During its long history, Jerusalem has been destroyed at least twice, besieged 23 times, attacked 52 times, and captured and recaptured 44 times.

The Citadel or Tower Museum at the Jaffa Gate, the westernmost entrance to the city, is all the history you can eat in a four hour sitting. It’s a four thousand year old story: from the Canaanites and the Hebrews to the end of the Mandate and the establishment of the State of Israel, via Egyptians, Assyrians, Persians, Greeks, Hasmoneans, Romans, Byzantines, Umayyads, Abbasids, Fatamids, Crusaders, Ayyubids, Tartars, Mongols, Mamluks, Ottomans, British, and even Australians. Each left their mark on Jerusalem, and most planted their brickage upon and within the Citadel.

There is a long roll-call of famous names who may or may have not resided in the place.

King David didn’t, despite his name being given to the place and the apocryphal story that he once spied on the bathing Bathsheba from its ramparts – indeed, her bathroom is said to be underneath the New Imperial Hotel, just across the way. Nor did his son and heir, Solomon, builder of the First Temple. Conquerors Nebuchadnezzar and Cyrus did not. They just wrecked the joint. Judah Maccabee might have, and those other famous Jewish rebels, the Zealots didn’t, but during Great Revolt, they retreated there and trashed the place. Herod the Great, a psycho with an serious edifice complex, resided here. As did also Procurator Pontius Pilate when he was in town (he preferred the luxuries of Caesaea Maritimus (Latin for “on Sea). Historians now believe that the Citdel was where he actually cast judgement on Jesus, and not in the Antonine Fortress which overlooked the Temple (where the Haram al Sharif now stands) throwing into question the whole basis for the existence of the Via Dolorosa.

Roman general and future emperor Titus would have taken up residence therein after he destroyed the city in 70CE, leaving only the citadel standing. His troops needed somewhere to crash. Constantine didn’t, but his mom Helena most likely did when she “discovered” The True Cross, commissioned the construction of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, and single-handedly invented the Holy Land pilgrim industry that endures to this day. The Muslim conquerors Omar Ibn Khattab, Salah ud-Din, and Baybars may have, but Ottoman Sultan Suleiman the magnificent, who built the city walls we see today, never set foot in Jerusalem, and nor did his successors.

Ottoman troops occupied it, and General Djemal Pasha would hang Arab Nationalists in the Square before it. General Allenby declared Jerusalem and Palestine liberated on the steps leading to the citadel in 1917, but most likely stayed across the square at our wonderful East New Imperial Hotel (the Kaiser stayed there too when he visited Jerusalem in 1898). British troops garrisoned it during the Mandate years – like the Roman legionaries before them, they’d’ve needed a place to lay their heads. The British-commanded Arab Legion of then Transjordan took control of it in during the the battle for Jerusalem in 1948 and defended it successfully against the new IDF. They did so again in 1967 only to lose it and the Old City.

If the stones could talk, what a tale they would tell. And indeed, the museum now does just that, in content and in form. We sit on the roof garden of our hotel, directly across the street and look across at its towers, ramparts and gardens, and sense it’s story in our souls. We watch present generations passing beneath its walls, and the young folk dancing on the ramparts, all part of the passing parade of humanity that has lingered by and upon these ancient walls.

For further reading, you can’t beat Simon Sebag-Montefiore’s Jerusalem : The Biography (Phoenix 2011).

See also in In That Howling Infinite, The Grand Old New Imperial Hotel, and Nova Via Dolorosa. For other posts about Jerusalem see: O Jerusalem

History Lessons

Dancers from the Son et Lumiere promenade