Artists’ depictions clearly show that in the middle of the 19th century, the square in front of the mosque/madrasa of Sultan Qaitbey still looked very much as it did when it was originally laid out in the 1470s. A four-storey tall building adjoined the façade of the mosque next to its minaret. Only a fragment of the wall next to the mosque remains. Two similar tall residential buildings with storerooms or shops on the ground floor stood across the square, on its eastern side. All that remains of these buildings now are stone-vaulted compartments that house some of the shops that face the square and sell handcrafted products.

Two of them have been conserved and adapted for modern use in 2018-19 by ARCHiNOS Architecture as part of the project supported by the European Union and the Drosos Foundation.