Despite going to bed after midnight on Friday (Saturday morning), I got up at five in the morning on Saturday and went for a walk up the hill on which the village lives. There are supposedly some Byzantine ruins right here, including a mosaic, but I couldn’t find them myself. I’ll definitely be tracking them down before the month is out, though. Breakfast was at eight, so I spent the three hours reading A Game of Thrones, which I have now finished and can only say, “… wow.”
Because lunch and dinner are meat meals, breakfast is the only time we are served dairy. This meant that breakfast included not only cornflakes and 3% milk (yeah, 3%), but also a variety of cheeses and yogurts. I had a large pile of pita stuffed with cheese as well as one with yogurt and cucumber slices. There is an interesting herb by name of Zatar that accompanies many of our meals and it smells and tastes a little bit like oregano; it tastes good on pretty much anything.
After breakfast a troupe of us gathered together our wide-brimmed hats and water bottles to head down to the old crusaders’ castle. The walk took us downhill along a winding, pitted gravel road, a favorite for mountain bikers. This road also snaked along the border of a national forest, part of which I had explored during my morning walk before breakfast. Once we reached the bottom of the hill, it was time to go back up. We continued along the gravel road as it snaked up between farmland and an olive orchard. Dr. Knauth surmised that these lands probably belonged to the Latrune Monastery on the other side of the hill, a French monastery that holds services only in French and Latin.
At the top of the hill we walked through a torn chain link fence to approach the castle. We had to watch our steps, for Jordanian trenches hid beneath shrubs and barbed wire lurked in shrubs. The castle itself was almost underwhelming at first. There was one set of rooms, reinforced by steel and concrete from the war, that was wide open to be explored. As we kept exploring, we realized there were many more rooms with high-ceilings that were mostly submerged in the hillside but could be reached by climbing down into them. There was still a lot of barbed wire and, more dangerously, prickly plants barring our way some of the time. I managed to burst a seedpod full of burrs that decided that the inside of my shoe was where they wanted the party to be while I climbed down into a particularly treacherous entrance to a hall, only to realize a wide door stood to the outside at either end of it.
It was approaching noon, which meant it was going to get even hotter than it already was. While we rested at the castle to take pictures and whatnot, I decided to clime to the roof of the highest structure. It was only when I was halfway up that I realized many of the stones were loose and it was a hard fall to the rocks below, but I managed to scramble my way atop the building. From that vantage point I could see all of the surrounding hill country. They say on a clear day that you can see all the way to the Mediterranean, but it was not one of those days. We headed back the way we came before the sun rose too high, and good we did too, for my water bottle had just run out at that point.
We went for a pre-lunch swim in the village pool, and then played hearts in the dig house after we ate. I napped before dinner and went to bed around nine o’clock.
If yesterday was an adventure, today was even more so. I woke up around five again, though this time I went to sleep until six before getting up and reading in bed with a cup of tea. After breakfast, we loaded onto a bus and headed out on our first trip to Jerusalem.
It’s hard to describe the feeling I got when I looked across the valley from the Mountain of Olives onto the Old City. The view was incredible. We could see the span of the Temple Mount and the Dome of the Rock, Mount Zion, the City of David, and the sprawling cemeteries, both Jewish and Muslim (not together) that lay along the sides of the valley.
We traveled down to the city after that and continued on foot through the Dung Gate (guess what they used that for). We got a view of the western wall of the Temple Mount (the Wailing Wall), but we didn’t approach because that requires a security check and a bunch of other tomfoolery, so we’ll do that later, possible next weekend. We walked through the Jewish Quarter, in which there were the remnants of Hezekiah’s wall and some Roman road.
We exited through another gate but I don’t remember which one. May have been the Yofa (sp?) Gate. All the gates are named for either their function (the Dung Gate) or the direction they face (the Damascus Gate). Gates were constructed with sharp turns inside of them so that an attacking army would not easily break through them. It was fun watching cars try and squeeze out, for they were hardly skinny enough to pass through the walls at all.
We kept walking into the Christian quarter to a shop owned by a man named Shabon. He was a good friend of the tour guide as well as several others from the project. They joked that he was like the godfather. Everyone knows Shabon, and Shabon knows everyone and how to get anything in the city at the best price. At Shabon’s we relaxed and were treated to a falafel lunch. Lucky for me Sam is a light eater, so I was able to have my own and the better part of hers. It was fantastic. While we were waiting for the food to get to us, the bells from the nearby Church of the Sepulcher started ringing and we witnessed the procession of the Greek Orthodox Patriarch. The Greek Orthodox Church has no pope equivalent, but many regional leaders, so this was the top dog in Jerusalem. Pretty neat.
After lunch we roamed about. Shabon led an expedition to acquire voltage adaptors from a vendor. He was an older guy, mustachioed, with thinning grey hair, but holy poop, he was practically running down the streets. It was hard to keep up. Once everyone had reconvened, we made for the Church of the Sepulcher.
This place was intense. First of all, five different Christian groups each hold office in the church. I don’t remember all of them, but I do know the Ethiopian brothers live on the roof. This living arrangement results from the 19th century, during which the brothers of the different sects constantly were fighting over control of the church, trying to claim more of it for themselves. Eventually they called it and said, “Whatever you got, you keep it and that’s that.” The Ethiopians were on the roof at the time, so there you have it. There was also a ladder that had remained leaning on a upper level of the outer wall since 1880 because at the time the holdings were solidified, no one knew who it belonged to.
Now, when I said this place was intense, I mean it’s considered the most likely site of Jesus’ tomb. Constantine built it around a cave in which his mother supposedly found the True Cross. It was a massive structure, with altars and chambers that extended deep down into the bedrock. It encompasses the top of the mountain on which Jesus was said to be crucified and even claims to have the very stone in which the cross was set. In the entrance lay the flat stone upon which Jesus was laid after he was taken down from the cross. It was hard to get a good picture because of the crowds that knelt to rub, touch, and kiss the stone. Pretty cool stuff. I have my doubts about whether all of these artifacts are genuine, but I don’t think that really matters.
We exited the city through the Damascus Gate. In order to get there, we had to move through some very crowded market streets. If you’ve ever seen a movie depicting a crowded Middle Eastern bazaar, it’s not very far off: very narrow streets, packed with vendors shouting about their wares. It was difficult not to lose the group in the chaos. The Damascus Gate was covered in scaffolding, but I could tell it was more impressive than the other two gates we’d been through. Those were just holes in the wall, whereas the Damascus gate was constructed atop the remains of a Roman triumphal arch built during the Pax Romana, or as our guide called it, “The peace enforced by Rome.”
We came back to the hotel, I finished A Game of Thrones, started writing this, and promptly fell asleep. I have to get up at 4:30 tomorrow; we leave for the Tel at 5:00. More to follow.
Nice post - those first impressions will be with you for a long time.
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