Pt1 - 16: JERUSALEM, JERUSALEM

 

The Old City hasn’t changed much in the last twenty years, but then nothing much has changed within these walls in the last two thousand years. Its covered streets, which don’t conform to any western notion of a street, were as vibrant and intoxicating as I remembered them, and passable digs still at a premium. The air was frigid and it was teeming with rain and bodies as we entered the city through the Damascus Gate and veered right along the Suq Khan El-Zeit, straddling the stream rushing down its central gutter. Thoroughly soaked and shivering violently we were grateful for the small mercy of landing a room at the first place we tried, the Hashimi Hostel, about halfway up the Khan.

As we stood in our personal portable puddles waiting for the receptionist’s attention I scanned an elaborate business card from the pile on the counter. The pitch was enticing:

 

Newly Renovated Hostel

Clean and bright with marble floors

Enjoy

A FRIENDLY RELAXED ATMOSPHERE

Television lounge + Indoor and

Outdoor sitting areas

With spectacular views of the Old City

Double, Family and

Dormitory Rooms available

All rooms with private bathrooms

Facilities include

Clean sheets, Kitchen + Money Changing

Sightseeing Tours and Helpful Staff

 

We’d be fortunate indeed if only half this were true and decided then and there that if they had a vacancy we’d fill it. We were in luck, though luck’s a relative thing. We inspected a third floor cubicle with a double bed and views out over the ancient beehive rooftops. It was clean enough but the marble floor and white tiled walls made it feel about as cheery as a monk’s cell in Siberia. The bathroom comprised a basin, a toilet and a shower head poking out of the wall. The hot water window was from 6.30pm till 7. We signed up for two nights – if there was anything more cosy in town we’d surely find it by then.

We wrung out our wet clothes, donned dry ones, stowed our gear and hit the souk for hot coffee and an orientation stroll. The Khan bisects Old Jerusalem along a north-west/south-east axis and meets David Street, which starts at the Jaffa Gate in the South-west and becomes Bab el-Silsileh on its way to the Temple Mount in the north-east, just south of the city centre. Thus is the city divided roughly into quarters – Christian, Muslim, Jewish and Armenian. We struck out along the Khan for the David St intersection at the heart of the souk.

The Khan itself is more alley than street; about three and a half meters wide, paved in worn stone and mostly enclosed by a stone barrel roof that looks like a smoker’s throat with skylights at regular intervals to dispel the gloom. By day it is a hubbub of activity lined with shops, stalls and vendors peddling gold and silver jewellery and coins, clothing, leather goods, ceramics, carpets, ornate chess sets and backgammon boards, falafel, shwerma and kebabs, rich oriental pastries, fruit and vegetables, unrefrigerated meat, aromatic herbs and spices and, of course, tasteless religious baubles. The close air is redolent with coffee, sizzling lamb, pungent spices, the descant babble of a dozen tongues and sinuous Arab music blaring from tinny storefront speakers. And all this is patrolled by pairs of anachronistic hi-tech police who look like they’ve landed from the distant future in a sci-fi scenario. Commerce is so intense along the Khan that the 300-odd metres to David Street can take anything up to 30 minutes to navigate, as it did this bustling Sunday afternoon. We turned right up the wider but no less busy David Street to the Jaffa Gate.

As we stepped out of the souk I couldn’t believe how accurately my memories of Jaffa meshed with the reality we saw now. It was the same place I’d infested alone in 1976 – Bastock went off on his own after the kibbutz, but that’s a story for later. The handsome gate was freshly cleaned and the squat stone facades around the small square were immediately and satisfyingly familiar.

We did a quick survey of the accommodation near the gate. Every street was déjà vu; I even knew where the loo was on St Mark’s Road before we turned the corner – it was locked. This was comforting in one way – we’d never get lost, and perversely disappointing in another – Jerusalem is a great place to get lost in. The rooms we looked at made the Hashimi seem luxurious, and that’s saying something, but they had character. One was at the very top of a narrow stone staircase which began in someone’s kitchen, passed through a pocket-sized courtyard on the second floor, a laundry on the third floor and emerged next to the clothesline on the roof where a shed had apparently been thrown up by a one-armed drunk.

To be fair, there were other places more welcoming than the Hashimi but they weren’t the sort where you could smoke, drink beer and fart very loudly. The Hashimi it would be for the next week, for better or worse – often worse.

Bearing in mind the breathless claims of the Hashimi’s business card an average day at the place merits a brief description, if only for the fact it inevitably coloured our much-anticipated experience of the Old City.

We soon discovered the tea and coffee were free if you bought your own, which we duly did, and each day began with a ritual which earned me six months’ worth of brownie points. In order to fetch our vital morning cuppas I descended three flights of slippery stairs to the kitchen, which was always filthy - grimy plates stacked high on the oily sink, pots and pans coated with the congealed remains of last night’s meal left to fester on the stove top…you get the picture. I stood guard over the boiling kettle lest someone from the Arab family who ran the place stole it, which they did on the first morning when my back was turned. Without benefit of surgical gloves or wire brush I then scrubbed out the two least offensive tin cups I could find and made the tea. Despite my best efforts I managed to spill most of the brew as I climbed the stairs again, not the ideal start to the day.

It was invariably colder in the room than out in the street, which had its advantages: we only had to lay the beers on the marble floor to chill them instantly, and we investigated every nook and cranny of Jerusalem to avoid doing time in the cell. On the other hand, it meant a mad dash from the shower to dry yourself and dress before you turned into an ice sculpture, and sleeping fully clothed and swathed in scarves and beanies in our down sleeping bags. And speaking of the shower – although the Hashimi wasn’t alone in this – you had to leave your towel outside and remove everything from the room, especially the toilet paper, before using it because it sprayed the whole room like a fire hose.

But at least you could drink, smoke and fart very loudly in the Hashimi because the Arab proprietors were always making way too much noise for anyone else to hear. Enough said.

The Via Dolorosa, or Way of Sorrow, is allegedly the route Jesus took on his last walk from the site of his condemnation at the hands of Pilate near St Stephen’s Gate to Calvary, which is now within the walls of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre within the walls of the Old City. Predictably, there is much scholarly debate about the route’s authenticity, not mention a grubby and deeply unedifying squabble between the various faiths claiming ownership of the One Truth. Let’s face it though, and you can call me an unreconstructed cynic, Jerusalem without the Via Dolorosa would be about as interesting to the pilgrim as the Vatican without St Peter’s, and then where would the shamelessly lucrative religious tourism industry be?

You’ve probably gathered I don’t have much time for organised religion, in fact I despise it in all its forms and the Roman Catholic Church is a special sort of obscenity, but Tess spent her childhood practising to be a good Catholic. Although she failed miserably, that kind of conditioning is hard to shake and Jerusalem was a personal focus for her from the very start of this odyssey, so we took advantage of a fine, crisp afternoon to trace the Via Dolorosa.

We set off on the little pilgrimage near St Stephen’s Gate where our first stop was a hole in a stone wall with a crude hand-painted sign above the doorway: Birthplace of Mary. A wheezing old Arab led us down a spiral staircase hewn from the rock to a credibly antique cave where he’d roped off a corner and set up a shrine. Tess was almost overcome with emotion at revisiting this aspect of her inner life. The old bloke lit candles for us both and we placed them in the holders. After a polite interval he bade us make a contribution to the plate. We parted with a George Washington each.

Back on the street we came to the Church of St Anne which marks…the Birthplace of Mary. “Ah shit,” said Tess. Her education in the finer points of religious tourism had begun.

Inside the Church of St Anne, an acoustically resonant Crusader-built structure which survived the Salah al-Din era as a Muslim madrasa – a group of Italian pilgrims were singing god’s praises to the high vaulted ceilings. We would be fellow travellers along the Way of Sorrow.

We met them again at the second station in the grounds of the Franciscan monastery. The Chapel of the Condemnation is allegedly where the sentence of crucifixion was pronounced and stands across a courtyard from the Chapel of the Flagellation where Jesus was whipped for good measure by Roman soldiers just before he set off on his last journey. It was going to be a long day for this atheist, who was already dreaming of the Chapel of the Chilled Carlsberg.

The Italians were preparing themselves to tread in the saviour’s footsteps, forming up in front of a priest who intoned some liturgy or other. The leaders supported a full-scale pine cross which members of the group, little old ladies and all, would take turns to carry right across town to Golgotha and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Some of them were already in the grip of religious ecstasy, weeping loudly as they sang another hymn.

I’d had about as much wailing and rending of garments as I could handle for the moment so we waited till they’d filed out in solemn procession and hung back to let them get ahead a bit. On our dawdling way down to the corner we passed a strapping young lad heading back to the monastery with two crosses, one on each shoulder. He was laughing hugely, probably about how brisk business was.

The Italians blocked the narrow street as they clustered round the priest to hear how Jesus had fallen at the 3^rd station and met Mary at the 4^th. The cross had passed to the next in line. We pushed our way through as they launched into yet another hymn.

We sprinted past the 5^th station, marked by an inscription in the wall, and paused to catch our breath outside Veronica’s 6^th Station Pottery and Souvenir Stall. The crowd parted as the black-clad Italians forged their way up the stepped lane into the labyrinth of the covered souk. We skipped the 7^th station, ducked across the Khan, and went straight to the 8^th.

A red and white plastic sign dangling from a bent coat hanger jammed into a crack in the mortar announced our arrival at the 8^th station on the Via Dolorosa. It’s difficult to get emotive about a coat hanger at the best of times; unmoved, we turned to retrace our steps to the Khan only to come face to face with the Italians again. We fled up a flight of stairs, swerved through the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate and ended up at the Holy Sepulchre. Here we finally conceded defeat in our attempts to outrun the devout little army from Italy, who were just lumbering up from the opposite direction.

On the church forecourt beneath a sign requesting visitors to respect the sanctity of the site by dressing modestly and behaving appropriately a young Italian man in a lounge suit yelled into a mobile phone. The atmosphere in the dim interior of the church was heavy with incense and the loud voices of ignorant tourists who didn’t need a mobile to communicate with the other side of the world. In the centre of the ground floor stood a little chapel with candlelight flickering in its elliptical portholes – it looked like something Captain Nemo might have pedalled around in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea if the Japanese had made the movie in 1963. An endless line of believers patiently awaited their turn to suffocate inside it. I’d had enough and escaped outside for a gasp of secular air.

It’s all too easy to mock the Italians and the millions of other pilgrims who come to Jerusalem in search of their religious heritage – whether it’s Christian, Jewish or Islamic – every year. That is their absolute right. What is distinctly unfunny is the cynical and self-serving trade in their addiction by the shameless traffickers of corrosive faith. For Tess the whole sham was an anticlimax and she was rightly disillusioned.

We strode past the hawkers and hustlers outside the church precinct and around the corner to the Fountain Café and Grill where, if they had any sense, the true believers must have retired to await the resurrection with the best shwerma and the cheapest coffee in town.

Our favourite among the many museums in the Old City was the Tower of David, not least because it was a warm refuge from the constant chill. It was also an engaging journey through time from the earliest Canaanite days to the present, with each period of the city’s 3000 year history captured in sophisticated but tasteful displays.

I especially enjoyed the story of the splendid 7^th century Dome of the Rock, which dominates the Temple Mount and is to Jerusalem what the Opera House is to Sydney. Although I was able to enter the Dome in 1977 it was now closed to all but worshippers. The rock in question is said to be the altar upon which Abraham prepared to sacrifice Isaac and the one from which Muhammad launched himself to heaven. What I liked most about the presentation, though, was the bit about the Ottoman Caliphs melting the original gold dome down to replenish the public purse and replacing it with lead. The current dome is only about forty years old and the “gold” is a lustrous aluminium-bronze alloy, a glorious fake. There’s a metaphor in there somewhere.

Our later wanderings around the Temple Mount and the Western Wall brought us into the revitalised Jewish Quarter. I lied when I said nothing had changed in two thousand years. Jerusalem was razed after the first of three major revolts against Roman authority ended with a siege in AD70; The Burnt House on Tif’eret Israel still bears the scars of the holocaust. As a result it was decreed that henceforth all buildings in Jerusalem would be constructed of local stone, the material used by the Emperor Hadrian when he established a Roman city, Aelia Capitolina, on the ruins of old Jerusalem in the AD130s and built a massive temple to Jupiter on the sacred Temple Mount. You can imagine how excited the Jews weren’t, and the Bar Kokhba Revolt of AD132 ended predictably.

After the fall of Rome the ebb and flow of conquest continued through the Crusades, the Holy Roman (or Byzantine) Empire and countless other claims on its sanctity right through to the present day. When Israel was proclaimed in 1948 it was granted a section of Jerusalem as the spiritual, if not political, capital of the new theocracy. The Jewish Quarter has been completely rebuilt since the Israeli victory in the Six-Day War of 1967 which put a notional end to the partition. This isn’t a political document so I’ll avoid making personal comment on the obvious fact the city is still bitterly, dangerously divided between East and West, or the stark contrast between the wealth of the Israeli sector and the poverty of the Arab territories.

The extensive renewal of the Jewish Quarter has produced a stylish precinct of honey-coloured stone buildings in the timeless style of Old Jerusalem, with open areas and a broad central square. It’s an agreeable atmosphere for good Jewish boys from the US to come study in rabbinical school. We happened upon a few high-spirited groups of them at a burger bar on the main square. Tess and I were feasting at a table across from four or five young Hasidim and, as is my wont after a meal, I pulled my rollies out of my top pocket. I was immediately aware I was under surveillance and looked up to catch one of them staring at me with what I can only describe as a fanatical eye. His comrades, who were themselves smoking, appeared oblivious. I ignored him, which only served to enrage him further, I lit up and watched out of the corner of my eye as Tess and I talked.

He kept up the evil eye until I thought he was about to implode but, instead of leaping up to confront the insolent goy as I fully expected him to do, he fell instead into a kind of trance and began muttering to himself. The incantations steadily gathered intensity until he was rocking back and forth and dribbling in his seat. I was waiting for him to pick up his burger, smash it into his own face and start banging his head on the table. Alas, no such fun so we left. Once outside I realised how unnerved I was by the whole weird episode and suddenly saw quite clearly that the difference between the young Hasidim and the black-clad Catholics of the Via Dolorosa was a sense of profound hostility. Why he had made me a target of some deep disturbance I’ll never know, but if he was casting a spell of unease upon me it worked.

And so, in a roundabout way, we arrive in New Jerusalem.

Next time: Beyond the Old City walls, and a day trip to remember...