Calvary - The Church of the Holy Sepulchre

Thursday 3 October 2013. In the previous entries I described our trip to Jerusalem as part of a tour from the cruise ship Thomson Celebration. The first entry about this tour covered the Mount of Olives and Garden of Gethsemane and the second covered our walk through the Stations of the Cross.

We have now arrived at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which covers the sites of both the Crucificion and the tomb of Jesus. The church itself was built by Constantine, the first Christian Roman emperor after excavating the site - the Emperor Hadrian in the second century AD had buried the site under earth and constructed a temple to Venus (some versions have it to Aphrodite) there.

In effect there are two connected churches here, one covering the site of the Crucifixion, excavated by Helena during which she reportedly discovered the cross of Jesus and the other covering the tomb of Jesus, the sepulchre itself. This was surrounded by a building called the Aedicule. It was damaged in riots and invasions, but remained a Christian building under the Muslim rule of the Persians. It was razed to the ground in 1009 by order of the caliph, provoking strong condemnation from Europe and, it is thought, partly providing the reasons for the Crusades.

It was rebuilt over the centuries, starting as a collection of open air chapels, roofed over in 1149. In 1555 the Aedicule was rebuilt and extended to create an antechamber.

Today the Church of the Holy Sepulchre is under the auspices of Catholic, Greek Orthodox and Armenian Apostolic Christians. In 1853 a status quo was agreed meaning that everything covered by the "common ground" should be left as it was at the time unless all three factions agreed. One effect is that a ladder under a window (see above photo) has been left there ever since.

On the right of the courtyard is Station Ten of the Cross, where Jesus was stripped of his clothes.

I don't like using flash inside churches if I can help it. I have a fairly steady hand, however in this case it was just a bit too dark. The flash would not have reached to the back anyway. This is Station Eleven. The spot where Jesus was nailed to the Cross. You can see that the place was filled with people - always a problem for me at only five feet and four inches... A mosaic at the rear shows Jesus being nailed to the Cross.

The site of the Crucifixion, Station Twelve. The altar is built over the spot and you see someone kneeling underneath to kiss the spot where the Cross stood. This has a silver star around it on the ground. To either side glass panels allow a view of Golgotha's rock with the split said to have been caused by an earthquake at the moment of the Saviour's death.

To the side of this spot is a large golden mosaic showing three scenes of the Crucifixion and its aftermath. We see two of the scenes here of Jesus' body being laid on a cloth over a slab of stone where his body was washed and anointed prior to burial and then to the left we see his body carried into the rock cut tomb.

In front of the mosaic is the actual site of the Anointing Stone. The stone itself is a replacement of 1810, but the site is said to have healing powers and I took this photo in a gap of just a second or two before it was again surrounded by pilgrims, who press cloths to the stone in the hope that healing powers will impregnate them. This is the 13th Station of the Cross.

The Aedicule under the larger of the two domes of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. This chapel-like building surrounds what was once the rock hewn tomb that Jesus' body was laid to rest in. The original ground was thought to rise at a steep angle from right to left. The antechamber that was created in 1555 covered the place where the Angel appeared to Mary and also the "Angel Stone", the stone that was thought to have blocked the entrance.

The Aedicule is in dire need of restoration. A process that is apparently held up by the Status Quo as agreement on a plan has not yet been reached. A skeleton of metal holds together the peeling red marble from around its walls. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre is huge, packed with people and you can't hope to see everything. We had no time to join the queue to go inside the Aedicule and I did not know about the the chapels all around it,

To the rear of the Rotunda containing the Aedicule is a further rock-cut chamber thought to be the tomb of Joseph of Arimathea. There are also chapels dedicated to the meetings of Jesus with Mary Magdalene and the Virgin Mary following the Resurrection amongst many others.

I tend to do things in reverse. I go somewhere and then read up on it afterwards... Perhaps I should do it the other way around.

It is still just about morning. We leave the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, pressing against the incoming tide of newly arrived eager pilgrims and sightseers in order to get out. We walk a short distance and leave the city by way of the Jaffa Gate. We walked along the hillside and then down some steps, admiring the windmill in the distance and then boarded our coach, which will now take us into Palestine controlled territory, to Bethlehem. But first a spot of lunch methinks!

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Jerusalem's Western Wall and The Way of The Cross

Thursday 3 October 2013. In the last entry I described the trip to Jerusalem, our descent from the Mount of Olives to the Garden of Gethsemane and the Church of All Nations.

We now leave the coach at the old city walls and enter the large courtyard before the Western or Wailing Wall. The first thing we do is dash for a toilet, knowing that we have a 2-hour walk before us. I came out the wrong way and had passed through a turnstile before I realised so there was a brief "Oh heck.." moment before I found I could nip quickly through a shop and back to the courtyard. Except it wasn't a shop, it was some sort of security place with a scanning doorway like you find at airports and a couple of armed guards on duty... I strode through trying to look bewildered (it wasn't hard...) and nobody thought me worth stopping.

As you can see by the golden Dome of the Rock behind the wall, we are very close to the Temple Rock.

In fact the lower bits of the wall are the original external wall of the Second Temple, raised by King Herod. It is tradition for Jews to pray at this wall, rocking themselves back and forth and also by placing prayer messages in the cracks between the stones of the wall. They consider this place the very foundation of the world.

This was a public holiday and the place was packed with happy family crowds celebrating Barmitzvahs. The photo was taken by dodging lots of cheering women, who were cheering their son, nephew, grandson, who was taking his place at the wall.

We gathered back as a group and followed our guide through a gateway and into a series of narrows streets. I would almost say passages - some were roofed by slats of wood, some by buildings that were built over the street. As narrow as they were, every now and then we had to press to the side to allow a car through.

We stopped at a small bakery. The shops seemed to be set into the walls, the counter was the sill of a large open window. After some negotiation our guide had the baker take a freshly baked pitta bread from the oven and passed it amongst us.

Miss Franny is waiting for a bit of pitta bread to make its way around to us. To the right of the photo was a vegetable shop. Actually no shop, just vegetables set in baskets on the paving of the street with the owner crouched down beside them.

We joined the Way of the Cross - Via Dolorosa means the Road of Sorrows. When the Romans chose Christianity to be their main religion, Constantine, the first Christian Emperor, sent his mother, Helena to Jerusalem to discover the sites associated with Jesus. This was in the fourth century, 326-328, so around 300 years after the events she sought news of. She presumably had to judge whether she heard tales handed down through generations or whether she heard someone hoping for payment... See Wikipedia for details of the relics she found.

The Fifth Station of the Cross. Jesus, exhausted, rested His hand against the wall for support. Centuries of people placing their hands in the same place has imprinted a deep indentation in the wall. Here Simon of Cyrene (now part of Libya) was ordered to carry the cross for Jesus. There is a sharp right turn here and the Way starts to climb up towards Golgotha via a series of steps.

Climbing up past Station Six, the House of Veronica on the left. Veronica (later St Veronica) had previously been healed by Jesus and came out of her house as He passed and wiped His face free of the sweat and blood with a veil she removed from her person. She bundled the veil and returned to her house and when she looked again at the veil, the image of Jesus' face was left on the cloth.

Her name was really Bernice. "Veronica" comes from the latin vera, (true) and the greek icon, (image) and refers to the veil which bore the true image. Her veil is one of the treasures kept at St Peter's Basilica in the Vatican.

We climb up past Station Seven, which was the extent of the city at the time. Here Jesus' crimes were proclaimed or read out.

Part of the later city. As we walked towards the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, we pass the arches which lead into the area known as the Muristan. The Muristan was the site of a very early hospital catering for Christian pilgrims. A later hospital on the site was built and run by the Knights Templars of St John, who were part of the conquering Crusaders and who became known as the Knights Hospitallers. These are the same as those who built the fortifications we saw earlier in the week at Rhodes and who were evicted themselves by the Ottomans, becoming the Knights of Malta.

We passed under a narrow doorway and came directly to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, covering both the site of the Crucifixion and the tomb of Jesus. We shall see this in the next entry.

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