The Secret Lives of Buildings: From the Ruins of the Parthenon to the Vegas Strip in Thirteen Stories

by Edward Hollis

  On the last day of the war, Israeli soldiers entered the Arab houses of the Mugrabi quarter next to the Western Wall and gave their inhabitants three hours to pack their belongings and leave. The houses were insanitary slums, the soldiers said, and they were going to be demolished. Days later there was a vast plaza where the houses had been, and crowds of celebrating Israelis. Just one piece of the old Mugrabi quarter survived the devastation: a cobbled ramp leading up to a door high in the wall. Deprived of the houses that once supported it on either side, the ramp looked insecure, but everyone decided to leave it as it was. It would be fine for now.

  Eventually the United Nations condemned the occupation of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Mugrabi quarter, and in a gesture of reconciliation the Israelis returned the Haram e-Sharif to the jurisdiction of the Waqf. The Israelis kept the keys to the door at the top of the Mugrabi path, though—they still have them. As Teddy Kollek, the mayor of Jerusalem, said at the time, “We need to establish facts on the ground.” Once you have those, international resolutions and condemnations carry all the weight of hot air.

  The facts weren’t just on the ground, but under it, too. On 27 June, the Israeli government announced that any antiquities found in any excavation whatsoever in Jerusalem belonged to the Israeli state. A month later it also declared that the whole of Jerusalem was an antiquity, and that no construction could proceed there without prior excavation. The combination of these orders neatly expropriated, de facto, the entire city.

  And then the Israelis started digging. The destruction of the Mugrabi quarter was an obvious act of subjugation, but it was just the first of many. Benjamin Mazar’s excavation of the Western Wall wasn’t just an academic or even a historical exercise. Whether he intended it or not, the project was a strategic offensive. The tunnels that riddle the area are perforated with stairs and doors that allow the Israeli security forces to appear at will anywhere in the Muslim Quarter at any time. The burgeoning Israeli presence brought about by the tunnels has also encouraged increasing numbers of Orthodox Jews who are buying properties in the Muslim Quarter, establishing rabbinical schools and communes in the buildings there. Their yeshivas perch on the roofs of the Arab souk and survey the skyline of the Temple Mount; but they are also connected to the dark undercrofts of the medieval city, where the faithful pray at the buried foundations of the Kotel. The Muslim Quarter has been surrounded, above and below, as well as on every side.

  In 2000, right around the same time that the Israeli authorities placed their embargo on construction in the Haram, Yasser Arafat, head of the Palestinian Authority, and Ehud Barak, prime minister of Israel, met with Bill Clinton at Camp David for yet another peace conference. They weren’t making much progress, and perhaps President Clinton wanted his guests to reflect on their intransigence. Noting that the Haram was built on top of the ground that the Israelis wanted to excavate, he proposed that in this area the border between Israel and the future Palestine should not be a vertical plane, but a horizontal one. That is to say, the surface of the Haram should belong to the Palestinian Authority, but the rock of the Temple Mount underneath it should belong to Israel. It was an absurd proposal, but in the context of Israel and Palestine nothing could have seemed more natural. Not, of course, that either side accepted the idea. The summit ended in failure, as everyone had expected.

  After the collapse of the summit, the notoriously hawkish Ariel Sharon, then Israeli minister for defense, visited the Haram e-Sharif, although both sides in the conflict had begged him not to. He said to the waiting reporters: “I came here as one who believes in coexistence between Jews and Arabs. I believe that we can build and develop together. This was a peaceful visit. Is it an instigation for Israeli Jews to come to the Jewish people’s holiest site?” Then he walked off, surrounded by a thousand armed Israeli police. The next day, Muslims threw rocks down from the Haram onto the worshippers gathered at the Kotel below, and so began the second intifada.

  Two years after Ariel Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount, Israeli architects Eyal Weizman and Rafi Segal mounted an exhibition for the World Congress of Architecture in Berlin. The key image in the show was a photomontage that showed a huge, hideous concrete overpass crossing the Kidron Valley between the Mount of Olives and the Haram e-Sharif. It was a proposal, Weizman and Segal baldly stated, to allow Palestinians to visit the Haram without encroaching on Israeli land or even entering Jerusalem at all. It was a deliberately absurd response to show just how absurdly tangled the situation had become. Today, the closest that most Palestinians can get to their Noble Sanctuary is a concrete wall several miles away; and just as the Jews gather at the Kotel to mourn the loss of their holy place, so Palestinians go to this boundary to mourn the loss of theirs. In reference to that other infamous dividing wall, someone with a memory of Berlin has written on the concrete, “Been there, done that.”

  During the dispute about the Mugrabi path, the same cartoon kept on appearing in the Arab media: it showed a bulldozer marked with the Star of David undermining the Dome of the Rock. The Israeli authorities claim that all their work at the Mugrabi site is just archaeology, and that there is nothing to worry about. But the Palestinians have seen quite enough of Israeli archaeology not to believe them.

  BUT IT WASN’T Israelis who started digging in this troubled ground, nor was it the Palestinians. The first excavators at the site of the ancient temple were Anglo-Saxon Protestants. Even today, the chief features of the Western Wall bear English names. At its southernmost end, a lump of stone indicates the broken remains of a bridge known as Robinson’s Arch, surveyed by Edward Robinson, an American missionary who was sent to the Holy Land in the 1830s. Below the Mugrabi Gate, partially hidden by the infamous crumbling ramp, may be seen the gigantic lintel of Barclay’s Gate, discovered by another American missionary in the 1840s. The largest chamber in the tunnels is vaulted by a Roman arch named for Major General Sir Charles Wilson, who surveyed Jerusalem in the 1860s for the British Royal Engineers.

  Edward Robinson had come to the Holy Land as a missionary, but he was quite aware of the political dimensions of his work.

  The people in general in this part of the country were ready to give us information, so far as they could; and seemed not to distrust us . . . The inhabitants everywhere appeared, for the most part, to desire that the Franks [i.e., western Europeans] should send a force among them. They were formerly tired of the Turks; they were now still more heartily tired of the Egyptians; and were ready to welcome any Frank nation which should come, not to subdue (for that would not be necessary), but to take possession of the land.

  In 1865, the British established the Palestine Exploration Fund, which sought to know everything that could be known about that part of the world. For the devout Protestant Britons of the PEF, the Holy Land was no terra incognita. It was a region whose ancient history they already knew intimately from a Bible in which they believed absolutely. It was a place whose true and sacred geography lay dormant under the sleepy Arab villages and farms that had buried it for centuries. The excavation of this land was therefore a religious duty. Gathering knowledge of the Holy Land was not science but an act of piety.

  And dominion over the Holy Land would be an act of piety on a monumental scale. At the founding of the PEF, the archbishop of York spoke with breathtaking confidence: “The country of Palestine belongs to you and me. It is essentially ours. It is the land from which news came of our redemption. It is the land we turn to as the foundation of all our hopes. It is the land to which we look with as true a patriotism as we do for this dear old England.”

  The Muslim authorities were well aware of the intentions of the British, and they consequently forbade them to make any excavations in the Haram. The explorers, of course, ignored the prohibition. Charles Warren, an officer in the British Royal Engineers (and later the chief of the London Metropolitan Police at the time of Jack the Ripper), rented properties around the south of the Haram e-Sharif and dug deep shafts through which he penetr
ated into the ancient vaults of the mount. Hidden among the rubble he found the “Great Sea,” a vast cistern carved into the rock, and numberless other caverns.

  These exploits were more than imperial derring-do; they were pursued with true missionary zeal. Robinson and Warren had been appalled by the Christians that they found living in the land of Christ, sunk in Byzantine rituals and superstitions. The imperial powers hoped to save these Christians from their error and convert them to the more rational precepts of Protestantism. Impressing the locals with the scientific methods of history, archaeology, and geography would, the missionaries assumed, replace their childish cosmologies with a modern worldview.

  The British weren’t too enamored of the religious practices of the other natives of the Holy Land either. They observed how the Jews used to stand before a ruined wall in the middle of Jerusalem, weeping and rocking with grief; and with amused detachment, they called it the Wailing Wall.

  THE JEWS WEEP at the wall because it is the only thing left of their temple. Referring to the Muslim buildings of the Haram e-Sharif, the Spanish poet Yehuda al-Haziri wrote: “What torment to see our Holy Courts turned into an alien temple! We tried to turn our faces away from this great and majestic church now raised on the site of the ancient tabernacle where once providence had its dwelling.” And the Jews weep, also, because the wall is the closest they will ever get to the place where the temple once stood. This is not only the result of Islamic control of the site. Somewhere under the Haram on the Temple Mount is the site of the Holy of Holies; and the Holy of Holies is so sacred that it can only be entered by the high priest, purified and barefoot, and then only once a year, on the day of Yom Kippur. Any Jew who enters the Haram runs the risk of treading accidentally on the sacred spot and committing a grave blasphemy. It is for this reason that most rabbis warn Jews against going into the sanctuary.

  In 1850, Abdullah, a prominent Jew of Bombay, attempted to buy the wall from the Ottoman authorities, and in 1887 Baron Edmond de Rothschild tried to buy the whole quarter of houses that faced it. In both cases their requests were refused. The Waqf had no objections to the Jews praying at the foot of the wall, but it was part of the Noble Sanctuary, and that was that. Any attempt to make it into a permanent place of worship was quickly suppressed. At one point, when the Jews erected a screen to separate the women from the men at prayers, a riot ensued and several hundred people were killed in the violence; the screen was made of nothing more than a row of chairs. When the mood took them, Muslims would taunt the Jews as they prayed at the Kotel, dropping stones onto them from the Noble Sanctuary above. They still do, from time to time.

  In 1902, a German Jew by the name of A. S. Hirschberg went to Jerusalem and visited the wall. He was a modern sort of man, and he found Jerusalem a squalid sort of place; but as he approached the stones he found himself dissolving into tears, overcome by a strange sorrow he never knew he possessed. He later wrote, “All my private troubles mingled with our nation’s consciousness to form a torrent.” There can be no greater symbol of the tenacity and the suffering of the Jewish people than the fact that they seek God by worshipping at a ruin that, they are told, does not even belong to them. No wonder they are so keen to excavate as much of it as possible.

  JEWS HAVE BEEN fascinated by the archaeology of their temple for centuries—for longer, in fact, than the modern notion of archaeology has existed at all. The idea that the stones of the Western Wall somehow tell the story of a whole people is an ancient one.

  In 1524, David Reuveni, a tiny man wrapped in expensive oriental silks, arrived in Venice. His brother Joseph ruled over the ten lost tribes of Israel by the river Sambation, which is a torrent of stone and fire that stands still only on the Sabbath day. At least, that’s what he told the merchants of Venice. That was the story he gave to the pope in Rome, and to King John of Portugal, and to Keiser Karel at Regensburg. “The king of the Jews,” as they indulgently permitted him to style himself, was a man with a mission. Merchant, pope, emperor, and king were all quite happy to help him, since Reuveni proposed to lead an army against the sultan Suleyman of Constantinople, the ruler of Jerusalem and their avowed enemy. They received Reuveni at court and offered him horse and cannon and men.

  But Reuveni overplayed his hand, for he was less interested in the overthrow of the sultan than in the coming of the Messiah. There was a stone in the Western Wall, he said, that had been placed there by Jeroboam in the time of King Solomon. The stone was cursed, he said, for it had been taken from a pagan temple, and the Redeemer would not arrive until it had been removed. The military campaign against the sultan was merely the prelude to this great event. The Jews he met urged Reuveni to keep quiet about the true nature of his plan, for his Christian sponsors would not want to hear about the appearance of a Messiah. The Jews feared that the usual reprisals would be visited on them all, but they were lucky: only Reuveni was put on trial. Dispatched to Spain for disposal at the hands of the Inquisition, he was burned at the stake in 1535.

  The sultan whose downfall Reuveni had plotted was in fact more sympathetic to the Jews than his Christian peers were. He observed the devotion of the Jews to the ancient temple wall, the way they would stroke and kiss it, and he ordered his architect Sinan to make a space so that they could worship there. Sinan cleared a lane at the foot of the wall, excavating the ground to make the wall taller, and he built a low enclosure around it so that the Jews could say their prayers undisturbed. They later told one another that the sultan had purified the site by washing it in rose water with his own royal hands, just as if he were his namesake, King Solomon himself.

  THE MESSIAH ANTICIPATED by David Reuveni did not arrive, and today the Western Wall forms but a tiny and unprepossessing part of the Haram e-Sharif, the Noble Sanctuary, which is the second most sacred place in the Islamic world. A beautiful grove of olives and cypresses surrounded by stone arcades, the Haram is studded with shrines, which are strange and wonderful retellings in architecture of the stories the Jews and Christians tell about the place. There is the Dome of the Chain, where, it is said, King Daoud used to sit in judgment on the people of Israel. There is the chair of Suleyman, in which the king rested after building the temple, and the Cradle of Isa, from which the son of Maryam preached while still a baby. The upper part of the sanctuary is approached through arcaded gates where, it is said, the souls of all mankind will be weighed on Judgment Day.

  At the southern end of the sanctuary stands the Al-Aqsa Mosque, which, like a medieval cathedral, has been rebuilt again and again since it was first constructed in the seventh century. The ivory pulpit was installed by Saladin, the Gothic rose window in the eastern transept was built by the Crusaders, and the white marble columns under the dome were the gift of Mussolini.

  In the center of the sanctuary stands the Dome of the Rock, built in the late seventh century by the caliph Abd Al-Malik. Covered in brilliant blue tiles, the gilded dome rests on two rows of antique columns of rich serpentine and porphyry. Beneath it, the holy rock itself, scarred with centuries of devotion and abuse, protrudes through a hole in the marble pavement.

  Al-Aqsa means “the farthest,” and all the splendors of the mosque of that name and of the dome beside it commemorate a single enigmatic sura of the Koran.

  Glory be to He

  Who carried His servant by night,

  From the Holy Mosque

  to the Farthest Mosque,

  the precincts of which

  We have blessed

  so that We might show him

  some of Our signs.

  Surely He is the All-Hearing,

  The All-Seeing.

  Like the tomb at Gloucester or the tale of the Holy House, it started out as a simple story; but it has been told again and again, each retelling an elaboration of the last.

  One night Muhammad had awoken and made his way through the streets of Mecca to the Kaaba, where he started to pray. The angel Gabriel appeared to him and led him over to a white winged steed tethered nearby
. This marvelous creature was named Al-Buraq. The angel grabbed him by his ear, and Muhammad mounted. They flew through the air at great speed, stopping to pray in Medina, in Sinai, and in Bethlehem. Soon they were hovering over a walled city, gazing down at domed churches and colonnaded streets and the courtyards of palaces becalmed in the silvery light of a crescent moon. The jumble of houses lapped at the walls of a rectangular platform that overlooked the town, empty of all habitation, like a plinth awaiting a statue. Al-Buraq swooped down, and Muhammad tethered the creature to an iron ring he found hanging from the western wall of the platform. He picked his way through ruinous rubble toward a low outcrop of rock.

  Standing around the rock was a group of old men silhouetted against the night sky. Muhammad recognized them all. There was Adam, who said to Muhammad, “This is where I first stepped on the earth when God cast me out of Paradise.” And Ibrahim added, “It is where I offered up my son Ishaq in sacrifice.” And Jakoub said, “It is where I saw a ladder between heaven and earth.” And Mousa spoke, “It is where they laid the Ark of the Covenant to rest.” And Suleyman said, “This is where I built the temple.” And Isa added, “This is the place of the temple whose destruction I prophesied.” Then all the prophets moved aside to let Muhammad pass, and he led them in prayer.