The Church of the Holy Sepulchre Building, Jerusalem Architecture, Israeli Basilica, Resurrection Site
The Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Jerusalem
Israeli Historic Old City Building – Religious Built Environment
13 May 2013
The Church of the Holy Sepulchre Jerusalem
Location: The Old City of Jerusalem, Israel
The Church of the Holy Sepulchre
Exterior view:
To really understand this building you need to see this overlay showing Golgotha in the past and the current church building:
Internal views – Golgotha altar:
photographs © Adrian Welch
The Church of the Holy Sepulchre is also called the Basilica of the Holy Sepulchre or the Church of the Resurrection by Eastern Christians. The building is a church within the Christian Quarter of the walled Old City of Jerusalem.
The building was consecrated in 325/326.
photographs © Adrian Welch
The site is venerated as Golgotha (the Hill of Calvary), where Jesus was crucified, and is said also to contain the place where Jesus was buried (the Sepulchre). The church has been a paramount – and for many Christians the most important – pilgrimage destination since at least the 4th century, as the purported site of the resurrection of Jesus.
photographs © Adrian Welch
Today it also serves as the headquarters of the Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem, while control of the building is shared between several Christian churches and secular entities in complicated arrangements essentially unchanged for centuries.
The Aedicule:
photographs © Adrian Welch
Today, the church is home to Eastern Orthodoxy, Oriental Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism. Anglican, Nontrinitarian and Protestant Christians have no permanent presence in the church. Some regard the Garden Tomb, elsewhere in Jerusalem, as the actual place of Jesus’s crucifixion and resurrection.
The “Christ Pantocrator” mosaic in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre:
photographs © Adrian Welch
Emperor Constantine I ordered in about 325/326 that the temple be demolished, instructing the local Bishop, Macarius of Jerusalem, to build a church on the site. Constantine’s church was built as two connected churches over the two different holy sites, including a great basilica (the Martyrium), an enclosed colonnaded atrium (the Triportico) with the traditional site of Golgotha in one corner, and a rotunda, called the Anastasis (“Resurrection”), which contained the remains of a rock-cut room identified as the burial site of Jesus.
Oculus over the The Aedicule:
photographs © Adrian Welch
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