The Clock Tower

This guide to the Clock Tower in Jaffa, Tel Aviv, starts with a local merchant named Yossef Moyal, tired of being stopped for the time, who used Sultan Abdul Hamid II's silver jubilee around 1900 as the occasion to build one everyone could see. It follows the tower through the communities who funded it, a marble medallion whose carved seal has been quietly altered on three of its four faces, and a Jewish watchmaker kept on through the First World War to keep it wound. Look up at the pale limestone shaft as you listen, and see how many faces of that medallion still show what it started with.