Church of the Holy Sepulchre

Image: Wikimedia Commons

Around the year 326, Helena, mother of Constantine, came to Jerusalem seeking the places of Christ's death and resurrection, and tradition tells that she found there the True Cross itself. Over Golgotha and the empty tomb her son raised a great complex consecrated in 335, and today's feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross is the ancient memory of those very events. Burned by the Persians, razed in 1009, rebuilt by the Crusaders, the church now guards under one battered roof the two holiest places in Christianity: the rock of Calvary and the Edicule over the tomb, restored in recent years down to the original limestone burial bed. Six ancient Christian communities share the building under the Status Quo of 1757, so strictly that a wooden ladder has rested untouched on a facade ledge for centuries, and every morning for eight hundred years the same two Muslim families of Jerusalem have unlocked the door of the church of the Resurrection.