Khayat Garden, Public garden in Haifa, Israel
Khayat Garden is a public garden in Haifa with multiple terraces, decorative plantings, fruit trees, waterfalls, and irrigation channels woven into the natural ravine landscape. The design connects different elevation levels, allowing visitors to move through distinct areas at their own pace.
Aziz Khayat (1875–1943), a wealthy Haifa landowner, built the garden in 1936 as a family retreat on about 6.5 dunams beside the lower spring of Wadi Siah, known as Ein Siah or Nabi Elias. Some accounts say the Khayat family restored an earlier garden in the 1930s rather than building it new. After Aziz died in 1943 the garden passed to his daughter Lucy, and after her death in 1972 it was sold to the Haifa municipality.
The garden's Arabic name, Bustan al-Khayyat, means "the tailor's orchard", after the Haifa family that owned it. In the early 1980s Amos Gitai filmed scenes of his film "Esther" here. Since 2008 the Coalition for the Preservation of Khayat Garden, including the Council for Conservation of Heritage Sites, the Society for the Protection of Nature and Technion researchers, has held work days in the wadi to clear and maintain it.
Access is by car via the road to Kfar Samir cemetery, at the lower end of Nahal Siah. The garden is not maintained by the municipality and has been neglected for years, so paths, terraces and channels are overgrown and uneven; wear sturdy shoes. Visits are promoted by the Social Development Association, which works to keep the site open and explain its history.
In the early 1980s, scenes from "Esther", a film by Amos Gitai, were shot in the garden. The filmmaker used the terraces, pools and channels as a set, which is why the overgrown site still appears on film even though the municipality's 1998 renovation plan was never carried out.
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