The Souk Al Musawkaf in Unaizah, Saudi Arabia

 

The Souk Al Musawkaf (سوق المسوكف الشعبي) is located in the city of Unaizah (عنيزة). Have you ever seen Suq or Souq? While I think the latter makes sense because of the (ق), Souk is more common. Lonely Planet even writes about this souk [1]. I read: “beautiful mock-castle, …, excellent place to recline, small museum, …, tall date palms, local handicrafts” – all true!

Unaizah (عنيزة) is a city of about 185,000 inhabitants and lies north of Riyadh (الرياض) and south of Buraydah (بريدة) [2]. The market was built in 2007 after the old market was demolished [3]. The old style of the market was revived, and so there is now a large courtyard with plenty of seating surrounded by traditional mud arcades. Visit Saudi has an excellent advertisement for foods and shops, which turned out to be accurate, but would be a rather long quote. Some shops catered for tourists, but most had a mixed variety of goods as shown in the last picture.

In between there had been the time for prayers.

In any case, I was able to have conversations there. For example, with a young woman who works for a French company and therefore frequently travels outside of Saudi Arabia. She also allowed to take her picture. I also met some Filipinas who work there and were enjoying their day off; they were, of course, also wearing abayas and headscarves, but not niqabs. Interestingly, I spoke with more women than men there, which I hadn't expected. Children said goodbye to us as we walked to the bus. One boy had a painted-on beard, which immediately reminded me of Groucho Marx.

Links and no Annotations:
[1] https://www.lonelyplanet.com/saudi-arabia/unayzah/attractions/al-musawkaf-market/a/poi-sig/1615627/1342759
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unaizah
[3] https://www.visitsaudi.com/en/qassim/attractions/al-musawkaf-traditional-market-in-unaizah

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