The Turkish Railway Bridge over Nahal Be'er Sheva

The story

The Turkish railway bridge is a stone arch bridge built in 1916 over Nahal Be'er Sheva, south of the city, as part of the railway line from Nahal Sorek to Kusseima — a branch of the eastern military line toward the west of the Sinai Peninsula, intended to carry soldiers and equipment in the Ottoman-German effort in the campaign over Sinai and the Land of Israel. The plans were drawn up by the German engineer Josef Wennagel of Sarona, an architect on the Berlin–Baghdad railway, and the execution was entrusted to the railway engineer Heinrich Meissner. The bridge was built by the Jewish contractors Michael Ehrlich and Eliyahu Yanovsky, who won the tender and recruited about one hundred and fifty workers as well as stonecutters and masons, a large part of them immigrants from Yemen. The works began in January 1916 with the digging of pits for the foundations; a flood destroyed the foundations, a typhus epidemic broke out in the city and many of the workers fell ill, and workers were killed by British bombardments intended to halt the construction. The construction lasted about six months and cost eleven thousand French francs, payment for which arrived only after a year of inflationary erosion. The length of the bridge is 190 meters and it has twenty semicircular arches — five in the northern section and fifteen in the southern — and it is built of yellowish dressed stone. Its use as a railway ceased in May 1917, and until 1920 the traffic between Beersheba and Bir Asluj passed over it. After the establishment of the state an asphalt road was laid on it, and in 1962 it was closed to vehicle traffic. In 1965 one of the piers collapsed in a flood. In 2017 the bridge was renovated ahead of one hundred years since the Battle of Beersheba, and since then it serves for the passage of pedestrians in the Nahal Be'er Sheva park.

• Ottoman
• Railway
• 1917
• People
• Beersheba