Of hyraxes, fortresses, and ancient temples

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Country drive to the farthest reaches

Our host Ilya, who works from home, has offered to drive us all the way up to Golan Heights today. Though Henry and I do not wish to take advantage of our hosts’ hospitality, it’s hard to turn down such an offer. Plus he happens to be an archeological buff and so his expertise and friendliness are an irresistible combination.

The drive takes about two hours (a lengthy excursion in this tiny country!). We only make pitstops and so rely on my guidebook and Ilya’s descriptions of the sights around us, whetting my appetite for further Israeli adventuring at some future point. I would love to go to Tsfat, the ancient home of the Jewish mystical strain called Kabbalah, or prowl around the banks of the large (and important) Sea of Galilee or go bird-watching in the restored marshlands of the Hula Valley, a major migratory flyway. On this drive, I fully realize a key startling fact. That to a large part, there are Jewish villages and there are Muslim (“Arab”) villages. And a few Druze villages, a religion that stems from Islam. But there is little intermingling within villages (i.e. few (no?) Israeli villages). A few places have more integration, like Haifa, but most villages are sharply divided between ethnic and religious groups.

The supplanted beach property rapidly turned green as we veered from the coast. And as we reach the Sea of Galilee and then head north to the Upper Galilee region, the hills are green, damp with low-hanging clouds. There are trees, stunted and bush-like, sometimes thickly clumped. I like to see how the villages mirror the contours of the land, sloping up hillsides or settling at the junctions of rivers. Of course, every countryside in the world used to be like that. Human settlement adhered to the land. That is, until we developed enough tools and strategies to make the land fully adhere to our desires and not vice versa. It’s rare now to see American cities or even towns that are obvious products of their landscape. Now the links to the past are just that, links, easily broken and often left dangling to rust away.

Our first destination is Banias Nature Reserve, one of the most acclaimed reserves in Israel. It’s an extensive place, compromising two main parts. We visit the waterfall section first. As soon as we get out of the car, Henry and I find ourselves grinning and teasing, knocking into one another and practically skipping to explore. We definitely needed some time outdoors! The path down the waterfalls is an easy one and even though it’s a weekday there are many visitors, including at least one BirthRight trip. The place is lush and green with conglomerate boulders breaking up the vegetation. We descend into the little valley that the Banias Stream cut out. The water moves fast here and there is a refreshing mist that must be especially nice in the hot Israeli summers. The highlight of this trail is the 10.5m high Banias Waterfall, one of the largest waterfalls in Israel. But the highlight for me awaits our trip back up.

Before moving back to the cars, we stop to look at the interpretative signs that point out the major features of the landscape before us and then someone spots the hyrax. Henry and I had just been talking about the wild animals here in Israel. I hadn’t seen any yet, just birds and tons of feral cats. And here is one of my favorites. A rodent-like creature whose closest evolutionary relative is the elephant but who resembles a marmot, round and furry. I go into minor raptures. I’d seen this creatures often while in Kenya and I had forgotten until this moment that in addition to being found in East Africa, they also are still wandering around the Middle East. Though I am not a mammal-dependent person (I also go into raptures about pretty flowers, snakes, lizards, and birds, and let’s not forget adorable salamanders), there is something refreshing seeing another mammal out and about.

The not-so-dim Nimrod Fortress

We move on the famous Nimrod Fortress, just up the road and even closer to the border with Lebanon. The fortress rests on its still strategic lookout hilltop, a lowslung expansive ruin. To the north and east lie wooded hills with the occasional village and to the south and west is the Hula Valley, grassy and well-settled now. The fortress was constructed in the early 1200’s by a nephew of the famous medieval leader Saladin. It was only intended for wartimes and so there was no accompanying village. An earthquake tumbled it down a couple hundred years ago but most of the inner rooms are still well intact, perhaps aided with a bit of archeologist love and care. There is little signage but rather a fairly involved pamphlet that we get at the bathroom complex just below the fortress. But Ilya lends his expertise and so we mostly follow his lead and heed his words.

He shows us the ancient dedication to the illustrious Saladin, a huge chunk of stone that is indecipherable to me in its elegant Arabic script but mostly repeats various praises to the sultan, each more florid than the last. People knew how to salute each other back then. There are bits of Arabic script over many of the door lintels. The intact rooms are dark and barren. I imagine they weren’t that different even when this place was occupied. Though I read later that in the sixteenth century the place was used as a luxury prison in the Ottoman empire. Well, the view wouldn’t have been bad! I spend much of my time looking at the various angles of the landscape around us. I do love architecture and history but this place has been swept clean by time, only the monumental stones remain. Though there is continual opportunity for exploration, the views call me to the broken walls over and over. Toward the east, I can see two clusters of buildings, the small Druze village of Ein Kinya and the incredibly tiny Neve Ativ. I wonder if some of the hills I see beyond belong to Syria.

Paneas turned Banias

We still have some daylight to burn so we head back down to the second part of the Banias Nature Reserve. This part is focused on ruins rather than just on nature. We park in a lot that’s right next to a ruins site protected by a chain link fence. There are plenty of tourists here again (we mostly had Nimrod Fortress to ourselves) and we follow them to the flowing heart of the Banias Spring. Here the water moves fast but broadly and there are concrete paths crisscrossing the clear spring water. We walk up to the multicolored cliff face, festooned with some brightly delicate patches of purple flowers, where the ancient Greeks dedicated the place to the god Pan. There are elegant niches carved into the cliff face itself, places where Greek god icons used to be. The walls of the temple complex are long gone, only a suggestion of lines running away from the cliff face. I can imagine this would have been a truly lovely place for a temple to the merry god Pan, guardian of grottos and springs. While we peruse the signage, a group of young Asian tourists strike up in song, complete with guitar. The rest of the tourists looked befuddled, though in a pleasant way. We learn from their broken English that they are a Christian touring group.

The park is closing soon so we hurry along the wooded path to the ruins of the palace of Agrippa II, from Greek to Roman. The woods here are taller than I’d expected and full of vines and brambles, dense enough to stave off path-independent travelers. Agrippa II was Herod the Great’s grandson, also given to architectural flourishes I suspect. There is some association between Jesus’ stories and this area but the links are rather loose except for the fact that the place was Christianized sometime in the 200’s or 300’s. At that time and until very recently, the place was called Paneas, after the first temple and Greek settlement. It changed hands again and again, even into the 1900’s as Syria and Israel fought over the place, mainly for water rights to the once-mighty Banias River.

The Agrippa ruins are far more jumbled than the Nimrod ones. There are distinct rooms but very little character, at least, that my untrained eye can make out. One room is said to be a synagogue because of its special holding place for a Torah scroll but I’ll leave the verdict up to the experts. I can make out none of the details here. The park is at its closing hour so we head back, with one last treat: a house that has architectural traces dating all the way back to Roman-Byzantine era. Five different conquering cultures can be seen in this house and its directly adjacent lands. Unfortunately, no one lives there now, having been pushed away (gently, I hope) by the demands of historical conservation.

This is our last day for exploring. Tomorrow we fly out, after spending the day with more of Henry’s family. So much more to see and do here. This place vibrates with life, perilous sometimes but life. Even the ancient history lives as people continue to remake what was there to suit their vision of this land. I want to come back to this country and see Old Jaffa in the daytime, wander the vibrant and much-lauded Haifa, camp in the Negev, journey to the renowned ancient city of Petra across the border, and more. This ancient land revitalized through millennia of new cultures and revived peoples promises much.

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Photos

Remnants of Paneas
Icon niches carved directly into the cliff face

Henry rattling the bars at Nimrod
These arrow slits are slanted down, better for aiming from above and deflecting from below

Looking northeast from Nimrod
I imagine these hills looked much the same as when this fortress was first built, eight hundred years ago