JERUSALEM
— It was a typical day at the shrine around what many believe is the
tomb of Jesus in Jerusalem’s Old City. A Greek Orthodox choir sang
inside a room facing the baroque structure. But the voices were drowned
out when chanting Armenian priests and monks circling the shrine raised
theirs.
“Sometimes they punch each other,” Farah Atallah, a church guard wearing a fez, observed with a shrug.
Mr.
Atallah is a seasoned witness to the rivalries among the Greek
Orthodox, Armenian Orthodox and Roman Catholic communities that
jealously share — and sometimes spar over — what they consider
Christianity’s holiest site, inside the Church of the Holy Sepulcher.
Amid
the rivalry, the unsteady 206-year-old structure, held together by a
69-year-old iron cage, is an uncomfortable, often embarrassing symbol of
Christian divisions, which have periodically erupted into tensions. In 2008, monks and priests brawled
near the shrine, throwing punches and pulling one another’s hair not
far from the tomb where Christians believe Jesus was resurrected.
But
in recent weeks, scaffolding has gone up a few feet from the shrine in
the gloomy shadows of the Arches of the Virgin, the first step in a rare
agreement by the various Christian communities to save the dilapidated
shrine, also called the Aedicule, from falling down.
The
March 22 agreement calls for a $3.4 million renovation to begin next
month, after Orthodox Easter celebrations. Each religious group will
contribute one-third of the costs, and a Greek bank contributed 50,000
euros, or $57,000, for the scaffolding, in return for having its name
emblazoned across the machinery.
The
idea is to peel away hundreds of years of the shrine’s history, clean
it and put it back together. Simple enough, but delayed for decades
because of the complicated, centuries-old rules and minute traditions —
called the status quo — that define the way Jerusalem’s holy sites are
governed, in which the very act of repairing something can imply
ownership.
“One
of the serious issues in the church is that the status quo takes place
over every other consideration, and it’s not a good thing,” said
Athanasius Macora, a Franciscan friar. “Unity is more important than a
turf war.”
The
inspiration for this unity was the threat of losing the shrine
altogether. Alarmed by reports that the shrine was at risk of collapse,
the Israeli police barricaded it for several hours on Feb. 17, 2015, throwing out the monks who guard it and preventing hundreds of pilgrims from entering.
The message was clear: Fix it, or else.
So
after a year of much study and negotiation, monument conservation
experts plan to first remove the iron cage that Jerusalem’s colonial
British rulers built in 1947 in a prior effort to keep the Aedicule from
collapsing, after a 1927 earthquake and rain left the structure
cracked, its marble slabs flaking.
They
will take apart, slab by slab, the ornate marble shell built in 1810,
during Ottoman rule of Jerusalem. The conservationists will then tackle
the remains of the 12th-century Crusader shrine that lies underneath.
That was erected after the Shiite ruler of Egypt, al-Hakim, destroyed
the first Aedicule in 1009. The original was built by Helena, the mother
of Emperor Constantine, the Christian Roman emperor who did much to
elevate the status of Christianity through the empire.
Finally,
the workers will repair cracks in the remains of the rock-hewed tomb
underneath, where most Christians believe Jesus was placed after he was
crucified. (There is a rival Tomb of Christ just outside the Old City
walls, patronized mainly by Protestants. But that is another story.)
Antonia
Moropoulou, the conservation expert heading the project, said the
shrine would remain open to visitors during most of the painstaking
process.
Hundreds
of pilgrims waited to enter one recent day as Catholics said Mass near
the Aedicule, blocking the entry with wooden pews. The shrine is topped
with a large gray cupola, and it is decorated with gold, icons, pillars,
candles, heavy bronze lamps, inscriptions and a large painting of
Christ.
“This
is a very super experience of my spirit,” said Anil Macwan, 30, a lay
Catholic preacher from India. “The world cannot give me the feeling I
get from this tomb, this place. It is a very sacred place.”
Two
women from the Eternal Sacred Order of the Cherubim and Seraphim, in
Nigeria, wearing matching blue dresses and head scarves, walked shoeless
into the Aedicule, crossing the Chapel of the Angel, with its walls of
elaborately carved marble and proclamations in Greek. They bent through
the low door into the Chapel of the Holy Sepulcher, where, under oil
lamps, two white marble slabs denote the location of Jesus’ rock tomb.
The
two women fell to their knees, raised their arms in supplication and
fervently whispered prayers. They wiped their hands and photographs of
children on the slabs.
Another
day, a line of Indian Muslims squished against South Korean tourists,
Indian nuns and Arab-American Christians stretched past the Chapel of
the Copts, a room attached to the back of the Aedicule, where a monk
guarding the site was engrossed in his smartphone.
The
three Christian communities vigilantly guard the property they already
control to an extent that can feel baffling to outsiders coming to the
Holy Sepulcher, a cavernous jumble of Byzantine and Crusader
architecture, with soaring domes, sunken rooms, gloomy light, heavy
bronze lamps, squat buttresses and elegant arches.
In
the church entryway is a gaudy gold mosaic on a wall, owned by members
of the Greek Orthodox Church, that distracts from the nearby Stone of
Unction, the marble slab covering the site where Jesus was anointed.
Beside
the mosaic is a ladder owned by Catholics, who will not move it. It is
next to an Armenian-controlled walkway of a few feet leading to the
Aedicule, where non-Armenian priests in vestments may pass, but not
stand, because that would suggest they are challenging Armenian control.
The last significant renovation began in the 1950s, when the Jordanian authorities who controlled East Jerusalem at the time pushed Christian representatives into forming a technical bureau to address the 1927 quake damage. But the process broke down more than a decade later, according to Father Macora.
After
the last embarrassing dust-up, in 2008, which was captured on YouTube,
the rival communities began trying to fix their relations in earnest,
repairing the toilets as a good-will measure. In 2014, Pope Francis met
the Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I of Constantinople, the spiritual
leader of Orthodox Christians, at the Aedicule, to promote unity.
Still,
“somebody had to push us,” said the Rev. Samuel Aghoyan, the Armenian
Patriarchate’s representative at the Holy Sepulcher, who took to
fisticuffs with a previous Greek Orthodox patriarch, Irineos I, inside
the Aedicule on Holy Saturday, before Easter, in 2002. “If the Israeli
government didn’t get involved, nobody would have done anything.”
Ms.
Moropoulou, the conservationist leading the renovation, said she hoped
it would maintain the intangible spirit “of a living monument.”
“This tomb is the most alive place,” Ms. Moropoulou said. More so, she added, “than anything I have seen in my life.”
She continued, “The greatest challenge is to preserve that.”