Even when I was just about to go to Jerusalem, everyone who could dissuade me. The main arguments are that it is dangerous, the time is wartime, and at the same time a huge crowd of people is expected in the holy city. I went there specifically on April 20th. It was Easter Sunday, which this year coincided with the date of all Christians – Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant. In addition, it was the last day of the Jewish Passover, as well as the celebration of the Moroccan Jews of Mimoun, a holiday in honor of the end of the holiday. In no other place in the world can you see the meeting of different traditions with such clarity. I really wanted to see how the branches of the common Abraham’s trunk would intertwine, and that’s why I decided to travel anyway.
At noon, I left the Jerusalem central bus station and was immediately struck by the desolation around me. This is the first time I’ve seen the city like this. I’ve been here many times, and I’ve always found myself in a crowd of eager people of different ages and nationalities. Right now, the city was unusually quiet. Probably because the current trip fell on a Sunday – and this is the first working day in Israel, I thought.
That’s how I liked Jerusalem. You can easily look at old buildings and notice the changes that have taken place in recent years. The new part of the city has turned into a huge construction site. At the same time, more glass buildings appeared, rather than “Jerusalem stone”, that is, marbled limestone, without which the city could hardly have been imagined a few years ago. Passing by the famous Mahane Yehuda market, I noticed an unusual emptiness at the counters, although there was still trade.
The old town also greeted me with silence. Usually, already on the approach to the Jaffa Gate, in the area of the relatively new Mamila shopping center by the standards of history, you can hear an incessant swarm of human voices, as if you were trapped in a hive of excited bees. Tourists and vendors of Arabic tortillas crowd around the entrance to the Old Town. The former, as best they can, try to avoid the persistent attention of the latter.
Today, everything was different. There was no noise, no clamor, no calls to buy anything on the shelves of the bazaar, which had grown together with the ancient quarters. The merchants looked at me with insulting indifference, and then turned away and continued to go about their business: reading the newspaper, drinking coffee, playing shesh-besh.
In an attempt to find at least some kind of gathering of people, I went around almost the entire Muslim and Christian parts of the city, where the main shrines of the followers of Christ are located. The gates of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre were tightly closed. Three or four dozen tourists, no more, strolled in his small courtyard.
Via Dolorosa (The Way of Sorrow) greeted me with the lonely rumble of the wheels of a belated vendor’s cart, which kept getting stuck in the crevices of the pavement stone, worn down by the soles of pilgrims almost to the state of slippery ice. The sites of at least eight stops of Christ on the way to Golgotha seemed abandoned today. It was as if I had entered some other dimension, where great shrines already existed, but there was still (or already) no universal veneration for them.
I knew with my mind that everything important had already passed. Christ is risen. Behind us is the Entry of the Lord into Jerusalem, followed by Holy Week, with its almost daily Catholic processions along Via Dolorosa. The day before, as usual, at three o’clock in the afternoon, the Holy Fire descended for the Orthodox faithful, and at night a festive divine service was held on Golgotha. Jerusalem is just tired of the week-long pre-Easter hype, it’s just resting now.
When I accidentally turned onto a street, I suddenly heard a familiar sound. It is produced by the kawas, striking the pavements of the Old City with their staffs. Kavas are Turks who protect the Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem when he goes to worship at the temple during the celebrations, or accompany him during religious processions. An indispensable attribute of the guards is not only a long heavy staff with massive iron knobs, but also a dark red fez with a tassel. The task of the Kavas is both to protect the patriarch and to ensure free space around him.
This tradition dates back to the time of the Ottoman Empire, when only Muslims could carry weapons. Rich and influential foreigners were given special guards, which were called kawasami. Translated from Turkish, this word means “archer”. In ancient times, guards were armed with bows and swords. They also had a staff. By knocking on them, they warned people that a particularly important person was walking down the street. At a certain point, the Turkish archers were attached to the Patriarch of Jerusalem.
And indeed, a few minutes later, a solemn procession came right at me: four Kavas in front, followed by priests in red Easter vestments with huge burning candles and banners in their hands. In the center of this solemn procession, I saw Patriarch Theophilos III of Jerusalem, dressed in snow-white robes. He was followed by a small group of believers. These people sang hymns in Greek, which were interrupted by joyful exclamations of “Christos anesti!” (“Christ is risen!”) and the response “Alitos anesti!” (“Truly risen!”). The main Easter greeting in this crowd could be heard not only in Greek, but also in Bulgarian and Russian. While walking to Golgotha, the Orthodox marchers were even congratulated in French. I had crossed paths with an elderly couple from Lyon half an hour earlier, when we were looking for one of Christ’s stops on the way to Golgotha.
The measured tapping of the staffs stopped only when we approached the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Its massive doors were already open, and the procession solemnly entered. The priests and believers retreated to the Catholicon, the chapel of the Resurrection, owned by the Jerusalem Orthodox Church and located opposite the entrance to the Kuvuklia, the chapel of the Holy Sepulchre, which shelters the tomb of Christ. I went to wander around the huge temple.
If there were still people at the entrance near the Anointing stone (according to legend, the body of Christ was placed on it after being taken from the cross, and it was here that Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus prepared the body for burial, anointed with myrrh and aloe) and in the rotunda itself near the Kuvuklia, then there were practically no people a little further away. Out of curiosity, single onlookers entered other chapels of the cathedral – Armenian, Syrian, Coptic, but they did not stay there for long. Adam’s chapel, located directly under the very spot where Jesus Christ is believed to have been crucified, was also empty. Legend has it that it was here, under the future crucifixion, that the first man Adam was buried. When, centuries later, the blood of the God-Man was spilled on the ground after being struck by a spear by the centurion Longinus, the rock cracked to its full depth under the blood that fell on it. It is easy to see this gap today, now it is covered by glass. A pigeon was sitting carelessly on the glass, preening its feathers, when I looked in here.
It was quiet among the Catholics too. The Franciscans, who own the so–called altar of Nails in the temple, the place where soldiers tore off Christ’s clothes and played dice with them, and then nailed Jesus to the cross, celebrated their festive mass together with the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem in the early morning. Through the slightly ajar door near the niche with the altar of Mary Magdalene, also under the jurisdiction of the Roman Church, I saw a large portrait of Pope Francis. The pontiff was still alive that day. Hardly anyone could have imagined then that the pope would pass away in less than a day.