The Naseef House in Jeddah in Lady Anne’s Journals

From Lady Anne Blunt’s Journals, December 15th, 1880, during her trip to Jeddah:

“In the afternoon we called first on Omar Nasif. The chestnut mare still stands outside the little yard near the house…”

Here are modern images of the Naseef house, one of the very few buildings still standing from the old down-town of Jeddah, which has all been razed to the ground, to give way to modern building in the 1960s (yet another beautiful Arab city destroyed…)

For an inside tour of the Naseef house, and a  view of the yard where that mare in Lady Anne’s Journals, see this blog entry here. The house as in other old Jeddah houses in apparently made of coral (yes, the stuff in the reefs) and of wood imported from what is today Indonesia, a legacy of the glorious (and little known) history of Jeddah as a cross-roads of trade between Egypt, East Africa and South East Asia (like Mukalla in Yemen, like Mocha, like Aden after that).