Khan as-Sawiya (Khirbet Berkit)

Also known as Khan as-Sawiya, Khan as-Sawiyah, Khirbet Berkit, Khirbet Berqit, As-Sawiya khan, Borceos

Khan as-Sawiya, also called Khirbet Berkit, is a small square ruined caravanserai on the edge of the village of As-Sawiya, roughly 15–18 km south of Nablus on the old road to Jerusalem. Its walls still stand to some height and the corners are built with drafted ashlars — a masonry style strongly associated with Frankish secular building in the twelfth century, though the technique was reused by later builders as well. Pottery sherds of Crusader and Ayyubid date have been recovered from the site and the village itself is recorded as Muslim-inhabited during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The Khan is included in Pringle's catalogue of secular buildings in the Latin Kingdom, but no medieval document directly names it; its Crusader-period attribution rests on its architecture and surface finds rather than on written evidence. The 19th-century explorer C. W. Wilson tentatively identified the ruin with Borceos, a town mentioned by Josephus on the border between Samaria and Judea.

Coordinates: 32.0847°, 35.2578°

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