Church of the Holy Sepulchre

     “Architecturally speaking, the Holy Sepulchre is a camel.” One of my papers due for the first class of the quarter is to be about an artifact in one of the museums here. I chose (admittedly largely out of limited options) to research the lintels from the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Lintels, as their name evoke, are not inherently interesting. In this case they are the decorative slabs of marble that surmounted the doors at the southern entrance to the church. One depicts various scenes from Jesus’ life, simultaneously representing triumph and salvation and alluding to the Crusader victory over Jerusalem. The other has a kind of trippy tangle of foliage, mythical creatures, and naked humans that represents sin and seduction.  In a fire in the 1930’s, the lintels were moved to the Rockefeller Museum, enabling me to write about them for my paper.

     I went to the church one Saturday afternoon with a friend for mass. We arrived partway through the Roman Catholic (six quarreling sects of Catholicism are represented in the church: Coptic, Greek, Roman, Ethiopian, Armenian, Syriac) holy procession - a highly choreographed walk around the church punctuated by standing in formations with chanting, singing, and swinging incense lamps. A pretty cool experience. It terminates in a tiny chapel with enough pews to sit about 30 people. The devout and curious mix as we file in, and with varying degrees of awkwardness kneeling on the uncushioned marble floor.  

     As I’m quickly learning, the holiest places in the world don’t seem to hold to any particular decorum (The church is the traditional site of Jesus’ crucifixion, burial, and resurrection). My visit to the Church of the Nativity a couple weeks ago proved that – I spent about forty-five minutes in line waiting to see the spot of Jesus’ birth, increasingly suffocated by pushy but strangely apathetic-seeming Russian pilgrims.     In the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, though, the bustle and cameras and fannypacks only detract marginally from the building. From the outside it could be any other dimly lit hall with requisite candles, baubles, and incense. Inside, though, it opens to a veritable maze of crypts, dead ends, cave-chapels, peevish sectarian priests, and a startlingly grand rotunda held up by immense columns. The maze-like character comes from the collage-nature of the construction. Like the Weasley house, the church was built over a large expanse of time, occasionally destroyed, repaired, or expanded depending on circumstances. The result is an unorganized but not unharmonious conglomeration. Hence the camel comparison- my article (Robert Ousterhout) references “the old joke that a camel is a horse designed by a committee.”