The Horses Square

The story

The Horses Square stands at the meeting of Herzl and Ha-Atzmaut streets, in the Old City of Beersheba. At its center is a steel sculpture of horses, a gift of the sculptor Menashe Kadishman to the city in memory of his parents and his sisters, Michal and Ziva, and the year of its placement is 2012. Kadishman (1932–2015) was an Israeli painter and sculptor and a laureate of the Israel Prize in the field of sculpture. On the square itself stand the Aref al-Aref House and the veteran ful house of 1952. This square is the nearest example on foot of a whole phenomenon: in Beersheba there are more than two hundred and fifty traffic circles, most of them developed, and about fifty of them have a name of their own and carry a sculpture, a fountain or invested landscaping. Some of the squares commemorate people, some carry the names of the city's twin cities, and some mark events and serve as a monument. Some of them are water projects and belong to the urban desert oasis project, conceived by the mayor Ruvik Danilovich and led by the landscape architect Prof. Yael Moria: dozens of water elements, fountains, waterfalls and pools with colored lighting throughout the city, three artificial lakes and changing lighting on public buildings. The project won the “Design Award”. In several of the squares stand signed works: the six-meter-high harp of Israel Primo in Artzieli Square, the glass drop of Jeremy Langford in the Dripper Square on the road to the Netafim plant at Hatzerim, David Ben-Gurion standing on his head by Varda Givoli and Ilan Gelber, the Light Square by Paula Ovadia, Oni Square by Orit Adar Bechar and the hundred nesting boxes of Tzipi Zohar in the Birds Square.

• Public art
• Beersheba