Photo Friday (Vol. LX) [desert ruin edition]

I'll cut to the chase today since the pictures do most of the talking anyway.

Just north of Beer Sheva, off to one side of the main road (Rt. 40), sits a ruined building that never fails to catch my eye when I pass it.  Invariably I am running late and don't have time to stop and explore... but last week I finally pulled over and checked it out.

I have no idea what it was or who built it, but the stonework and location suggest it is probably left over from when Beer Sheva was a sleepy, southern outpost of the Ottoman Empire.

This is what the ruin looks like calling to passers by from its little hill in the Negev Desert (note: everything in the desert is green these days because we've just finished with the winter rains):

Walking from the road, the ruins begin to take on some detail:

On the extreme right side of the picture above you can see the remains of a small room that had little niches in two walls.  Were these for pigeons, mail, keys? ... who knows.  Here is a closer look at this detail:

Once inside the ruin I noticed some neat architectural touches that further reminded me of some of the Turkish Ottoman buildings in Beer Sheva's Old City.  Here is an arched doorway (note that some of the mud/plaster that once covered all of the walls remains inside the room beyond the archway):

And another one:

While standing inside one of the smaller side rooms I noticed that a hole in the wall was neatly framing some nearby trees and a smaller ruin:

That's it for today.  I've been poking around more ruins lately (closer to home) so in the weeks to come you may see more of this sort of thing.

Shabbat Shalom!