House of Arches (Lod / Lydda)

Also known as בית הקשתות, Beit HaKashtot

The House of Arches (Beit HaKashtot) is a large kurkar-sandstone building in the Old City of Lod — the town the Crusaders knew as Lydda, seat of a Latin bishop and the centre of the cult of Saint George. It is built as three successive ranges of broad arches carrying cross-vaults roofed with shallow domes, each range raised in a different era, so a single structure preserves several centuries of building. Its documented life is industrial: through the Ottoman period and the British Mandate, down to 1948, it worked as an olive-oil press (a bet bad), one of many in Lod, and the stone crushing basins still stand inside. The Crusader link is suggested rather than proven. Local heritage accounts attribute the monumental arches of the northern range to the Crusader period — possibly the substructure of a hall or grand public building — and the smaller central arches to the Mamluk period, with the simpler southern range Ottoman. The published archaeological surveys, however, describe only the oil-press phase and do not confirm a twelfth-century date, so the Crusader attribution is best treated as a local tradition awaiting excavation rather than an established fact. The building survives in sound structural condition and is earmarked for conservation within the regeneration of Lod's Old City.

Coordinates: 31.9530°, 34.9012°

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