what's with all these cats?
Today's itinerary:
We drive from Tel Aviv to Tiberias.
Israel's agriculture
Caesarea
Megiddo
Bet She'arim
Chinese food in Tiberias
There are tels all over Israel. In fact, it's a bad idea to suspect a hill of being a true hill until you get some archaeologists in to check it out.
FYI, Tel Aviv means "Spring Hill," a combination of the new (for the new state) and the old.
We set out early in the morning for northward toward Caesarea, passing Netanya and lots of farms. Evidently the family farm is alive and well in Israel, and they're growing oranges (the famed Jaffa oranges--though not so much any more; oranges are being grown cheaper in Morocco now) and avocados.
Also big, to our surprise: turkeys. Evidently some American Jews came over and pioneered the process of raising turkeys in hermetically sealed environments. The turkey farms looked like big Quonset huts that were only remarkable because Micky pointed them out. Turkey is now a popular meat in Israel, and evidently it was all but unknown here a few decades ago.
[Micky mentioned these special turkey farms so many times (over the course of the vacation) with the information "These turkeys never see the light of day!" that "They never see the light of day!" became a running joke for the rest of the time we were in Israel.]
Caesarea is famed for three things:
- the remains of an ancient Herodian city built after the Roman model,
- the remains of a Crusader fort, and
- the only golf course in all of Israel.
We visited the first two.
Darin, Scott, Diane, and Carole discuss getting in line early for good seats at the Springsteen concert.
I can't remember exactly how Micky described this theater, but it's one of the best-preserved examples of theaters of the period. The theater was part of a large Roman community Herod--oh, damn: Herod the Great or Herod Antipas? I can't remember that either--plunked down here on the ocean. (Not pictured: the view of the Mediterranean from the cheap seats. Who'd be watching the play? I ask you.)
Diane flees from one cameraman as Mitch takes a picture of the theater.
(Funniest coincidence of trip: when we were at Frankfurt airport, a giant tour group showed up for the flight to Tel Aviv, and we quickly discovered that they were the Highland Park, IL., Strings. Darin and his family are from Highland Park, of course, and although Darin, Mitch, and Scott didn't know anyone in the Strings, it was a pretty funny coincidence.
(Then, at Caesarea, the tour group is at the theater the same time we are. I wondered if we were going to be running into the same people over and over again throughout the trip.)
Because there's no fresh water in the area, Herod also had an aqueduct built to truck in fresh water from 10 miles away. Over time--and you definitely get the theme that this area has nothing but time--the aqueduct was abandoned and drifts of sands covered it up. So it was only discovered recently, perfectly preserved because no one knew it was there: it just looked like a big sand dune.
Another feature of the area is the port Herod built with some well-engineered breakwaters. When the Crusaders arrived, they settled on Caesarea as their port, because it was already set up for them.
Micky gives the attentive Americans a talk about the Crusader ruins below
The Crusaders discovered the tel problem when they started to set up their fort (the main wall of which exists today: these things were built to withstand anything, including a 1000 years): evidently they were putting down the supports for a church when they broke through the surface of the hill they were standing on to discover storage areas from Herod's port. They had to build a chapel instead and move elsewhere to put down a larger structure.
We drove through some verdant valleys to get to a large, looming hill: Megiddo, one of the important fortresses built 3000 or more years ago along the road that connected Egypt and Babylonia. Whoever controlled that fortress controlled the trade route, and as you might expect quite a few managers came and went over the centuries.
Which means that this hill wasn't a hill; it's a tel. And this becomes very clear when you see the pie-wedge section cut out of the hill by archaeologists from the University of Chicago, because you can see about 20 layers of civilizations, one on top of the other, building upwards.
What started as a teeny little hill became this domineering feature of the landscape. You can see all of the valleys below from this vantage point: you can see what caravans are coming (so you can tax them), and you can see what armies are coming. If you control Megiddo, you control the valley; if you control the valley, you control the road. If you control the road, you are one serious mofo.
The importance of Megiddo is obvious enough when you find out how bad the Greeks were at pronouncing it and what they called it instead. The Hebrew word for fortress is "Ar," so Fortress Megiddo is "Ar-Megiddo," which was evidently not to the Greeks' liking, so they renamed it "Armageddon." The land the fortress overlooks is the Valley of Armageddon, and that's where the last battle is supposed to take place.
"Huh. Looks so peaceful. Let's eat."
One of the coolest features of Megiddo is Yet Another Engineering Marvel You Just Can't Believe The Ancients Did Without Extraterrestial Help. While the fortress was well-guarded, it had one weakness: it had no water supply within its walls, which meant that enemies could control their water (a bad idea, wherever you are). So they did what any normal human beings would do: they tunneled to the source of their water and then hid the opening, so that enemies couldn't find the water or the entrance into the fortress.
We walked down into the cavern, through the tunnel that carried the water, and then out again. The only other tourists there were a group of Canadians who were being ferried around in a silver bus much like ours.
From Megiddo we went to the Necropolis at Bet She'arim. Bet She'arim was a happening Jewish community in the first century, and a famous rabbi (whose name escapes me) was buried there, so Jews from all over the Roman Empire sent their bodies to be buried near him.
This led to the creation of the Necropolis, or City of the Dead, with giant underground caves filled with stone sarcophagi. These sarcophagi are works of art in themselves, with various designs carved into the stone: designs, flowers, scenes.
One sarcophagus is decorated with the images
of a bull, an eagle, and a lion on its sides.
DIANE
If only there was a man too,
this sarcophagus would represent
the Four Evangelists.
SCOTT
The man's inside.
There were so many rooms in this Necropolis: off the main corridor were subcorridors, each of them at least as long if not longer than the main one, and there were rooms off the subcorridors. There were sarcophagi lining both sides of the corridors and crammed into the rooms as well. This Necropolis was a happening place, if you believe in that sort of thing.
It wasn't creepy, it was beautiful. It was also musty and had stale air and we couldn't stay in there long.
As we left the Necropolis, another group of tourists came in: the same group of Canadians we'd seen at Megiddo. I guess there are only so many places tourists can be at one time in this country.
One of the messages from a sarcophagus was, "Good luck with your resurrection." I foresee a whole new line of Hallmark cards.
We checked into the Radisson Moriah Tiberias and everyone said, "Let's not fall asleep! Stay awake! Don't lie down!"
You cannot imagine how difficult that was. Every single atom in my body was asleep--it was a matter of keeping my mind awake.
Darin in our room and Mitch and Scott in their room (with the door open between our rooms) turned on Chasing Amy with Hebrew subtitles. The noise of the movie kept me awake--there were 15 minutes between the end of the movie and when we left for dinner, and I fell asleep then.
We walked over to the House, which was reported to be the best restaurant in Tiberias and was to boot a Chinese restaurant. Sadly, it was only open on the weekends. So we walked across the street to the Pagoda, a giant Chinese-Thai place. (Yes, it cracked me up that this little city on the shores of the Sea of Galilee was lousy with Chinese restaurants.) There we had pretty decent Chinese food. We walked back to the hotel and I think I was asleep within seconds of walking in the door to our room.
Something I noticed in Jaffa and then again in Caesarea, Megiddo, and Bet She'arim are the plethora of cats. There are cats everywhere. At the Museum of the Diaspora, a swarm of cats--at least 10--hovered outside one of the doors, near the cafeteria. But everywhere we go, there's a cat hovering (or, more likely, lounging) nearby. There's probably not a big rat problem in this country.
I realized that I'm not used to seeing animals in public places, other than dogs on leashes in very proscribed places.
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Copyright 1998 Diane Patterson
Send comments and questions to diane@spies.com