The Ottoman houses in the old part of Rosetta are what make the town worth visiting. Efforts continue to restore and open some of these houses, of which only 22 remain. Unfortunately, work is sporadic, and though progress is being made, you can never quite tell what's going to be open for visits and what is not.
Amasyali House is one of the largest and best preserved, perhaps because the family of the original owner lived there until the early 1920s. One of the first buildings, along with Arab Killi, which has become the Rasheed National Museum, to be restored, it also has one of the most impressive exteriors (a small consolation if you can't get inside). It's five stories tall, and in the original design, the usual ground-floor well and cistern were displaced to a basement in favor of a reception hall. It's well worth going inside Amasyali if you can -- it has some lovely examples of 18th-century wooden mashrabeya paneling and various secret rooms and byways that allowed the women of the house to move about unobserved.
Next door to Amasyali House is the Mill of Abu Shahin, where a grinding mill, originally used to grind flour and rice, has been fully rebuilt. Whether the wood mechanics of it are as fully functional as claimed is debatable, but they certainly move in all the right ways if you give them a push. The massive street doors of the mill are worth noting in passing.
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