Hittin' the Pavement

The Old City of Jerusalem

There are few places in the world as paradoxical as the Old City of Jerusalem. A place whose name translates literally to “Abode of Peace,” Jerusalem has seen brutal conflict and exile for nearly all of its millennia-old history. Its area measures less than half a square mile, yet its influence and importance in the course of global affairs is outsized. Indeed, at 3,000 years old, it remains as relevant as ever.

The magic of Jerusalem is that it defies so many of the rules of a modern walkable city. Most of its streets are narrow enough to make bumping into one another almost a requisite of citizenship. A mix of building age? Not here. One is hard pressed to find a building less than five centuries old. And this is to say nothing of the complete homogeneity of building materials–the famed Jerusalem stone hugs the surface of the Old City almost without exception. 

The city’s layout can hardly be called efficient, either. Like the layering of a cake, each wave of conquest added a new and sometimes forcibly imposed built layer to the city. To cut out a slice of the Old City is to dive into a mingling of empires unlike any other–Ancient Jewish Kingdoms, Babylonians, Greeks, Romans, Crusaders, and Ottomans, to name a few.

But Jerusalem’s layers are not limited to stone and archaeology. In the Old City, physical and spiritual strata collide in a cacophony of sights and sounds. This is, after all, a place whose landlords include the Rabbinate of the State of Israel, The Palestinian Religious Authority or wakf, and the Roman Catholic Church. As both a functioning city and the host to the holiest sites of the world’s major religions, a walk through Jerusalem is tour of the divine living side-by-side with the mundane. Pilgrims share narrow, cobbled paths with trash collectors. Rabbis and Imams shuffle around series of tight corners that show no sign of ending. All the while, sandwiched between sites of Biblical lore are small single-family homes and apartments, arranged in clusters that seem at once imprecise and perfectly efficient.

The Old City is a place of revelation of both the spiritual and architectural varieties. Those venturing in without a map can easily find themselves lost in a maze of tight twisting passageways, only to step unexpectedly into glorious vistas looking over the Western Wall and the Dome of the Rock. Like a pair of lungs, the streets of Jerusalem perpetually expand and contract, plunging their inhabitants deep into tapered tunnels before spitting them out into plazas of light and space. A walk through the dimly-lit main bazaar, its sides stuffed with religious paraphernalia in stores barely large enough to walk into, leads to an elevated square with views of the Old City walls and surrounding hills. For some, this is the Via Dolorosa, the site of the Crucifixion of Jesus. For the thirty or so children kicking around a tattered ball, this is the schoolyard.

Amidst the din of playtime, one begins to feel as though this place, in all its 3,000 years, has never once fallen silent. Thanks to its tourists, the streets of Jerusalem echo with the Babel-like hum of a hundred languages. Just beneath, the constant buzz of negotiation reverberates: one rosary, three postcards, and a falafel. Conspicuously absent is the noise of cars, relegated permanently to the modernity laying outside the ancient walls. And hovering above it all is the sound of devotion. Five times per day, the Muslim call to prayer blares from the minarets, crashing head-on into Jewish rites and priestly blessings.