Walls within Walls

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Welcome to the Old City

We bumble our way to one of the main bus stations in Tel Aviv and after asking strangers, ascertain the correct bus to Jerusalem. They leave regularly, multiple times within every hour, so our chances are good. A young man, who looks nearer my age than not, tells us in clear English what we need to know as he’s boarding the same bus. We take a seat in the back and I start re-poring through my Lonely Planet guide, underlining the sights that I think will be feasible. We’re headed to one of two hostels within the Old City. Henry only had a bare couple of hours within the place, mostly at the Western Wall and he’s hankering to go back. Considering this small acreage is the site of so much history and current drama, I am completely up for it.

After we get off, the young man again helps point us in the right direction (a bus to the Old City), explaining that during his travels he was always grateful for help too. Pass it on, travelers! Both when you travel and when you’re home and you see someone with that classic “oh-man-I-don’t-understand-the-public-transit-system-or-maps-here” look.

Suddenly there are black-hatted Chasidic Jews everywhere. And women with headscarves or wigs towing children and big shopping bags. After Tel Aviv, the difference in the Jewish population is blatant. I knew Tel Aviv was largely secular but I’m still surprised by the concentrations of Orthodox Jews. Once we’re on the bus, I even have moments where I wonder if I’m acting inappropriately toward Henry. Even married couples act circumspectly with each other in the Chasidic tradition. But I shrug it off, resolving to be aware of my surroundings but not to wildly alter my behavior. I find that amusing since in the States I am often shocked by too-much-skin or annoyed by too-much-PDA.

The bus drops us off at Damascus Gate, the main northern gate leading into the Old City walls. It takes us a while to figure out where we are, luckily there is a hostel that we see mentioned in my guidebook. This place is bustling with cars and people and we find a cab to take us to Jaffa Gate, the place that is nearer our hostel locations. We give the street name to the taxi driver and he takes us in the general direction but then starts to veer away from the walls. I scramble to correct him and he insists that he is taking us to the right spot. And he was…sort of. He was trying to use the driving map in his mind and I was trying to use the map in my guide. On streets that are not drivable. And of course, there is repetition in street and place names. We finally convince him that we do indeed want to enter the City and he drops us off just inside the walls.

After a few false starts into the warren of walking streets that make up the majority of the Old City, we plunge onto a shop-lined street that is mostly covered and is darkened and close. Vendors size us up and down and call out their wares or just look. Luckily, the first hostel is right off the main shopping artery headed from Jaffa Gate. We go up stairs that no vehicle could ever maneuver and find Citadel Hostel, off of St. Mark’s “road.” The entryway is set back and in the dark, a large wooden door, unsmooth and gnarled. We enter into a cave. Or at least that’s what it feels like. The entry room has a small TV and red-and-black wall drapings and the rough stones walls and low ceiling give the distinct impression of a recessed cave room, built into the hills. But no, it’s likely just built into history, a room nook that has passed hands hundreds of times. There is room (it’s a Sunday night after all) and proceed up the sharp twists and turns and tight squeezes of the various stairways up to our penthouse room. We’re the last one before the rooftop balcony. I’m already getting gleeful at the views I can glimpse outside our room’s windows. I can see the iconic golden dome of the Dome of the Rock and with that, I feel a weight that I hadn’t felt before here in Israel. The weight of the mighty and immense past of three major world religions and the convoluted present stories that still twist and turn the fate of a young nation, the countries around it, stretching out even to the other side of the world. This is a place not to be taken lightly.

Ancient walled-in city

After I change into a long skirt and shirt with long sleeves for religious modesty’s sake (Muslim and Jewish mostly…but also Christian), we set off. I have some sights I want to see before we leave but the main point of today is wandering. And wander we do. We strike out roughly north but there are few straight shots in the Old City. However, I have little fear of getting really lost since the whole place is walled in and we’re bound to hit up against some wall at some point and find some street sign that actually made it accurately (or inaccurately) into my guide book. These walls were built by Suleyman the Magnificent (what an appellation!) in the 1500’s. It enclosed all the major religious sites of Jerusalem in that age and still does. But it also enclosed a thriving, dense residential population, not just a pilgrimage site. And still does.

Rapidly, I become aware of not only how many people live and do regular day-to-day business in this place but also how very distinct the sections are. I saw on the map that there is a Jewish, Muslim, Christian, and Armenian Quarter but until I start walking the streets, I do not see what those mapped sections really signify. They signify abutting but not overlapping worlds. A city within a city, walls within walls. We’ll be walking along a street filled with Muslim women in long dark dresses and fashionable shoes, men with angular faces and darker skin tones and then we turn a corner and flow among a stream of black-hatted, whiter men with long overcoats and women wearing sensible shoes and shin-length skirts, hair often coiled up beneath turban or headscarf, always black.

And then there are the tourists and the pilgrims. We squeeze past a group of kerchiefed, rounded women, led by a priest, who start to sing as they approach one of the stops along the Via Dolorosa, the route that Jesus walked when dragging the cross. The stop is right across from one of the multitude of inset stores with Arab storekeepers who watch the pilgrims and tourists pass by with seasoned detachment. This is not the tourist season of course so there are relatively few obvious foreigners milling about with the resident shoppers.

Henry heard about a cave system snaking underneath the Old City, outside the north side. We exit through the Damascus Gate, a bustling, crowded through-fare. And the sunken entrance, an unassuming hole in the wall, is well out of the way of the hustle and bustle. These are Zedekiah’s Caves, a name that refers to a (likely) apocryphal story about ancient King Hezekiah who had to flee Jerusalem. There is also a tunnel that will lead all the way under the city but we just poke around the Caves. I don’t want to spend too many precious daylight hours underground. The Caves are old quarries that supplied the stone that built some of the walls and buildings in the Old City. Some of the spaces are enormous, caverns lit by yellow light. We read on a sign in the largest cavern that this is the irregular meeting place of the Freemasons. Turns out these caves are also called Solomon's Quarry, the famous king who supposedly mined this area to build the First Temple. And Solomon is considered the first Freemason. This would be a stupendous place for an intimate but grand meeting. We see only one other couple in this blank, quiet space and I find myself turning toward the sunlight and human noise and nonsense.

View from above

Plunging back into the City, we wind our way to the heart of the Jewish Quarter, with a stop for food in a small café where we are the only customers, served assiduously by a clean-shaven young man Henry’s age or younger. More shakshuka, my new favorite dish, for me! On our way to the Jewish Quarter, we get distracted by stairs leading up to the rooftops. We see enough people going up them that we are fairly certain they are not private so we go cautiously up. Sure enough there’s even a small tour group assembled around their guide up on a broad flat rooftop. Trash lines the corners and edges of the roofs, a jumbled, uneven scrambling dream. We peer over edges and strangely enough, I don’t have a voyeuristic feeling watching the traffic down below. Every movement in this place must be seen by another, known or unknown. After wandering to a grill placed over a hole in one rooftop, we discover peepholes into the partially covered streets, the same rabbit warren of shops we lost ourselves in. The sun is starting to descend so I pull Henry off the rooftops and back on the streets.

After taking a chance on a very narrow, dark cross “street,” we head south and stumble upon the Cardo Maximus. It’s a down-level wide area with freestanding Grecian-style columns in two rows. We go down and find a brilliantly colored mural that depicts what this broad north-south street would have looked like in Roman days, open to the air and full of life. The mural is actually a recreation of a 6^th century mural now in Jordan with some modern artistic input. A little boy in modern clothes is entering the scene, a link to the past. The rest of Cardo Maximus is now dominated by a posh Jewish arcade, all on this strange stone sub-level with wells that let us peer down into the depths to see the hundreds of layers of Jerusalem construction.

The rest of the Jewish Quarter feels oddly whitewashed and open. I learn later that it’s mostly reconstructed after the area sustained heavy battery during 1948 and then near destruction by Jordanian forces later on. We follow signs that point to an overlook of the Western Wall. Once again, we found ourselves with a removed overview of a vivid scene. The sun is setting and the Temple Mount is limned in soft pink. The expansive view lets us see the Mount of Olives and beyond but I’m arrested by my first view of the Western Wall.

A clean broad space opens up before one of the most precious and holiest places to modern (and not-so-modern) Jewry. The Wall itself was a retainer wall outside the First and Second Temple, a place of no great significance before the final destruction of the Temple in the first century CE. But now, it is a clear physical link to the past glory and holiness of the ancient Jewish creation. Seeing it from above, I can appreciate the monumental nature of this ancient wall, the enormous stones, changing in style of going up, reflecting the change from Jewish builders to Muslim architects when the Al-Asqa Mosque (the golden domed creation) was built.

After our Old City adventuring, we make our way outside the walls for a chance at fresh, vegetable soup at a youthful, casual eatery that comes highly recommended in my guidebook and by an Israeli friend of Henry’s. The place would be proclaimed hipster if it was in the States. We find it cozy and there is nothing like a good bowl of lentil soup and fresh bread. Makes me look forward to home-cooked meals. We actually get to meet up with Henry’s friend, Doron, and another Birth Righter who stayed after, a young and lovely Canadian. Finally we head back to our neglected cave-hostel, winding our way up to the penthouse.

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Photos

View from our hostel
Temple Mount (look for the golden dome)

Cave entrance
The "lobby" of our hostel!

Under the wall
Entrance to Zedekiah's Caves

Rooftop splendor
Not a bad place to while away some hours, no? On top of the hostel

Muslim tombstone
I captured this because of my endless fascination with cemeteries and the beauty of Arabic script

Madaba Map (recreation)
What the Cardo Maximus might have once looked like