Five Centuries of Jerusalem Soup

((A friend brought this to my attention today.))

On a gray Tuesday in December, a small knot of people bundled up against the wind gusting from the hills above Jerusalem as they waited for two narrow, metal doors to open. Set into an arch in a stone facade at the bottom of steps that lead down from a courtyard, the doors stood flanked by small, very old stone discs etched with eight-pointed star patterns, the only hint that the doorway had been once one of importance. Other than the group waiting patiently, only a faintly savory, warming aroma hinted at the simmering, stirring and seasoning taking place inside.

“I think today is molokiya,” one man said, referring to the popular soup dish of spinach-like jute mallow leaves, simmered in a broth and ladled atop rice mixed with chunks of meat. His companion, aged similarly somewhere either side of 60, snuffed noncommittally and stamped his feet to fend off the chill. Like everyone in the little group, each man carried a shopping bag that held plastic tubs scrubbed clean of their original ice cream, olives, sheep’s cheese or other comestible.

That morning was roughly the 170,000th time in almost 500 years that these doors would open. But they are not doors to a restaurant. They open to a high, domed hall with stainless steel counters and, behind them, hot vats of soup and stew that is given away daily to those who visit. For this is probably the oldest continuously working charitable soup kitchen in the world: Khaski Sultan Imaret.

The namesake is a key to its story and its founding patron, a woman who never herself passed through its doors. European history remembers her as Roxolana, but that was just a nickname derived from the place of her birth in around 1502: Ruthenia, known today as Ukraine. At that time the power of the Ottoman dynasty was expanding and, like Mamluk sultans before them, the Ottomans relied on slave networks to supply the centers of their empire with human resources from its peripheries, chiefly East and Central Africa, the coast of North Africa and parts of Eastern Europe. Having been brought to Istanbul, Hurrem Sultan was purchased by Hafsa, a wife of Ottoman Sultan Selim I, as a gift for her son Suleiman, then in his early 20s. When Suleiman soon afterward acceded to the throne, he broke with royal tradition and declared Hurrem Sultan his one and formal wife. As such, she was granted the imperial title Khaski Hurrem Sultan, which translates roughly, “Sultan’s Own Joy.”'>>>

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