this is ground zero. welcome.
Today's itinerary:
Laundry day
The Old City of Jerusalem
Western Wall
Church of the Holy Sephulcre
Model of Herodian Jerusalem
Dinner at Eucalyptus
I left the hotel early to go change money and I ran into Micky, who had already driven in from Tel Aviv. He told me I should wait to change money until we got to the Jewish Quarter. I said, "I want to make a joke about moneychangers." He said, "It's the same everywhere you go around the world."
First things first: we had to do laundry. Doing it at the hotel was out of the question--they wanted about $3 (everything's in dollars at the Jerusalem Hilton) to clean a pair of socks. I feared what cleaning underwear would be.
Everybody toted their large bales of laundry downstairs and Micky drove us to a laundromat where we could drop everything off and pick it up later. Then we drove to Jerusalem and parked in the tourist car lot by the Zion Gate--which has a very narrow, 90 degree turn cars come honking through. Going through the Zion Gate leaves you in the Armenian Quarter, which specializes in an intricately painted style of pottery.
The first thing Micky took us to see was the Cardo, which was the name for the main drag of any Roman City, including the Jerusalem built by Hadrian after the second destruction of Jerusalem, in 135 AD. The reason archaeologists knew where to go to uncover the Cardo was because of an ancient picture of Jerusalem found in a church in Jordan, which showed the Cardo starting at the Damascus Gate (or the Gate of the Pillar, where the Pillar is now in a museum in Istanbul).
The ancient picture of Jerusalem.
From there we went to the Jewish Quarter, where we had some coffee, tea, and hot chocolate. Scott, who looked as ill as he felt, sipped down very little of his tea. Mitch, Carole, and I went to the bank, which couldn't handle traveler's cheques, so I got a cash advance on our Mastercard. I can see that traveler's cheques are the wave of the past--using the card was so much easier.
From there we went to the Reconstruction Museum, which explained to us to about the Jewish Quarter, which has a very interesting history--beyond the whole history of Jerusalem thing. Israel reunified Jerusalem after the Six Day War in 1967, which gave them access to the Old City for the first time. And, more importantly, gave archaeologists access to the city.
Under the Jordanians, the residents had not been keen on having the place dug up, seeing as how they lived there and all. The Six Day War destroyed much of the Jewish Quarter, which gave the archaeologists a primo opportunity to see what was underneath all those old buildings. So for six years the entire Jewish Quarter was excavated--completely uncovered down to the Herodian ruins, which dated back to the first destruction of Jerusalem, in 70 AD.
Then, showing that wacky Israeli efficiency, they put in support pilings and erected buildings over the excavations, allowing life to get back to normal and keep the ruins intact.
The thing I like best about all these ruins/reconstructions are the mosaics. The designs (or partial remains) give me an idea that people really lived here in a way that all the rooms and cisterns and mikvahs (the ubiquitous ritual purification baths) don't.
After the Reconstruction Museum we went to see a slide show presentation about the Burnt House, a house found preserved from the 70 AD period. The projectors were a bit out of alignment, which was annoying. Darin said, "Clearly this hasn't been updated since the 70s." (1970 AD, that is.)
We went through metal detectors to get to the Western Wall. This is often falsely called the Wailing Wall--the mistake in the name comes from the British, who saw the chanting and thought they were wailing. The Western Wall is a little tiny piece of the western embankment of the Second Temple. Before 1967, buildings went right up to the wall--one of the first things the Israelis did was to clear the area, because they expected (rightly) that thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of Jewish pilgrims would push in. The area in front of the Wall is divided between men and women, with men getting two-thirds to three-fourths of the space. Evidently it's a very big thing to have your bar mitzvah here, and there were a couple of them going on.
I went up to the Wall on the women's side--every crack is crammed with pieces of papers that have prayers on them. Women were hurriedly scribbling prayers as I walked around. Many were praying and rocking back and forth. One woman was overwrought as she touched the stone.
We were supposed to go through the Tunnel, but the reservation got mixed up and we were scheduled for Tuesday. When it became clear we weren't going to be able to rearrange it, Scott begged off--he was feeling more and more nauseous and wanted to go lie down. Micky took him to get a taxi; we waited by the Wall and petted the cats who wandered around.
And this is what happened to Scott when he got in the taxi: the taxi driver asked, "You like your tour guide? You like where he's taking you? He take you to Bethlehem?""No, we're not going to Bethlehem."
"You want to go to Bethlehem? I take you to Bethlehem right now."
"No, no, I just want to go to my hotel. I feel sick."
"You're sick? I take you to the doctor."
"No! Just the hotel!"
The rest of us went to the Moslem Quarter, which has a ton of shops, mostly selling the same stuff: handcarved creches, t-shirts, Armenian chess boards. (I really liked those.) Steve went into the first shop we saw, and Micky kept saying, "He has to haggle! He isn't done negotiating if he doesn't leave the shop at least once!"
We stopped for lunch at a hole in the wall Micky had heard of but had never eaten at: the Abu Shukri Restaurant. It's on El-Wadi, just past the Via Dolorosa, and I point it out because if you're ever in Jerusalem, you should definitely go there. It had great hummus and falafel, and, believe you me, we'd certainly eaten enough of both by the time we got here. It was totally great.
We walked more through the Moslem Quarter, which was filled with tiny little shops: candy, pastries, meat, clothes, dishes, souvenirs. There were lots of women out shopping--Micky said they were preparing for the Ramadan evening meal. There were also a ton of people crowded into these tiny little alleyways. I was amazed at how blase everyone was about being crammed in like sardines.
A typical pathway in the Moslem Quarter
We ended up at the Church of the Holy Sephulcre, which is built over the spot where Helena, the mother of Constantine, reportedly found the True Cross. It also covers the rock of Golgotha (and there's a window onto the crack in the rock) and Calvary, plus the reported burial site of Jesus.
You might imagine that this spot is just a wee bit important to the Christian religions, which is why 4 churches run the Church of the Holy Sephulcre: the Roman Catholic, the Russian Orthodox, the Armenian, and the Coptic. They harshed on one another so much that a century or so ago the Status Quo Law (or Agreement, or something) was passed, which decreed that everything would be kept exactly the way it is--including the time, which means that the Church never goes on Daylight Savings Time, even when the rest of Jerusalem does. A Moslem family is entrusted with maintaining the Church, under the watch of representatives from each church--every time the caretaker does something, like open the church or close it, a representative from each church must be present.
The church has on display the slab where Jesus's body was prepared for burial and the rock on which his body was laid out. The preparation slab was out in the open and was freely available to anyone walking by. One time we passed it and a woman, fully wrapped in robes and headcover, prostrated herself over it and kissed it. Micky told us how Greek pilgrims will pour rosewater over the stone and pick the water up again via syringes in order to deliver it to the sick back home.
There was a gigantic crush of pilgrims going upstairs to see Calvary.
In the center of the Church is the burial tomb of Jesus, which is covered by a Russian Orthodox built chapel. There was a gigantic crowd to get in there, too. We didn't get in line for that, either.
Micky took us into the Coptic section, which is being restored, and showed us an authentic burial crypt of the time, which was claustrophobically small. I had to stoop to get in, and to get a body into one of the finger-like chambers I would have had to crawl.
He also took us down to the Roman Catholic chapel in the "basement" (ground level centuries ago) where Helena found three Crosses. They could tell which one was the True Cross because it healed the sick. (Of course.) One of the interesting features was the graffiti on the wall down the stairs: Crusaders had carved crosses into the wall as they walked down, and there were hundreds of these intricately designed crosses.
It was at Holy Sephulcre that the ludicrousness of the entire enterprise really hit me. No one was keeping souvenirs when Jesus died--the burial preparations slab? Are they kidding? The part about finding the True Cross--by the emperor's mother, no less. There were running a racket or they were conned. I looked at these people, overcome with emotion at being so close to objects that reportedly touched Jesus and thought, Oy gevalt. (To coin a phrase.) It would be pathetic except for the dire consequences this belief has had on the lives of millions.
From the Old City Micky took us to a scale model of Jerusalem in Herodian times, complete with temple and Antonia Fortress and various structures. It was very cool that they've done enough research to determine that much about how the city was laid out.
Went home. Rested. I finished While Christ and his Saints Slept, which ended with a much bigger bang than it began, because it got into the story of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine. Penman writes in the afterword she wants to get back to Henry and Eleanor at a later date--I found myself wishing she'd spent all her time on them at the beginning.
It was up to Darin to pick dinner, so he paged through the tourist Yellow Pages and picked out Eucalyptus. We couldn't really tell anything about it, even where it was, but Darin asked the concierge to make reservations for 5. (Scott had spent the afternoon tossing up one of the Cokes I had encouraged him to drink to settle his stomach, so he passed on dinner.)
Eucalyptus turned out to be a short walk away from the hotel, a walk marked by Steve and Carole continually second-guessing Darin's navigating. Turns out we walked past it, but only because it was in a City Hall building off the street.
Eucalyptus, we discovered, serves Eretz Israel food: traditional food of the region, foods mentioned in the Bible, plus some recipes from the owner-chef's mother's kitchen--what he called "Jewish-Iraqi cuisine." Whatever it was, it was wonderful. Darin had figs stuffed with meat, Steve had a beef and eggplant dish, Carole and Mitch had a specialty of the house best described as a kosher paella, and I had a joint of lamb with fava beans. For dessert, we got a sesame and honey dish and a plate of pears stewed in wine that we all agreed was the best example of that type of dish any of us had ever had. I ate too much--I hadn't been hungry to start it--but I agreed that this was wonderful and Scott had missed a real treat.
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Copyright 1998 Diane Patterson
Send comments and questions to diane@spies.com