Mofleh offers tea, conversation and sometimes lunch to the visitors who venture off the main road and stumble across his dwelling. Many Bdoul sell souvenirs and donkey rides in the main tourist drag. “If you live in the city, maybe you don’t walk all day.” UNESCO tried to convince him to take a house in the village, he says, but he refused. “ was meant to be across the board, but now because Um Sayhoun is only so big … the people who did not have housing guaranteed to them stayed in the park,” she says.Īccording to Mofleh, before the construction of Um Sayhoun, there were about 150 families living inside Petra now there are around 10, and he is the only one left in the center of the park. But others, like Mofleh, didn’t want to give up their traditional lifestyle, and in any case, the supply of housing in the village could not keep up with the growing families, said Allison Mickel, an assistant professor of anthropology at Lehigh University Many, especially families with children, liked being closer to schools and hospitals. Reactions to the resettlement were mixed. Upon further thought and counting on his fingers, the number rose to eight.Īfter Petra was designated a World Heritage site in 1985, UNESCO and the Jordanian government began efforts to relocate the Bdoul from Petra to the newly constructed village of Um Sayhoun nearby. It wasn’t his last venture into matrimony–when first asked, he said he had been married four times. But the marriage didn’t work out, and he returned to his cave. He married a Swiss woman, had a daughter, and for a while split his time between Switzerland and Petra. Sometimes the meeting of cultures led to romance, as it did for Mofleh. “One Canadian lady stayed in this cave alone for one month.” He gestured at a hillside across the canyon.
“When I was young, some people would come and sleep with the Bedouins for one month,” Mofleh said. The site began to draw a trickle of Western tourists after it was “discovered” by the Swiss explorer John Lewis Burckhardt in 1812. Many, including Mofleh, also found work on archeological digs and in the tourism industry. Traditionally, the Bedouins lived off goat herding and small-scale farming.
It’s not known exactly when the Bdoul tribe took up residence in the ruins, but nomadic tribes have been living in the area at least as far back as the 1500s, says Steven Simms, a retired anthropology professor at Utah State University who studied the site and the Bdoul in the 1980s and 90s. Petra, a city carved into the sandstone cliffs in Jordan’s desert, was capital of the Nabataean empire between 400 B.C. If you have problems, you forget them quickly.” “The most beautiful place,” Mofleh says of his home. A Jordanian flag stands sentinel over the canyon below. In the winter, the rain waters the plants in the summer, he hauls water up from a restaurant in the tourist area.
A lonely ruin stands sentinel windows#
Outside the cave–more spacious than the apartments of many city-dwellers and with windows drilled into the stone for light–Mofleh constructed a walled terrace with a garden of flowering shrubs where he welcomes visitors for tea. Now Mofleh is one of just a handful of Bedouins from the Bdoul tribe still living inside the historic site.Īlthough his cave on the back side of Jebal Habis, or Prison Mountain, is just a five-minute climb from the main tourist drag, it feels far removed.
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