The Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem

Sepulchre = "a small room or monument, cut in rock or built of stone, in which a dead person is laid or buried"

I first visited the Church of the Holy Sepulchre six years ago, and have to admit that it left me cold; this is what Christians are supposed to believe is the site of the crucifixion, burial and thus the resurrection of Jesus Christ.   Instead, it appeared to me (then) to be a scruffy, gloomy and noisy, tourist filled, faded building, cashing in on its supposed fame.   

To reach the church, one walks through the souk, accosted by shop owners selling everything:- spices, shoes, religious artifacts, clothes emblazened with suitable (or unsuitable) slogans; jewellery, ceramics, Jewish prayer shawls, fruit, bread ... the nearer one got to the church, the more religious the T-shirt slogans.

                                                                                                                                                                                         

    

The narrow alley-ways, and twists and turns suddenly open out into a small square in front of the Church, which I discovered is best visited soon after dawn, as the thronging crowds later get impossible to squeeze through.

(aerial picture from https://www.seetheholyland.net/church-of-the-holy-sepulchre/)

The square can just be seen in front of the brownish building right of centre, between the smaller dome, and the blackish tree on the lower edge of the photo; you can just make out how small the square actually is, and crushed into the old city.  The two sloping white roofs are structures covering the roof of part of the Church while renovation work continues beneath.

So, on my first visit six years ago, I had been half expecting to see some of the rocks of Calvary, and perhaps a rock tomb, as described variously in the four gospels.  Indeed, on that visit we had been staying in a hotel just outside the city wall, and on looking out of our bedroom window, I could see this slightly skull-like rocky cliff.

Was this the 'place of the skull' that was mentioned by General Gordon as Calvary, especially as there were human bones scattered around, according to ancient writers ?

The next day we actually visited The Garden Tomb, which was behind our hotel in the next street, and it was exactly the place we had seen out of our hotel window !   I felt it was authentic .... 

... yet reading up about it later, it seems unlikely.    I wish I had researched more before that first visit, and had learned more about the Church of the Holy Sepulchre ... and had found this web-site ... https://www.seetheholyland.net/church-of-the-holy-sepulchre/   which I didn't discover until a few weeks ago.    I forsee another visit to Jerusalem .... 

... to be continued.