For 150 years, people lived, traded, and prayed in Jerusalem's Mahane Yehuda market. This project gathers the scattered paper trail they left behind, and turns it into one connected story you can walk through.
Everything here exists to answer a single question, for every corner of the market: who was here, and when?
After years of digging, the archive holds tens of thousands of individual facts. On their own they're just scraps. The work is connecting them.
Nobody wrote the history of this market in one neat book. It survives in thousands of fragments, scattered across the world. We track down every one.
A scrap of paper doesn't go straight onto the map. It moves through stages, from "just found it" to "fully woven in."
Here's the honest part: most sources never finish the trip, yet. Of 565 sources tracked, only around 170 have made it all the way through. The rest are parked at an earlier stage, waiting their turn. That's not a mistake, the master list exists precisely to remember where each source got stuck, so nothing is ever lost.
Underneath everything are just three kinds of thing, people, records, and places. The whole archive is the art of linking them correctly.
One person might be spelled five different ways across old records. We give each real human a single hidden tag, so all five spellings point back to one person, never two ghosts of the same man.
Every fact remembers exactly where it came from, which newspaper, which page, which year. So any claim can be traced straight back to its source. Nothing is just asserted.
Every shop and home sits on a real plot of land with real coordinates, so the moment we know where someone was, we can drop them onto the actual map of the market.
a named greengrocer, the plot they held, and the year it's attested, one person, one place, one year, all stitched from the scraps.
Once the facts are connected, the project pours them back out into things a person can actually use.
Click any plot of land and see who was there, decade by decade, the market's history as a place you can wander.
Look up any family name and find every trace of them, every shop, every record, every mention we've gathered.
Dashboards that show how much is done, what's been found, and what's still waiting to be read.
A thousand scraps of paper, one connected story, that's the whole machine.
The Mahane Yehuda Archive · place × time → who was here