A Day in 'The Holy City'

For my Physical settings class, I'm required to write a 1pg summary for every day of field study. Here is mine for Sunday afternoon.

Field Study #1: Old City Walk

            My first visit to the Old City of Jerusalem was in 2014, when a few Wheaton students and I stayed in a hostel, and spent the following day wandering around the city and the Mt. of Olives. While this was a fantastic day, and I was happy to be able to see all that we did, I left feeling as though I saw much but understood little.

            Today’s field study was the first step in remedying this situation. Although most the places we visited I had already been, I saw them in a very different light, and am beginning to realize the connections throughout the city. In 2014, I could not begin to claim I knew the layout of the city, and I felt very lost in the many tight streets. What I found to be particularly helpful was the foundation of geography we began with, and referenced throughout the walk. Beginning on Mt. Zion, we tracked our path as we walked on the West Hill, noting the watershed ridge to the West. Continuing down towards the Central valley, we looked out across the Eastern Hill, Kidron Valley, and into the East towards the Mt. of Olives.

Not only did we track the geographical terrain, we located the Byzantine Cardo and Decumanus, dating back to the A.D. 4^th Century, which cuts the city into quarters. We roamed each of these quarters, and identified several important landmarks in each. The Jaffa Gate and the Zion Gate both enter into the Armenian quarter which includes the Church of St. James. The Jewish Quarter contains the Western wall, from which you can also see the Temple Mt, near the Muslim quarter. In the Christian quarter we identified the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, and the Church of the Redeemer.

These landmarks act as another tool to maintain one’s bearings in a city of about 30,000 people, all situated within only ½ square mile. To put this in perspective, the town where my family lives, Ramsey IL, is nearly twice the size of the Old City in area, but has a population of only 900. The Old City’s density of population speaks to the many people groups who claim the territory as their own. Jerusalem is the most wared over city in the world, and evidences of this are abundant.

As we saw on Mt. Zion, Jewish holy sites, such as the acclaimed tomb of King David, were seized and modified by different religious groups over the course of history. What remains today is a Synagogue, beneath a Byzantine church, which has a minaret, quotes from the Quran written in the interior and a Mithra, but also crusader architecture and some Mameluke features. On a more recent level, the nearby Zion Gate, or Gate of the Prophet David, is riddled with bullet holes from the 6 Day war in 1967. The Wailing Wall, the holiest site in all of Judaism, now serves as a retaining wall for the third holiest site in Islam, the dome of the Rock.

There are few, if any, other places in the world which contain so much history in such a small space, and continue to be inhabited. It can be easy to spend an entire day in the Old City, and see only the very surface level, as I did in 2014, but when you are shown where to look, you can see not one, but several cities and eras, all interwoven.