Spelunking (kind of)


One of my favourite moments in 'Who Framed Roger Rabbit' is when Bob Hoskins first goes from human land into Toon Town. One moment he is driving down a dreary underpass, the next he passes through a pair of cartoon velvet curtains (complete with Looney Toons glissando) and everything around him is animated. Pink and blue cartoon birds twitter in cartoon trees, cartoon rabbits hop around crazily green grass and everything is in vivid, overbright Technicolor. I think he even has to retrieve a pair of sunglasses from the glove compartment.

A similar thing happened to me a couple of Saturdays ago when I was walking through the Old City. I had entered through the Zion Gate, the southernmost of the eight massive gates that pierce the city walls and the one that leads into the Jewish quarter. Between 1948 and 1967 the Old City was controlled by the Jordanians and, during that time, much of the Jewish quarter was seriously damaged. (The other three quarters - Muslim, Christian and Armenian - are pretty much how they have been for centuries.) As a result, most of the buildings here have been restored in the last few decades. There are still winding narrow streets that lead into little courtyards but it's all clean and new and, to be honest, a little dull, like some Biblical version of Palo Alto. (It does mean, though, that the Jewish quarter is the only part of the Old City that is accessible to people in wheelchairs.) It's also mostly residential and on a shabbat afternoon there's hardly anyone about.


Yet, after you have walked north for about 10 minutes, you take three steps and you are suddenly in the middle of the Arab market. Here, everything is colour, noise, smells and people. CD stalls pump out Arabic pop hits and recitations of the Quran. Barrows overflow with fruit and vegetables and mountains of little pastries and cakes. There are stalls piled high with spices, pickles and brightly coloured sweets that all seem to defy our boring European ban on crazy food colourings. You can get your hair cut, send money abroad and buy kitchenware, all within a few shops. There is an unexpectedly high penetration of Spiderman costumes among the kids (see photo). And, most wonderfully for a visitor, you can get totally lost until you unexpectedly pop out again and find yourself looking up the enormous Damascus Gate that cuts through the walls in the north.


I was thinking about this yesterday when two of us set off to find the other entrance to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. The Holy Sepulchre marks the spot where Jesus was crucified and buried and, since about 300AD, it has been one of the holiest sites in the Christian world (the holiest, even, maybe?). This is where the Via Dolorosa leads and at any time of day you can find pilgrims carrying big wooden crosses, singing hymns and dodging barrows of fruit and veg as they follow Jesus's final journey from Pontius Pilate's palace to Golgotha.

"Church", however, is something of a misnomer as the Church of the Holy Sepulchre is really a group of 20 or so different churches and chapels that form a sort of huge Sepulchre complex. Over the millennia, different Christian sects have added their own altars and chapels and now it's hard to tell who runs what (although the priests on duty certainly know). I think the Greek Orthodox and Armenian churches control access to Jesus's tomb, the Roman Catholics run the place of his crucifixion and so on, though I may have got that the wrong way round - sometimes altars and naves and chancels just seem to bump into each other. The only people who, I think, are not represented are the Protestants, which is why the British, when they were here, liked to claim that Jesus's tomb was actually north of the Old City near the American Colony Hotel.

Most people enter the complex at ground level but on Friday night the host of a shabbat dinner I was at was talking about another, smaller, entrance that brings you in at the top of the church and gives you access to a huge disused water cistern that you can climb down into and explore. So yesterday, instead of going to a seminar on contemporary Jewish law, I met up with a friend of a friend from home and we set off to see if we could find it.

Our directions were a bit vague - more or less leave the church behind you, head left into the spice market and look for some stairs on the left - but eventually we spotted the turn and found ourselves climbing up and up, past the usual Jerusalem sights of cats and piles of rubbish, until we were maybe a couple of storeys above the narrow streets and on eye-level with the Church of the Holy Sepulchre's dome. And there we found a sign for the cistern.

You go through a little church (I didn't get the denomination, but it looked Greek-ish) and, just to the left of the altar, there are some rough stone steps that wind downwards and out of sight. Here, after the baking Jerusalem day, the air was cool and damp and as we turned a corner we were suddenly in an enormous, rough-hewn cave, about the size of a small ballroom, that was originally the Holy Sepulchre's water supply. There is still some water in the bottom of it - it looked a bit mucky to wade into - but the best thing is the acoustic. Because the rock walls and ceiling are all irregular, the place has a fantastic echo and any sounds you make bounce back and forth for a few seconds. So of course we started to hoot and ummmm and ahhhh and soon we had our own little choir going. We discovered that if you sing three notes in quick succession you can make a chord and some of our output ended up pretty jazzy. We were by ourselves, of course. I don't know if we would have been so Miles Davis-like if other people had been there. But it was a great, and very different, way to pass a quarter of an hour or so in the afternoon.

Back in the open air, the roofs opened out into a little square and we almost walked into someone's house until two men with very dark, African-looking features (not that common here) pointed us towards a small door in one corner.

Inside was a tiny church of Ethiopian Christians. Positioned a little sadly, I thought, far from the main action - Jesus's tomb and the location of the crucifiction are two floors down and next door - this is an Ethiopian monastery and a handful of monks who could have come straight from east Africa (and probably did) were sitting around contemplating the altar. The furnishings were fairly sparse but there were some nice, mellow icons and paintings of Jesus on the walls and the whole thing felt like some very devout person's living room - well, a living room that for some reason also contains an enormous wooden bishop's throne painted in shocking Barbie pink.

Through another little door you begin your descent into the rest of the complex and here there is more Africa. A small niche with a (very white) Jesus on the cross is decorated in Rasta colours and there is a huge modern painting of the Queen of Sheba coming from Ethiopia to see King Solomon and hear about this new-fangled God he was worshipping. The story goes that she returned to Ethiopia having converted to Judaism and so began the lineage of Ethiopian Jews and Christians that continues today.

There was something very Jerusalem about finding the Ethiopian church. For centuries this city was called the navel of the world and it still attracts people from all over who come to experience a moment of stillness and, perhaps, a closer connection with the otherworldly. I liked the Ethiopian church a lot and it helped me understand a little more why this place, so far from both the plains of Africa and the streets of central London, still exerts such a pull on the imagination.


In the meantime, this graffiti has appeared on the road I walk up in the mornings to get to the yeshiva. It says "No petrol, no problem" and is part of an underground campaign to promote cycling here. I would love to cycle in Jerusalem but not many people do and if they do they tend to cycle on the pavements. Israeli drivers are not the most patient people in the world and they don't always have their eye on the road. The other morning I saw a driver, with his mobile phone in one hand and a cigarette in the other, only just manage to stop at a red light, while his passenger, feet out of the window, carried on reading his newspaper. And they were in a police car.