274 (Washington, 1903), 467.
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50 Kreiser only noted an inscription in Ottoman Turkish. However, that translation seems to be based on the Arabic inscription. Kreiser, ‘Public monuments’, 110.
51 Translated by the author from the Arabic inscription on the Sütūn-u ʿĀlī.
52 Translated by the author from the Ottoman Turkish inscription on the Sütūn-u ʿĀlī.
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70 Ibid., 488–90. The provincial average is taken from the male and non-military rüşdiye schools in the districts of Saida, Sour, Haifa, Nazareth, Safed, Tiberias, Jenin, Jableh, Marqab and Sahyoun.
71 Ibid., 487.
72 Ibid., 475–6, 492–3.
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