Wanderings -- and photos

I have put most of the photos up on Flickr, and I'm in the middle of the process of labeling them and sorting them, now.  If you'd like to see the raw product, here's the link:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/69697114@N00/

There and Back Again

I'm posting this entry -- from the air!!!! -- from somewhere in the skies between Atlanta and St. Louis.  This fills my nerdy soul with delight, that such a thing is even possible.  Felix Fabri probably never even dreamed of such a thing. (Although I have no doubt that he'd have done it too, given half the chance. I bet he'd have been one of the first friars in the Ulm convent with both a Facebook Page and a Twitter account.)

After the formal conference ended on Friday, we were taken to tour Galilee and Nazareth on Saturday and Sunday.  We saw three early synagogues -- one from the 2nd Century (Zippori), one from the 4th century (Hammat Tiberias), and one from the 6th Century (Beit Alpha Synagogue) -- and archaeologists have uncovered the most beautiful mosaics.  Each synagogue floor had a zodiac as its central symbol. What was a pagan representation of Helios, the sun god, and the pagan signs for the months doing in the very heart of a Jewish place of worship?  It was an amazing multi-cultural mix of the kind that you find all over the ancient world.  The Jewish cities of Tiberias and the region were so integrated into Hellenistic culture that the pagan deities had become a part of "good taste" and had lost their religious, pagan meanings. It's interesting, because I think we usually think of people in "ancient times" as being extremely religious, and I think this shows that they were as complicated as we are today. 

The zodiac in the synagogue of Beit Alpha

We also spent the afternoon looking at Capernaum, where there is a beautiful, white marble synagogue, and happens to be the very same town where, as the tradition goes, Jesus called Peter to be a "fisher of men".

The site is owned by the Franciscan Friars, and they make sure you know it's a holy place before you enter --

-- yep, that's right -- no dogs, cigarettes, guns, or short clothing!

After a long day of touring, driving by the Horns of Hattin (which we didn't get to stop at!), we had lunch and later sat in the evening sun on the shores of the Sea of Galilee.  Just being in a place that I'd heard so much about, and which seemed so unchanged, gave me the shivers. Big waterbirds flew low over the sea, and the sun turned the sea golden, and 2,000 years ago seemed really close.

Jerusalem, the old and the new

Early morning (before 6:30am) in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre -- the last chance to visit -- the Greek monks were chanting a service behind the tomb in the rotunda, and the Franciscan friars were chanting their own service on top of the rock of Calvary. It was hardly light, and candles glowed in the dark church. Hardly any tourists -- most people in the Church were there for devotion, and it was a *completely* different place this morning.

Then, from out of the shadows, a dozen Knights of Malta walked across the rotunda, dressed in their white, floor-length capes and red Maltese crosses.  They could have stepped from out of time -- crusaders, right there.  And then, they stopped in front of the holy tomb ... and pulled out their digital cameras!  They were just tourists, too.

Not tourists, really, or only ... or completely devout -- but full of contradictions, like the city of Jerusalem.

Knights in Disguise

Leaving the city through the Jaffa Gate to head back, I saw the Knights of Malta just outside the Ottoman ramparts.  But they weren't planning a new crusade -- just taken off their robes and were waiting for their tour bus. The old and the new, together.

Eid Mubarak! (Happy Holidays!) ... hoofprints and footprints ...

From sundown last night and for the next few days, today is a special day in Jerusalem -- a holiday!

(And a holy day [holiday = holy day]) This is the festival of Eid ul-Adha, which Muslims celebrate to honor Ibrahim's (Abraham) willingness to obey God's command and to sacrifice his son, Ishmael. (Those of you who know the Hebrew Bible might be a bit confused -- in Islamic tradition, it's Ishamel, not Isaac, whom Abraham was supposed to sacrifice.) As he was about to obey, God stopped Ibrahim and gave him a lamb to sacrifice, instead. The festival is the second most imporant feast in the year, and it also marks the end of the yearly pilgrimage (hajj) to Mecca. The spot where Ibrahim is said to have offered the lamb is a sacred rock, under the golden Dome of the Rock that is in the picture above. The rock is also the spot where Muslims believe Mohammed was taken up into Heaven from Jerusalem on the winged beast al-Buraq during his miraculous Night Journey from Mecca. Al-Buraq is supposed to have left a still-visible hoofprint in the rock. 

If a family can afford it, they sacrifice a sheep on this holiday, and divide the meat between themeselves, their neighbors, and the poor.

Families also visit each other on the holiday, dress up in their best clothes, walk around, eat, see the sights, and do fun things together.  We saw this family doing just that, with Dad and son getting a camel ride (sister leading) on the top of the Mount of Olives. [Yes, I played hooky from a session this afternoon -- shhh, don't tell.  I just had to see more of Jerusalem!]

From there, and the beautiful, iconic view of the city of Jerusalem, we walked down through the Jewish cemetery (where people want to be buried because it's thought that that valley will be the site of the Last Judgement) ....

... to a sacred space on the Mount of Olives that is holy for both Christians and Muslims --

 the Rock of the Ascension, where Christians believe Jesus ascended bodily into heaven, and Muslims revere as a spot sacred to Jesus, God's prophet.

Today, it's part of a mosque and not always open -- but it was open during the festival.  The building around it was probably built by the first crusaders. The first reference from the site comes from a crusader sermon the night before they captured Jerusalem in 1099. The crusaders had made a procession around the city to gain God's grace for a victory, and it was at this place that they stopped and said, from here Jesus ascended into heavem. The crusaders modelled the building around the site on the rotunda of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Later, the site was rebuilt by the Ottomon Turks and made into a mosque. We managed to wait out two noisy tour groups and finally got to explore it all by ourselves.

crusader-era column capital

Fabri says about this place:

"... we returned along the road on the top of the ridge of the Mount of Olives, and walked southwards on that high ground towards a great half-ruined church. When we came to it, we went up some stone steps into the vaulted porch, which stands before the door of the church. Before the church-door a Saracen had placed himself with a club, and would suffer no one to enter unless he gave him a madinus, twenty-five of which make a ducat. [We had to pay 5 sheckels ($1.36) to enter today. --Dr. B]  Now in the midst of this church there stands a great chapel-fair, round, and vaulted, wherein is the exceeding holy place of the footprints of the Lord Jesus Christ, which He left stamped into the rock when He ascended from that place into heaven. We stood before this chapel, and with loud and cheerful voices chanted the hymns and prayers appointed in the processional for the place of the Lord's Ascension; and entering in, as many of us as could go in at one time, we fell down upon our faces, kissed the most holy footprints of our Saviour, and received plenary indulgences. 

After this we betook ourselves to viewing the place. It stands upon a high peak of the Mount of Olives at the southern end thereof, even as Galilee aforementioned is at the northern end of the mountain, and the place of the annunciation of the death of the Virgin Mary is below the ridge, half way between Galilee and the place of the Ascension. In this holy place there stands a great round church, beautifully built in such sort that on the top it is not covered by a vault, but the vaulted roof has a wide opening purposely made in it, beneath which opening stands the chapel of the Lord's Ascension, even as doth the chapel of the Lord's Sepulchre. [The vault was covered over by the Ottoman Turks in the 16th century. All that is left now is the "chapel" that Fabri mentions, and the bases of the columns for the missing outer church. --Dr. B]

On this rock are to be seen the prints of both the feet of the Lord Jesus, though the print of the right foot is the plainer of the two. These prints are kissed by Christians and Saracens alike. Now one of the pilgrims, moved by a pleasant spirit of piety, having with him a flask of exceeding sweet wine, poured some of it into the hollow formed by the footprints, and the rest licked it out as they kissed them, and as fast as the place was emptied he poured more in. On the north side of this church there is a hole in the wall so high up that a tall man can only just reach it with his uplifted arm. Pilgrims raise themselves up to this hole and put their hands upon it, declaring that there in the wall is some of that very stone whereon Christ stood when He ascended into heaven; but whence they get this idea I know not."

--Fabri, Wanderings, vol. II, pp. 484-5

After visiting this place (And getting lost -- so many helpful people pointed us to the right way! We didn't speak Arabic, and they didn't speak English, but they could tell we were lost. So much can be said with just a kind gesture.) we walked down the Mount of Olives, and through the Garden of Gethsemene.

There, while watching everyone go into a spot holy to Christians, having walked through a Jewish cemetery, we drank Turkish coffee and listened to the evening prayers (one of the Five Pillars of Islam) ring out over the city in the gathering dusk.  I love this movie below, because you see an ancient, sacred site of the city, and hear the devotion that still moves people here -- and then, you hear a traffic jam from just around the corner, which reminds you that this place is still alive, with normal, vibrant (and impatient!) people.

Eid Mubarak!

The Veneration of Absence

Spent the entire day (9am to 9pm) at the conference, so no excursions into the city today. But we did hear the bells of Jerusalem ring out in the morning, just when the sun was coming up.

Several papers pointed out that pilgrims' experience of Jerusalem was one of absence -- the hole of the cross, said to be in the middle of the world; the empty tomb of Jesus; the holes carved in the side of the tomb; the core without a center.  But in the wandering, veneration, and actions of the pilgrims themselves, they filled the absence with their faith (at least some of them).

Today, all day in the conference room, was a day of absence -- the absence of the real city of Jerusalem -- but that absence was also filled -- with lots of thinking and talking about representations of Jerusalem.

Fabri writes:

"If anyone wishes to see the form (formam) of this church [The Church of the Holy Sepulchre], let him look at the `Pilgrimage,' written by that eminent lord and clever man, Lord Bernhard of Braitenbach [sic], Dean of the Metropolitan Church of Mainz, where he will be able to see its image drawn clearly as if he were standing in the courtyard and beholding it with his eyes (ac si in atrio ecclesiae staret et videret)."
                                                       --Fabri, Evagatorium (The Latin edition of his Wanderings), I, p. 344.

I couldn't see the Church of the Holy Sepulchre today, but you can:

Bernhard von Breydenbach (with woodcuts by Erhard Reuwich), Peregrinatio (Mainz, 1486)

Enjoy. (Still working out the kinks in presentation, but at least the sound should work.)

Bells of the Holy Sepulchre

Jerusalem, the Second Day: through the Via Crucis to the Holy Sepulchre

Early in the morning, through St. Stephen's Gate...

Then along the via crucis (Way of the Cross)

To the Church of the Holy Sepulchre

Felix Fabri says, "Indeed, no one should think visiting the holy places to be a light task; there is the intense heat of the sun, the walking from place to place, kneeling, and prostration: above all, there is the strain which everyone puts on himself to earnest piety and comprehension of what is shown him in the holy places, and to devout prayer and meditation, all of which cannot be done without great fatigue, because to do them fitly a man should be at rest and not rambling about. To struggle after mental abstraction whilst bodily walking from place to place is exceedingly toilsome..." (Wanderings, vol. I, p. 299.)

 .... when you're in Jerusalem, it's good to take a break from all the toil --
slow down, relax, talk to a friend:



Jerusalem, The First Day



The Dome of the Rock and the Western (Wailing) Wall

Much of today was spent inside the conference room, listening to one great paper after another. We heard about everything from the transportation of rocks from St. Katherine's monastery on Sinai to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, to the exchange network of the many relics of the true cross, to the Russian pilgrimage lamps designed to catch the miraculous Holy Fire of Orthodox Holy Saturday -- so much fun! But we spent all day talking about Jerusalem, without actually seeing it. So, after the evening lecture, a few of us ventured into the Old City of Jerusalem to begin our pilgrimage proper.  Here below are a few things we saw, with a bit of what Felix Fabri had to say about them:



 The Citadel of David: "It stands there at the present day, an exceeding strong and fair castle and place of strength, on the top of a steep rocky crag...So now we stood still and gazed at the citadel of David...and there we mused upon how Jerusalem must have looked in the days of old..." (Wanderings, vol. VIII, p. 324)

 

"When Titus besieged Jerusalem he first of all burned the temple and afterwards the whole city. He overthrew the walls of the temple down to their very foundations, caused the mount whereon it stood to be cut away, and ordered it to be cast down into the brook Cedron, and filled up the ditches thereof, levelling it with the earth, as we read in the `Jewish War,' Book VII., ch. xvi., and in many other places." (Wanderings, vol. VIII, p.234.)



Praying at the Western Wall





The Western Wall of the Temple of the Lord is all that is left of the Jewish Temple that stood at that site at the time of Jesus. It (the second Jewish temple to be built on the site) was destroyed by the Romans in 68 CE (Common Era). According to the souvenir flyers (which Fabri certainly would have collected if they had been available when he visited), the Western Wall is "the most sacred structure of the Jewish people."  Devout jews gather from all over the world to pray there and to leave slips of paper inscribed with prayers between its stones. It is a place, like many pilgrimage sites, where memory, identity, and time (both divine and earthly) come together. Pilgrims can run their fingers over the rough surface of the stone, hear the prayers of those around them, and connect, all at the same time, with the past, the present, and the future.

 











Safe and Sound

In Jerusalem, safe and sound ... and sleepy!

But an 11-hour flight beats Felix's three weeks in a boat with storms, seasickness, pirates, and the dangerous grosse Merfisch of the deep:

"Yet another peril is to be met with, which is called Troyp, from the fish Trays, which, when it becomes aware of a ship, comes forth from the depths, and pierces the ship with his beak; for he has a beak fashioned like an auger, and unless he be driven away from the ship he bores through it. He cannot be forced away from the ship save by a fearless look, so that one should lean out of the ship over the water, and unflinchingly look into the eyes of the fish, while the fish meanwhile looks at him with a terrible gaze. If he who looks at the fish grows terrified, and begins to turn his eyes away, the beast straightway rises, snatches him down beneath the water, and devours him. Let this suffice about the perils of the sea." -- Fabri, Wanderings, vol. VII, p. 125.

Koninklijke Bibliotheek, KA 16, fol. 106v

When Life Gives You Limens...

“Liminality” is a concept that has interested anthropologists and students of pilgrimage for the past two decades. In Latin, a limen is a threshold, which is an in-between place – not inside, not outside the house.  So, “liminality” is a kind of “threshold-ness” a being in-between – just like a pilgrim on a journey, not at home, but not yet at a destination, either. (The term was first used by the anthropologist Arnold van Gennep, who used it to described the intermediate phase in a ritual initiation, where the person undergoing a rite of passage has left her old identity, but hasn’t yet taken on a new one. ) I once heard Jás Elsner (Pilgrimage Past and Present: Sacred Travel and Sacred Space in the World Religions, 1995) say that the entire experience of a modern international flight is liminal. You enter a strange space; your old identity is left behind (you have to carry papers even to prove who you are); you fly over a space often claimed by no one; and when you arrive at the new destination, you have to go through the ritual of disembarking, showing your passport, and, at that point, become a “new” person.  The time in-between the start and the finish of your journey, or pilgrimage, is a “liminal state”.

Airports themselves often feel “noplace” (at least inside of them). In the air, as a traveler, you’re also “noplace” and “nowhere” at once. I think this might be especially true in those short hallways between the plane and the customs and passport control, before you’ve actually “entered” the new country. You’ve not really set foot on the state territory, actually ... but you are someplace, as well. You can see it, and touch it, and slip on it if you get tangled up in your luggage.  Makes you wonder how “real” modern nation-state borders really are—and who decides where they are, when they begin and end, and why.

Anthropologists of pilgrimage, especially Victor and Edith Turner (Image and Pilgrimage in Christian Culture, 1978), also like to talk about the communitas of pilgrimage—another Latin word that means here a sense of shared community, and especially the shared community of the band of travelers: a new identity of being pilgrims together. 

Felix Fabri spent almost three months in a “liminal state” on his way to Jerusalem.  Felix enjoyed a sense of communitas with the other pilgrims on his ship, but communitas also had its limits for him, too. On his way to Jerusalem in 1480 (his first trip), he tells us that the French pilgrims and the German pilgrims did not leave off their old identities for one new happy pilgrim band, at all:

            “...we unanimously decided that no more games of cards or dice should be played on board of the [pilgrim] galley, that no quarrels, oaths, or blasphemies should be allowed, and that the clerks and priests should add litanies to their usual daily prayers. Indeed, before this decree was made, much disorder took place in these matters, for men were gambling morning, noon, and night, especially the Bishop of Orleans with his suite; and withal they swore most dreadfully, and quarreled daily, for the French and we Germans were always at blows....For the French are proud and passionate men; and therefore, I believe that it was an act of divine providence that they were separated from us, and our galley cleared of them; for we should scarcely have reached Jerusalem in their company without bloodshed and the murder of some of us.”

[Felix Fabri, The Book of the Wanderings of Brother Felix Fabri, trans. and ed. by Aubrey Stewart, Palestine Pilgrims’ Text Society; vol. VII, p. 20.]

No games, dice, or swearing on the first leg of the flight. Everyone’s been pretty well behaved...so far!

On the Way!

When Felix Fabri left for Jerusalem, he traveled by horse and boat. I'm heading off on an airplane from St. Louis, but I bet the excitement is the same.

Fabri says that as his party was entering Venice by boat (where they would get a pilgrim galley to sail them to Jerusalem), they started singing the German pilgrim hymn, "In Gottes Namen Fahren Wir". They also (in his imagined pilgrimage, the Sionpilger, sang a response, In mari via tua.

Here, you can read the German hymn, and here you can listen to the Oxford Consort Iridiana sing In mari via tua. Both are going through my head right now, as I bet they were for Felix as he set out.

More later!

The Beginning

Friar Felix Fabri, a Dominican reformer and pilgrim to Jerusalem in 1480, left his adopted hometown of Ulm, Germany, for a second trip to
Jerusalem, Mount Sinai, and Egypt in April of 1483.

This blog will retrace part of his journey.

(For the fullest account available online in English, see the link below to the "Traveling to Jerusalem" website at the University of Colorado-Pueblo)

Fabri began his account of his journey thus:

I SHALL now begin my wanderings on my most desirable and delightful pilgrimage, which pilgrimage I intend to describe in the following order, arranging it in twelve chapters, according to the twelve months, more or less, for which the pilgrimage lasted, and dividing each chapter into as many heads as there are days in the month, so that each month makes a chapter and each day a heading. I shall begin with the day of my departure, and end with that of my return, and shall faithfully set down all the places which we saw month by month and day by day, and will tell truly all that befell us in each month and on each day, adding descriptions of the holy and other places the better to explain my narrative. For I never passed one single day while I was on my travels without writing some notes, not even when I was at sea, in storms, or in the Holy Land; and in the desert I have frequently written as I sat on an ass or a camel; or at night, while the others were asleep, I would sit and put into writing what I had seen...

On the 14th [of April, 1483] having got together the baggage which I intended to carry with me, and having placed it on the horse which I had bought, I mounted, and was about to ride away in company with the Count's servant. However, as I sat upon my horse, all the brethren flocked round me and eagerly begged me to take careful note of all the holy places I saw, and to write an account of them and bring it to them, so that they also, in mind, if not in body, might enjoy the pleasure of visiting the holy places. I promised the brethren that I would do this, and with that the Count's servant and I went out of the convent and rode stealthily, as though hiding ourselves, out of the city, crossing the river Danube by the gate which leads to the sheep-bridge. 



Ulm in Fabri's day. From Hartmann Schedel's Weltchronik (the Nuremberg Chronicle), 1493, fols. 190v-191r


Ulm's location:


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Stay tuned for more...