Church of the Holy Sepulchre

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The Church of the Holy Sepulchre stands in the Christian Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City, built over the two places Christian tradition identifies as the site of Christ’s crucifixion — Golgotha, or Calvary — and the rock-cut tomb from which he is held to have risen. To the Eastern churches it is more often called the Church of the Anastasis, the Church of the Resurrection, and that name states what the building is for: it encloses an empty grave and treats the emptiness as the center of the faith.

The history begins with Constantine. After his mother Helena is said to have located the sites during a journey to Jerusalem, the emperor ordered a Roman temple cleared from the spot and a complex raised in its place; the church was consecrated in 335, with construction reckoned from about 326. Whether the identified tomb is in fact the historical burial place of Jesus cannot be established, and scholarship can say only that the tradition is very old and that the location lay outside the city wall of the first century, as the Gospel accounts require. The Constantinian building was destroyed in 1009 on the order of the Fatimid caliph al-Hakim, rebuilt in reduced form, and rebuilt again by the Crusaders in the twelfth century, whose Romanesque church supplies much of the present structure.

What makes the place singular among Christian sanctuaries is that no single church owns it. Possession is divided among several communions — Greek Orthodox, Armenian Apostolic, and Roman Catholic chief among them, with Coptic, Syriac, and Ethiopian Christians holding smaller rights — under an arrangement known as the Status Quo, frozen by Ottoman decree in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The arrangement is exacting to the point of paralysis: a wooden ladder beneath an upper window has stood unmoved for centuries because no community may alter the common parts alone, and the keys to the main door have for generations been held by two Muslim families, a neutral custody meant to forestall dispute among the Christians themselves.

At the heart of the rotunda stands the Aedicule, a small shrine built around the remains of the tomb chamber. There, each year on the eve of Orthodox Easter, the ceremony of the Holy Fire takes place: the Greek Orthodox patriarch enters the sealed Aedicule and emerges with a flame that the faithful receive as kindled without human means and pass hand to hand through the crowded church. The Orthodox tradition holds the fire to be a miracle; observers outside it have long disputed that claim, and the Church has at times been pressed to account for the rite. The dispute has not diminished the crowds, and each year the fire is carried out of Jerusalem by lamp and aircraft to Orthodox churches across the world.

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