JERUSALEM
— The only mystical power visible was the burning light from seven
tapered candles. And yet for ages, the tomb that sits at the center of
history has captured the imaginations of millions around the world.
For
centuries, no one looked inside — until last week, when a crew of
specialists opened the simple tomb in Jerusalem’s Old City and found the
limestone burial bed where tradition says the body of Jesus Christ lay
after his crucifixion and before his resurrection.
“We
saw where Jesus Christ was laid down,” Father Isidoros Fakitsas, the
superior of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate, told me. “Before, nobody
has.” Or at least nobody alive today. “We have the history, the
tradition. Now we saw with our own eyes the actual burial place of Jesus
Christ.”
For
60 hours, they collected samples, took photographs and reinforced the
tomb before resealing it, perhaps for centuries to come. By the time I
visited one dark night this week, the tomb had already been closed
again. In the end, just about 50 or so priests, monks, scientists and
workers had peered inside, and they seem likely to be the only ones on
the planet who will do so in our lifetimes.
The
tomb believed to be Christ’s was opened as part of a complex renovation
of the shrine that was built around it long after his death in what is
today known as the Church of the Holy Sepulcher,
perhaps Christianity’s holiest site. Scholars hope to study what they
found to determine more about the event that spawned one of the world’s
great religions.
Pilgrims
have been flocking to the church for generations, sometimes as many as
5,000 a day. To get to the tomb, many walk along the Via Dolorosa, the
winding path through Jerusalem’s Old City where Jesus is said to have
been forced to bear his cross. Vendors like those lining the way today
would not have been there then, but otherwise not much has changed.
The
church was first built where the tomb was discovered in the fourth
century during the reign of Constantine, the first Roman emperor to
officially convert to Christianity. It was sacked after Jerusalem fell
to the Persians in the seventh century, then rebuilt and later destroyed
by Muslim caliphs in the 11th century. After the Crusaders captured
Jerusalem, the church was restored in the 12th century but burned to the
ground in the 19th century and then rebuilt yet again.
A site known as the Garden Tomb
is said by some to be the site of the crucifixion, while the Church of
the Holy Sepulcher is more commonly deemed by Christians to be the place
where Jesus was buried and rose again. At the time, it was outside the
Old City, but the wall was later moved to include the church and its
famous tomb.
The
marble shrine, known as the Aedicule, was built in its existing form in
1810 during the Ottoman era and has been crumbling lately. But only
after pressure from the Israelis did the three religious communities
that jealously share the church, Greek Orthodox, Armenian Orthodox and
Roman Catholic, agree to a renovation that began last spring.
Chosen
to handle the project was the National Technical University of Athens,
which had worked on restorations of the Acropolis in Athens and the
Hagia Sophia mosque turned museum in Istanbul. The National Geographic Society
teamed up with the university to work on cultural restoration and the
National Geographic Channel will air a program later this month documenting the project.
Under
the direction of Antonia Moropoulou from National Technical University,
the conservation experts removed the iron cage built by the British in
1947 to shore up the earthquake-damaged Aedicule and then began taking
apart the shrine piece by piece. They removed disintegrating mortar,
reconstructed parts of the sometimes-swollen masonry, reset the columns
and injected grout into cracks in the structure.
Rainwater
had deteriorated much of the mortar over the centuries. Iron support
bars that were fully corroded will be removed and replaced by titanium.
The
specialists had no plans at first to open the tomb, but they decided a
couple of weeks ago that they needed to do so in order to ensure that
nothing could leak inside.
It was a delicate operation. The top of the tomb was split, and the specialists worried that lifting it would break it.
“The
main goal was not to break the plate,” said Harris Mouzakis, an
assistant professor of civil engineering at National Technical
University who is working on the project.
The
team felt the pressure. “We had to be very careful,” Mr. Mouzakis said.
“It was not just a tomb we had to open. It was the tomb of Jesus Christ
that is a symbol for all of Christianity — and not only for them but
for other religions.”
Once
they removed the marble cladding, they discovered another marble slab
with a cross carved into it. Beneath that, they found the limestone slab
hewed from the wall of a cave that is believed to be where Jesus lay
after his death.
That
slab had not been seen since at least the 1500s. The team worked around
the clock for three days, gathering dirt and other material from inside
the tomb for future study. They closed it again quickly to avoid
disrupting the visits of pilgrims who still flock to the church each
day.
“Every
Christian, they want to come and visit the holy place and open his
heart to them,” said Father Isidoros, 43, who first came to the church a
quarter-century ago, and lives there.
Ducking
his head, Father Isidoros brought me into the tiny room where the tomb
rests. A small window had just been installed opposite the tomb to show
the original cave walls where Jesus is believed to have been buried. The
tomb itself looked plain and unadorned, its top separated down the
middle. The candles flickered, illuminating the small enclosure.
The hardest part of the renovation is now behind the team, but months of work to bolster the shrine lay ahead.
“It
will last many, many years,” Mr. Mouzakis said. “We will succeed if
after 200 or 500 years somebody will come back to restore our work.”
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