Jerusalem: The Old City

Dome of the Rock

The buff colored stone streets are slick.  Smoothed and shined from over 4,000 years of people walking, running, laughing, playing, fighting, shopping, dancing, dying—Jerusalem is a city of history quite unlike any I have experienced.  It is among the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world, with much of the modern layout existing in one form or another for 4,000 years with other evidence of habitation over 2,000 years before that.

Modern civilization stems from the simple act of placing seeds and plants into the ground.  Over 7,000 years ago we learned to farm.  This city was here.  Came and went the the millennia, revolution after revolution—political, industrial, technological—and this city was here.

The Austrian Hospice

We stayed in the Austrian Hospice situated in the Muslim Quarter of the Old City, the ancient, walled square kilometer of masonry upon masonry through which Jesus, the Apostles, the Romans, the ancient Hebrew people, walked and wandered.  A mosque across the street called Muslims to prayer at 4:30 in the morning, the sun itself barely awake.  We were swept up in the foot traffic, streets packed wall to wall with pedestrians as the occasional car tried to squeeze its way through.

Our time in Jerusalem was spent mostly looking at the religious history of the city, for history and religion are inexorably intertwined here.  We started off at the Holocaust Museum in the far eastern part of the newer Jerusalem built beyond the walls.  It is an incredibly well-constructed museum and display of arguably the most traumatic event in recent Jewish history.

The Place of Ascension, Mount of Olives

The next bit of our time consisted of going to all of the holy sites of three of the major religions, Christianity, Judaism, and Islam.  These included places such as the Mount of Olives where Jesus is said to have ascended to heaven, with views of the Temple Mount (Dome of the Rock, currently a mosque), the room of the Last Supper, and the Via Dolorosa (way of sadness) along which Jesus walked with the cross.

Reconstructed Room of the Last Supper

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Our second day in Jerusalem was spent learning of conquest and fall of Jerusalem to a host of cultures, including Romans, Byzantians, Arabs, and later western powers (Britain primarily) over the last 2,000 years that have created the backdrop for the creation of Israel, the Israel-Palestinian conflict, and the modern city of Jerusalem.