Tag Archive for 'photography'

An early start after a few hours of sleep on our first day in Jerusalem. This had been designated for exploring the Old City, and with Temple Mount with its grand al-Aqba Mosque and Dome of the Rock only open to non-Muslims between the hours of eight and ten am there was no avoiding the dawn.

Jerusalem, according to Mike our ever-knowledgeable guide, is roughly split into three parts: “ancient” Jerusalem, or the City of David; “old”, or historical Jerusalem; and the “contemporary” part of the city which houses our hotel and many of the parliamentary buildings. Local law insists that all buildings be constructed (or at least covered) in the same sandy-coloured limestone, so the demarcation isn’t as harsh as it would be otherwise.

The first thing that strikes you is how busy the city is – both in terms of its bustling, densely-populated centre and in its method of construction. The Old City provides the most striking examples of this: it’s a warren of interconnected passageways and buildings built on top of buildings, cities built on top of cities; the remnants of the region’s many wars cannibalised into new constructions by the next round of conquering invaders. We enter through what is known as the “Dung Gate” in the old city walls to the sound of drums, which Mike tells us is not really to celebrate our arrival but because Thursday is a traditional date for bar mitzvahs.

We walk a lot today – what one member of our party equipped with a pedometer later claims to be a good seven miles. Through the Temple Mount area to Bethesda, traditional birthplace of the Virgin Mary and location of the medicinal baths where Jesus once healed the sick. My brother and I climb right down into the ruins of the baths, which provide one of the most striking examples of how the city as it stands today is built on the layers and ruins of what has gone before. It must be an archeologist’s dream – so much so that Mike points out to us fragments of excavated Roman pavement, brought up to the contemporary surface so that pilgrims can walk in the footsteps of Jesus even if the roads he trod in his last five days were really eighteen feet lower.

In the afternoon we walk the Via Dolorosa, or Way of Suffering – the last steps of Jesus, laid out with the major events in the Good Friday story we recognise as the Stations of the Cross. Now part of the Old City’s “Arabic quarter”. this walk is perhaps my favourite part of the tour – the bustle and bargaining and merchants clamouring for our attention couldn’t have been much different two thousand years ago although, as one of our party points out when I share this analogy, probably less likely then to have offered memory cards and DON’T WORRY – BE JEWISH t-shirts. I know the barter system doesn’t appeal to everybody but I love the cheeky, pushy salesmen who try to charm us with fake Scottish accents and change their prices to reflect the colour of the money in your wallet rather than pass on a sale because you haven’t changed for shekels yet.

The symbolic walk ends in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, an ornate basilica in the Greek Orthodox style commemorating the site of the death and resurrection of Jesus. As we queue to catch a glimpse of the Rock of Calvary I start thinking of Graceland, and the more I try to get rid of the mental comparison the more it sticks. It’s maybe the lavish decoration – something you don’t tend to see much of in the Catholic churches I am used to and so something that tends to leave me cold – or maybe the crowds holding up cameraphones. The only real difference is that nobody stops the pilgrims using flash photography and you’re allowed to touch and kiss the artefacts – probably because many of them are symbolic rather than “genuine”. Some Spanish women, heads bowed, hair covered in shawls, are spreading whole carrier bags full of just-purchased crucifixion-themed souvenirs on the “stone of anointing”, symbolising where Jesus’ body was dressed for burial, even though I’m sure Mike tells us this was only an eighteenth century addition.

I find it strange that I am more moved by the Garden Tomb – a site only nominated as the location of the crucifixion and burial by the British Protestant General Gordon in the nineteenth century – rather than the site that the more convincing evidence points to. A guide – a gorgeous Israeli Christian named Philip, who speaks compelling rhetoric with a trace of generican accent – points out a hill whose rocky formations seem to resemble a skull. He isn’t even phased that the site’s own interpretation of the crucifixion would place it in what is now a bus station, arguing that Roman executions always took place in accessible places as deterrent and spectacle. Regardless of fact, the tomb itself provides a great illustration of what the place where Jesus was laid to rest would have been like.

We also pay a visit to the Western Wall, which the Jews would never call the “wailing wall”. I don’t slip a prayer into its cracks because my mind goes blank at the crucial moment, but apparently the 21st century allows for you to email this most ancient and holy of Jewish sacred places. “The Western Wall – the greatest psychiatrist we Jews ever had, apart from Siggy Freud,” says Mike. “It’s only worrying if the Wall talks back…

“We have no oil. We have no gold. Only rocks,” he likes to say. “But still, there is something that draws people to Jerusalem.” And he’s right. It seems hard to understand why one piece of land can hold such pull to so many disparate millions from so many faiths, particularly if you do not identify as a religious person yourself. But, tired as I am, even I can tell from my first day that there is something magnetic about this layered, complex city.