TOMB SERVICE
Restoring the holiest shrine in Christendom is a feat of both engineering and diplomacy,
JERUSALEM— Work has begun to save the holiest shrine in Christendom. It won’t be a simple patch-and-paint job.
This is the alpha and omega of restoration projects.
They are going to repair Christ’s tomb — with titanium bolts.
Over the next nine months, a team of Greek conservationists will restore the collapsing chapel built above and around the burial cave where the faithful believe that Jesus was buried and rose from the dead after the Crucifixion.
To fix the chapel, which is buckling under its own weight, the crew will have to enter a few square metres of the ruins of the first-century tomb. It is called the Holy Rock. To get there, they will clean centuries of candle soot left from votive lamps, they will reset and anchor the imported marbles and they will inject 21st-century stabilizing mortar into 12th-century masonry from the time of the Crusades.
At the heart of the heart of the edifice, in the centre of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in the Old City of Jerusalem, they will lift the slab where millions of pilgrims have knelt and prayed, where the salt of tears and the wet of sweat have smoothed and worried the hardest stone.
And for the first time in more than 200 years, they will look inside.
The ruins of what is believed to be a rock-cut tomb is being breached because the chapel built above it is falling apart.
Its repair is decades overdue. After years of squabbling among the Christian communities who occupy the site, work to restore the edifice began earlier this month.
The conservationists — whose jobs have included repairing the Acropolis in Athens — are not sure what they will find.
“This is the most alive place we have ever worked,” said Antonia Moropoulou, a leader of the team from the National Technical University of Athens.
The conservation team has already probed the chapel and tomb with ground-penetrating radar and laser scanners.
They are flying drones with cameras above the indoor site now, which — like flying drones around the Vatican or Mecca — is not easy.
They have detected a fracture in the rock of the tomb, unknown until today.
They believe that the crack is the result of stress from the columns supporting a cupola above.
Still, no modern scientist has ever looked inside. What will they see?
Archeology at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre has been limited, not only by protective clerics but also by centuries of tradition. The site is considered the most sublime in Christendom, a place of pilgrimage, faith, passion and mystery — not digging and probing.
Patriarch Theophilos III of the Orthodox Church of Jerusalem told the Washington Post: “There is no doubt that there is some kind of energy. I don’t want to describe it, but some kind of energy that emanates from this place.”
Theophilos said he has reread the historical accounts of his predecessors who saw the ruins of the tomb when it was last exposed in 1810.
The previous Crusader-era chapel was destroyed by a catastrophic fire in 1808, he said.
When the Greeks were rebuilding in 1809, “Everybody was so excited to see part of what has remained of the original cave that served as the tomb of Christ.
“Now? To be honest, we have the same feelings,” Theophilos said. “You cannot remain indifferent.”
He added: “This is not an archeological monument. Those stones are not mere stones.” But what lies beneath? The British archeologist Martin Biddle, who studied the site in the 1990s, speculated that there could be ancient graffiti left by pilgrims somewhere around the Holy Rock or beneath the floor under the rotunda, perhaps scribbles of “He is risen!”
Or maybe small, scratched crosses left in the caves of Christians in the first centuries after his death. Or maybe just cut stone. Whatever evidence exists, the conservationists won’t know until they get there — and even then, will it prove definitely that this was the tomb of Jesus?
The Greek team has promised to keep the church open to visitors and pilgrims throughout the restoration, meaning they will be working in the deep of the night, the site lit by their own portable generators and a hundred vigil lamps.
“This is a very challenging environment. Very profound. Yet very exciting,” said Moropoulou, who said she is both an engineer and a believer.
“This is a serious undertaking,” she said. “We know very well where we are and we know what we are doing.”
The Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem is one of the most popular religious sites in the world.
The cavernous basilica, filled with obscure niches, secret crusader tombs, hidden chapels and golden icons, marks the site where Catholic and Eastern Orthodox faiths believe Jesus died, was buried and rose.
“Where heaven and earth meet,” Theophilos III said.
Every year on Easter Saturday, thousands of Eastern Orthodox worshippers crowd into the church to see the miracle of the Holy Fire, when a bundle of candles is lit by the tomb and passed, hand to hand, to reaffirm for believers the resurrection of Christ and the promise of eternal life.
Religious scholars say the earliest followers of the new movement that Christ inspired may have been praying here in AD 66. There is abundant evidence that Christian pilgrims have been making their way here since at least the fourth century.
The traditional tomb is now underneath a towering rotunda, co- cooned in a small chapel called the Holy Edicule. According to tradition, this shelters the remains of the firstcentury burial cave that the Bible says belonged to a prominent Jew — and a secret disciple of Jesus — who offered it to Christ.
There have been at least four Christian chapels erected over the site. The first was by the emperor Constantine in the fourth century, who swept aside a pagan temple Hadrian had built to the goddess Aphrodite — perhaps a move by Rome to deny early Christians a place of pilgrimage. The Holy Sepulchre was saved by the Muslim conqueror Omar in 638, destroyed by the Egyptian Caliph al-Hakim in 1009, rebuilt by the crusaders who themselves slaughtered half the city, protected again by the Muslim conqueror Saladin and ravaged again by the fearsome Khwarazmian Turks, whose horsemen rode into the church and lopped off the heads of praying monks.
The last chapel was built by the Greeks in 1810.
Today, a cage of iron girders, erected as an emergency measure by the British governor in 1947, no longer can sustain the bulging edifice.
Rev. Jerome Murphy-O’Connor, in his Oxford archeological guide to the Holy Land, saw the Church of the Holy Sepulchre as a very human collision of the sacred and profane.
“One looks for luminous light, but it is dark and cramped,” he wrote. “One hopes for peace, but the ear is assailed by a cacophony of warring chants.”
The priest-archeologist asked: “Is this the place where Christ died and was buried? Yes, very probably.”
It has taken years to get the Christian communities who worship at the Holy Sepulchre to agree to the restoration project.
The religious orders who have rights at the Holy Sepulchre — Greek Orthodox, Roman Catholics and Armenian Orthodox, alongside Syrians, Copts and Ethiopians — are notorious squabblers, each fiercely asserting their rights under an Ottomanera “status quo” agreement to worship at this altar at that hour on this or that holy day.
It took some prodding from the Pope and a nod from the head of the Eastern Orthodox Church to get the project rolling — plus a commitment by King Abdullah II of Jordan, a Muslim who has rights as a protector of holy sites in Jerusalem, to foot most of the $3.4-million (U.S.) bill.
When the restoration is complete, the British-installed iron girders will be gone, the columns straightened, the tomb bolted, and the limestone and marble scrubbed clean and glowing again in pink, yellow, white, black and green.
Asked how long the repairs will last, one of the Greek conservationists guessed “a thousand years.”
Then, shrugging, added: “Maybe forever.”