Bayt Balit is a large residential house in the Judayda (Jdeideh) Quarter of Aleppo, located across the lane from
Bayt Basil. The house takes the name of the Balit family, prosperous Armenian merchants who immigrated to Aleppo from France as early as the late 16th-early 17th/early 11th century AH and remained in the city through the twentieth century.
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Like many early-modern Aleppine bourgeois houses, the Balit house contains several stories and is oriented around a courtyard with a pool, plantings, and pavements of opus sectile marking the entrances to important interior spaces, i.e. the qa'a or reception hall.
Notes:
- Mary Momdjian, "Halabis and Foreigners in Aleppo's Mediterranean Trade: The Role of Levantine Merchants in Eighteenth-Century Commercial Networks," in Stefan Winter and Mafalda Ade, eds., Aleppo and Its Hinterland in the Ottoman Period / Alep et sa province à l'époque Ottomane. Leiden: Brill, 2019.
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