During the final years of the Turkish Occupation, Koum Kapi hosted an entire village of Arabs, known as "halikoutes" or "halikoutides". It has generally been assumed that the shantytown outside the eastern city walls was erected by freedmen, former slaves from northern Africa, who had served in the Egyptian army and who later picked up opportunistic manual labour jobs that the locals thought beneath them. According to recent research, the etymology of the pejorative "halikoutes" originates in an Arabic phrase of the Cyrenaic dialect in northern Libya that means "put the box down", a set of words frequently heard but not understood down at the port where these people tried to make wages by encouraging travellers to put down their luggage and allow them to porter.