Church of the Holy Sepulchre Guide

1. What the Church of the Holy Sepulchre Is

The Church of the Holy Sepulchre is a single building in the Christian Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem that covers two separate places about forty metres apart: the outcrop of limestone identified since the fourth century as Golgotha, where Jesus was crucified, and the rock-cut tomb identified as the one lent by Joseph of Arimathea, from which the Church proclaims that he rose on the third day. Everything else in the building exists to shelter those two points. Greek, Armenian, Coptic, Syriac and Ethiopian Christians call it the Church of the Resurrection, the Anastasis, which names the event rather than the grave.

Catholics reach it in the Latin tradition as the goal of the Via Dolorosa. The last five Stations of the Cross are inside the building, from the stripping of the garments to the burial, so a pilgrim who has walked the street stations arrives at the door with the sequence unfinished and completes it indoors. For what the Church means by walking to a place at all, see our guide to what a pilgrimage is.

Two details of that sentence matter for the building. The tomb was close to the place of execution, which is why one roof can cover both. And the ground was garden ground, which turns out to be testable. Section 2 takes the question of whether this is the right hill and the right grave seriously, because a great many visitors arrive quietly assuming that it cannot be.

Why It Does Not Look Like a Shrine

Most first-time visitors are disoriented. There is no long nave leading the eye to a single altar, no clear route, and no silence. The interior is a warren of chapels at four different levels, held by different churches, lit by hundreds of hanging lamps, crossed by queues and by processions on fixed schedules. Ceilings are black with centuries of oil smoke. The reason is in section 14: the building was divided by an Ottoman settlement that froze the arrangements of 1852 in place, and a building that no one may unilaterally alter accumulates rather than tidies. Knowing that in advance changes the visit from confusion into interest.

2. The Case for the Site Being Right

Nothing found in the ground can prove that a particular shelf of limestone held the body of Jesus, and Catholic faith in the resurrection has never rested on an excavation. What archaeology can do is test whether the traditional location is consistent with the gospel description and with what Jerusalem looked like in the first century. On that narrower question the evidence has held up unusually well.

The Ground Was Outside the Wall

Executions took place outside the city, and Jewish burial practice kept tombs outside the walls. The Letter to the Hebrews makes the point theologically: "Jesus also suffered outside the gate" (Hebrews 13:12). The church today sits well inside the Old City, which is the objection most visitors raise first. The answer is that the walls moved. Josephus describes a second wall running north from the area of the present Jaffa Gate district and enclosing a smaller city than the one Herod Agrippa later expanded with a third wall in the 40s AD. Excavations under and around the church, including the work of Kathleen Kenyon in the early 1960s and of Virgilio Corbo of the Studium Biblicum Franciscanum inside the building itself, found the site lying outside that first-century line, in a disused quarry beyond the wall.

The Ground Was a Quarry With Tombs Cut Into It

The rock under the church is a worked limestone quarry, and the quarry faces carry rock-cut tombs of Second Temple period type. Two survive inside the building. One, west of the Edicule and reached through the Syriac chapel, is a kokhim tomb, the shaft-burial form in use in Jerusalem in the first century, traditionally named for Joseph of Arimathea. Another lies behind it. The presence of Jewish tombs of exactly the right period settles that the ground was a burial area outside the inhabited city, which is what John 19:41 requires. The outcrop identified as Golgotha is a spur of poor, cracked stone the quarrymen left standing because it was not worth cutting, which explains how a rocky knob came to be sitting in an abandoned quarry beside a road.

The Garden

Excavation of the church floor began again in 2022 under an agreement between the three major communities and Sapienza University of Rome, directed by Francesca Romana Stasolla, with the work published in stages by the university and the Custody of the Holy Land. Among the reported results is evidence of agricultural use of the quarry floor, including cultivated soil with traces of olive and vine, between the quarrying phase and the Roman rebuilding. Cultivation on that spot is what the gospel means by a garden.

The current excavation is a project of Sapienza University of Rome under the direction of Francesca Romana Stasolla, carried out with the agreement of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate, the Custody of the Holy Land and the Armenian Patriarchate, and reported by the university and by the Custody. The earlier findings summarised above are those published by Kathleen Kenyon from her 1961 to 1963 Jerusalem excavations and by Virgilio Corbo of the Studium Biblicum Franciscanum from his work inside the church. This page gives no figure for the age of any individual stone beyond what those excavators published.

The Memory Runs Back Before Constantine

The strongest argument is not physical. When the emperor Hadrian rebuilt Jerusalem as the colony of Aelia Capitolina after the Bar Kokhba revolt in the 130s, the quarry was filled and built over with a Roman forum and temple precinct. Two centuries later Constantine's builders had to demolish that temple and dig out the fill to reach the rock. Eusebius of Caesarea, who was alive for the work and wrote it up in his Life of Constantine, presents the demolition as the uncovering of a tomb the Christians of the city already knew. Choosing a site under an imperial temple in the middle of a Roman colony is an expensive and awkward thing to do. A community inventing a holy place would have picked somewhere convenient.

The Garden Tomb

Many Protestant pilgrims visit the Garden Tomb, a quiet rock-cut tomb in a garden north of the Damascus Gate, identified in 1883 and long associated with General Charles Gordon, who thought a nearby cliff resembled a skull. It is a genuinely prayerful place and the staff there are gracious about its status. The archaeological difficulty is the tomb itself: its form and cutting belong to the Iron Age, several centuries before Christ, which conflicts with the gospel statement that the tomb was new and had never been used. Archaeologists of several confessions, including Gabriel Barkay, have set out that dating. The Garden Tomb Association itself does not claim the site as certain. Catholics can visit with respect and still hold that the older site is the likelier one.

3. Constantine, Helena, and the First Basilica

The first church here was an imperial project. After the Council of Nicaea in 325, Constantine ordered the clearing of the Roman temple precinct and the construction of a complex worthy of the site, and Eusebius records the correspondence and the result. The building dedicated in September 335 was a linked group of structures rather than a single church: a colonnaded courtyard entered from the main street of the city, a large five-aisled basilica called the Martyrium, an open courtyard with the rock of Golgotha standing at its corner under a canopy, and behind that the rotunda called the Anastasis, built over the tomb after the surrounding rock had been cut away to isolate it as a free-standing shrine.

That cutting away is why there is no hillside to see. The tomb was carved out of a quarry face; Constantine's masons removed the face around it, leaving the burial chamber standing alone so a domed building could be raised over it. Everything later built and rebuilt on that spot, including the Edicule of today, is a shell around what survives of that isolated chamber.

Helena

Constantine's mother Helena travelled to Palestine in the late 320s, an elderly empress on a journey Eusebius describes at length, and her name has been attached to the whole enterprise ever since. Eusebius credits her with the churches at Bethlehem and on the Mount of Olives and credits the Jerusalem basilica to her son. The tradition that she discovered the True Cross during the excavation appears later in the fourth century, in Ambrose and in Rufinus, and it is that tradition the chapel deep under this church commemorates. The finding of the Cross belongs to her story rather than to the building's, and we tell it on her own page: see St Helena.

What Fourth-Century Pilgrims Saw

Two witnesses describe the finished complex in use. Cyril of Jerusalem, preaching his catechetical lectures in the city around 350, refers to the wood of the Cross venerated in Jerusalem and distributed from there, and points to Golgotha as visible to his hearers. The Spanish pilgrim Egeria, who kept a diary of her stay between roughly 381 and 384, describes the daily and Holy Week liturgies moving between the Anastasis, the Cross and the Martyrium, with the veneration of the wood on Good Friday and a vigil at the tomb. Her account is the reason we know that the shape of Holy Week the Church still keeps was being celebrated on the exact ground where the events happened, within living memory of the buildings going up.

Sources for this section are Eusebius of Caesarea, Life of Constantine III, for the demolition and construction and for Helena's journey; the Catechetical Lectures of Cyril of Jerusalem, conventionally dated to about 350; and the pilgrimage diary of Egeria, dated by most scholars to 381 to 384. The dedication of the basilica is placed in September 335 by Eusebius, who connects it with the bishops assembled that year.

4. What Happened to the Building

Almost nothing of Constantine's complex is visible today, and the reason is a long series of catastrophes and rebuildings. Knowing the sequence explains why the church looks assembled rather than designed.

Dates and events above follow the standard published architectural histories of the church and the accounts of the restoring institutions themselves. The 2016 to 2017 Edicule restoration is documented by the National Technical University of Athens, whose team was led by Antonia Moropoulou; findings from that campaign, including mortar samples analysed by optically stimulated luminescence, were published in the peer-reviewed literature and reported by National Geographic, which co-funded the work.

What the 2016 Opening Found

In October 2016, for the first time in centuries, the marble slab covering the burial shelf inside the Edicule was lifted so the structure beneath could be assessed. Under it the team found fill, a second broken marble slab bearing an incised cross, and beneath that the original limestone shelf cut from the bedrock of the quarry face. Mortar taken from between the shelf and one of the slabs was dated by optically stimulated luminescence to around the middle of the fourth century, consistent with the Constantinian building campaign rather than with a medieval installation. The result does not identify whose body lay there. It does show that the shrine venerated today is built directly on the rock that Constantine's builders enclosed, which is a real and limited piece of information, and worth exactly that much.

5. The Facade, the Courtyard, and the Door

You come to the church through alleys and arrive suddenly in a small stone courtyard, the parvis, with the twelfth-century south facade in front of you. The facade is a substantially intact piece of twelfth-century Crusader architecture: two round-headed doors below, two windows above, carved lintels and columns of grey marble. The right-hand door is blocked with masonry. It was walled up after 1187, and its permanent closure is one of the reasons the whole crowd of the church funnels through a single opening.

To the right of the doors a truncated bell tower rises, shortened after damage in the fourteenth century. Around the courtyard are small chapels belonging to the Greek Orthodox, the Armenians and the Ethiopians, several of them easy to walk past. The stairway on the right of the courtyard climbs to the Chapel of the Franks, the Latin chapel that was once the ceremonial entrance directly onto Calvary. Above the right-hand window, on a cornice, stands the Immovable Ladder, discussed in section 15.

The Threshold

The courtyard is where most groups gather, and it is the best place in the whole complex to stop before going in. The interior gives you no room to compose yourself. Standing in the parvis, it is worth remembering what is on the other side of that door and how far people have come to reach it: fourth-century pilgrims from Spain, medieval pilgrims who sold everything to get here, Ethiopian monks who walked, and today the ordinary Christian who saved for years. For pilgrims who will never make the journey in body, the Church has always recognised prayer made at a distance in union with a shrine, and we cover that in the guide to virtual pilgrimage.

6. The Stone of Unction

Through the door, straight ahead and low on the floor, lies a slab of reddish limestone about two metres long with eight lamps hanging over it. This is the Stone of Unction, also called the Stone of the Anointing. It commemorates the preparation of the body of Jesus for burial by Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus, who according to John 19:39-40 wrapped the body in linen with a large quantity of myrrh and aloes according to Jewish burial custom. Pilgrims kneel, press cloths and rosaries and photographs to the stone, and often weep. It is usually the first thing you see and it is usually crowded.

What the Stone Is and Is Not

Honesty here helps rather than hurts. The present slab was installed in 1810, part of the rebuilding after the fire of 1808, and it is not claimed by anyone to be the surface on which the body was laid. Devotion at a stone of anointing in this part of the church is attested from the Crusader period, and the location has shifted within the building over the centuries. The slab is a memorial marker at the right place in the sequence, between the descent from the cross and the tomb, and the Church has never taught otherwise. Kneeling there is an act of remembrance of the burial of Christ, which is what the twelfth and thirteenth Stations of the Cross ask for. Knowing the date of the marble takes nothing away from that.

Behind the stone, on the wall, is a large mosaic in the Greek Orthodox style showing the deposition from the cross, the anointing and the burial, installed in 1990. It reads left to right and is a useful thing to look at while waiting, because it lays out in one image the three scenes the next twenty minutes of your visit will cover.

7. The Stairs to Calvary and the Two Altars

Immediately to the right of the entrance, a steep and narrow staircase of worn stone climbs about five metres to the top of the rock of Golgotha. The rock is inside the building, encased in masonry and marble, and the two chapels at the top of the stairs sit directly on it. The climb is short, awkward and crowded, and it is a fair physical echo of what it represents.

The Greek Orthodox Chapel of the Crucifixion

At the top on the left is the Greek Orthodox chapel, the Twelfth Station, where Jesus died on the cross. An altar stands over the summit of the rock, hung with lamps and backed by a large crucifix with figures of Mary and St John. Beneath the altar table, under a silver disc with a circular opening, you can put your hand down through the hole and touch the bare rock of Golgotha. That is what the queue on the stairs is for. On either side, panels of glass in the floor let you see the natural rock face falling away.

The Latin Chapel of the Nailing to the Cross

To the right, sharing the same rock platform, is the Roman Catholic chapel served by the Franciscans of the Custody of the Holy Land, the Eleventh Station, where Jesus was nailed to the cross. Its ceiling and walls carry mosaics installed in the twentieth century, and the altar at the far end is a silver and bronze work given by the Medici in the late sixteenth century. Between the two chapels stands the Latin altar of Our Lady of Sorrows, the Thirteenth Station, with a wooden bust of the sorrowful Virgin behind glass, marking the moment the body was taken down and given to his mother.

How to Pray It

The practical problem on Calvary is that you get very little time. People behind you are waiting, a sacristan may be moving the queue along, and there is no space to kneel and gather your thoughts. The answer is to arrive with the prayer already chosen. Decide on the stairs what you are bringing up: one person, one sin, one grief. Say it under the altar with your hand on the rock, and let the rest be silence. Choosing the words on the stairs is worth more than any photograph you take at the top.

8. The Chapel of Adam Beneath the Rock

Come down the far staircase from Calvary and you arrive at a small Greek Orthodox chapel set directly beneath the rock, at ground level. This is the Chapel of Adam. Behind the altar a window in the stonework exposes the natural rock of Golgotha, and running through it a substantial vertical crack. The chapel is often empty while the platform above it is packed, which makes it one of the few places in the building where a person can actually sit down and pray.

The Skull of Adam

An ancient Jerusalem tradition, referred to by Origen in the third century and repeated widely in the East, holds that Adam was buried beneath Golgotha, so that the blood of Christ ran down through the rock onto the skull of the first man. The name Place of a Skull was read as pointing to it. Eastern icons of the crucifixion still show a skull and crossed bones in a cave under the cross, and that is what they mean. The Catholic Church has never taught this as historical fact and does not require it. As a theological image it is exact: the second Adam undoing the first, which is Paul's own argument in Romans 5:12-19 and 1 Corinthians 15:22, "for as in Adam all die, so also in Christ shall all be made alive".

The crack in the rock is also read against Matthew 27:51, which records that at the death of Jesus the curtain of the temple was torn and the rocks were split. Geologists who have examined the fissure have offered natural explanations for it, and the two readings are not in competition for a Catholic. The rock is cracked stone; what it is asked to carry is a memory.

9. The Edicule and the Tomb

Walk left from the Stone of Unction and the building opens into the rotunda, and in the middle of it stands a small stone structure about eight metres long under its own canopy of scaffolding-free masonry, blackened by lamp smoke, hooped with lamps and candlesticks. This is the Edicule, from the Latin aedicula, a little house. Inside it is the tomb.

The Two Chambers

The Edicule contains two rooms in sequence, which reproduces the plan of a first-century Jewish rock-cut tomb. The outer room is the Chapel of the Angel, named for the messenger who sat on the rolled-away stone and told the women that he was not there (Matthew 28:2-6). Set in a low pedestal in the middle of that room is a fragment of stone traditionally identified as part of the rolling stone that closed the tomb. From there a very low doorway, which forces every adult to bow, opens into the burial chamber itself.

The burial chamber is small enough for three or four people at a time. On the right is the burial shelf, a bench cut from the bedrock, covered since the sixteenth century by a marble slab to protect it from pilgrims chipping away relics. Lamps belonging to the Greek Orthodox, the Armenians and the Latins hang above it, and icons cover the wall. A sacristan of whichever community holds the hour keeps people moving. You will not have long inside.

The 1810 Shell and the 2017 Restoration

The Edicule you see was built in 1809 to 1810 by the Greek Orthodox architect Nikolaos Komnenos of Mytilene after the fire of 1808 destroyed its predecessor, in a heavy Ottoman baroque manner that many visitors find unlovely. It is the latest in a line of shrines going back to Constantine, each built around whatever survived of the last. After the 1927 earthquake the structure became unsafe, and in 1947 the British Mandate authorities strapped it with an external cage of steel girders, which stayed in place for seventy years while the communities failed to agree on repairs. Agreement finally came, and between 2016 and 2017 a team from the National Technical University of Athens dismantled, cleaned, consolidated and reassembled the shrine and removed the girders. The stone is now pale where it was black, and the difference is plain in any pair of photographs taken before and after the work.

The Coptic Chapel at the Back

At the far western end of the Edicule, built against its rear wall, is a tiny chapel of the Coptic Orthodox Church, wide enough for one monk and two pilgrims. A Coptic priest sits there and will show visitors a small exposed piece of the rock through an opening. The chapel is a fragment of rights preserved under the Status Quo, and it is one of the quietest devotional spots in the building. The Coptic Orthodox Church is one of the Oriental Orthodox churches, in communion with the Armenian, Syriac and Ethiopian churches and not with the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate.

10. The Rotunda, or Anastasis

The rotunda is the round, high, domed hall built around the Edicule, and it is the direct descendant of the building Constantine raised over the isolated tomb. Eastern Christians call it the Anastasis, the Resurrection. A ring of massive piers and columns carries a gallery, and above that the dome opens to an oculus. The present dome decoration, a twelve-rayed sunburst radiating from the opening on a white ground, was completed in 1997 as part of the long joint restoration begun in 1959, and the twelve rays stand for the apostles.

The rotunda is the room in which the shape of the whole church makes sense. Everything is arranged around a small empty building in the centre. There is no image at the focus, no statue, no relic on display. The architecture is organised around a hole in a rock, which is the most confident thing a building can say about the Christian claim. For what the Church holds about the risen body and what the empty tomb signifies, see our guide to the resurrection of the body.

What to Notice

Stand back against the pillars on the north side of the rotunda and watch for twenty minutes. Within any hour you will probably see a Greek Orthodox procession, a Franciscan procession with a cantor, Armenian clergy in pointed hoods, Coptic and Syriac monks crossing to their own chapels, and several hundred lay pilgrims from a dozen countries queueing at the same door. Six separated Christian communities keep their own liturgies in this one building, often within the same hour. That is the church's wound and the thing most visitors remember, and the Catholic reading of that wound belongs to the work of Christian unity.

11. The Catholicon and the Omphalos

East of the rotunda, through an arch, lies the Catholicon, the Greek Orthodox cathedral church occupying what was the nave and choir of the Crusader building. It is enclosed by a wall and an iconostasis, has its own dome bearing an image of Christ Pantocrator, and holds the thrones of the Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem and of the Patriarch of Antioch. Compared with the rest of the building it is orderly and quiet, and the Greek Orthodox community celebrates the Divine Liturgy there.

The Omphalos

Set in the floor of the Catholicon is a stone urn on a pedestal marking the omphalos, the navel of the world. Medieval maps of the world, including the famous circular ones, put Jerusalem at the centre and this church at the centre of Jerusalem, and the marker is the physical expression of that geography. Psalm 74:12 speaks of God working salvation in the midst of the earth, which is the verse the tradition leans on. Nobody presents it as a geographical measurement. It is a claim about where the decisive thing happened.

The Ambulatory Chapels

Around the east end of the Catholicon runs an ambulatory with a series of chapels, and it repays a slow walk. On the north side is the Prison of Christ, a Greek Orthodox chapel commemorating the holding of Jesus before crucifixion. Continuing round are the Greek chapel of St Longinus, named for the centurion of Mark 15:39 who confessed that this man was the Son of God, and who by tradition is also the soldier who pierced the side of Jesus in John 19:34; the Armenian chapel of the Division of the Robes, recalling the soldiers casting lots (John 19:23-24); and the Greek chapel of the Mocking, where a fragment of a column said to be the column of the scourging is kept. These chapels turn a corridor into a sequence through the Passion, and they are usually almost empty.

12. The Chapel of St Helena and the Pilgrim Graffiti

From the ambulatory a broad flight of stone steps descends to a low, wide, vaulted chapel belonging to the Armenian Apostolic Church. Catholics and most guidebooks call it the Chapel of St Helena; the Armenians dedicate it to St Gregory the Illuminator, the apostle of Armenia, and they call it by his name. It has two altars, one dedicated to St Helena and one to the penitent thief, and it is lit by a small dome and by dozens of hanging Armenian lamps. It is cool, dim and much quieter than the church above.

The Crosses on the Stairs

The walls of the staircase down are covered with small crosses, thousands of them, cut into the stone by pilgrims over centuries. They are shallow, roughly made, often crowded on top of each other, and in places the wall is more cross than wall. Each one was carved by a person who had got themselves to Jerusalem, in most cases at enormous cost and risk, and wanted to leave a mark that they had come. Run your hand across them on the way down. Very little else in the building connects a modern visitor so directly to the ordinary pilgrims of the past.

The Ship and DOMINE IVIMUS

In a chamber below this level, uncovered during the Franciscan excavations of the early 1970s under Virgilio Corbo, a drawing was found on a wall of the Constantinian foundations: a Roman merchant ship, mast and hull sketched in outline, with a Latin inscription beneath reading DOMINE IVIMUS. The usual translation is "Lord, we went", or "Lord, we have come", and it is generally taken as an echo of the pilgrim psalm, "I was glad when they said to me, let us go to the house of the Lord" (Psalm 122:1). The excavators dated the drawing to the period of the Constantinian construction or slightly before, which would make it a pilgrim's mark from the earliest years of the church. The reading of the letters and the date have both been argued over since. Even at its most cautious it is a fourth-century traveller's note, scratched by someone who came by sea and wanted God to know they had arrived.

The ship graffito was recorded during the excavations of Virgilio Corbo of the Studium Biblicum Franciscanum and published in his report on the Holy Sepulchre. The dating and the reading of the inscription have been debated in the scholarly literature since, and this page reports the excavator's interpretation as his rather than as settled fact.

The Chapel of the Finding of the Cross

A further flight of steps drops from the Armenian chapel into a rough rock-cut chamber that is part of the ancient quarry. This is the Latin Chapel of the Finding of the Cross, served by the Franciscans, marking the traditional spot where the wood was recovered during Helena's excavation. The bare quarry walls here are among the least altered surfaces in the building and give a clear sense of what the ground was before anything was built on it. A bronze statue of St Helena holding the cross stands in the chamber. The story of the finding itself belongs to her page.

13. The Syriac Chapel and the Ethiopian Rooftop

Two of the six communities hold spaces that most visitors walk past, and both are worth going out of your way for. Both churches are Oriental Orthodox, which means they accepted the first three ecumenical councils and did not receive the Council of Chalcedon of 451 in the same terms, and they are therefore not in communion with the Eastern Orthodox churches. They are distinct communions with their own patriarchs, languages and liturgies, and describing either of them as Eastern Orthodox is simply an error. For the Eastern Orthodox communion itself, which is a separate matter, see our guide to the Eastern Orthodox Church.

The Syriac Chapel of St Nicodemus

On the west side of the rotunda, directly opposite the entrance to the Edicule, an opening leads into a bare, scorched, undecorated apse belonging to the Syriac Orthodox Church. It has almost no furnishing, the stonework carries the marks of the 1808 fire, and for most of the week it is dark and shut. The Syriac Orthodox community celebrates its liturgy there in Syriac, a dialect of Aramaic and the closest liturgical language to the one Jesus spoke. Through a low opening at the back of this chapel you reach a rock-cut tomb of the kokhim type, of first-century form, traditionally called the Tomb of Joseph of Arimathea. It is unlit, unadorned and archaeologically significant, since it demonstrates that this ground was a burial field.

Deir es-Sultan and the Ethiopian Monks

The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church holds the roof. Reached by a lane and a staircase from outside the church, Deir es-Sultan is a small village of mud-and-stone cells on the terrace above the Chapel of St Helena, arranged around the dome that lights the chapel below. Two chapels stand there, one dedicated to the Four Living Creatures of Revelation 4 and one to the Archangel Michael, and a handful of monks live in the cells in real poverty. A visitor who climbs up finds sunlight, quiet and a completely different aesthetic after the crowded dark below, and the descent through the two chapels brings you out into the church courtyard.

The rooftop is disputed. The Coptic Orthodox Church holds that Deir es-Sultan belongs to it and that the Ethiopians occupy it. The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church holds that its presence there is ancient and its right established. Possession changed hands more than once in the modern period, the matter was litigated in Israeli courts, and the courts have effectively declined to impose a final settlement on what they treat as a religious question under the Status Quo. The buildings are in poor repair, in part because neither party will permit a restoration that might prejudice the claim. It is the sharpest illustration in the whole complex of what happens when a frozen arrangement meets a live disagreement.

The Deir es-Sultan dispute is documented in the litigation record before the Israeli courts and in the standing position papers of the Coptic Orthodox and Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo patriarchates, each of which publishes its own claim. This page states that both claims exist and does not adjudicate between them.

14. The Status Quo and the Six Communities

The Status Quo is the arrangement that governs who may do what, where, and when, in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and at several other holy places in the Holy Land. It works by freezing existing practice. Whatever a community was doing in a given space at the moment of the freeze, it may continue to do; whatever it was not doing, it may not begin. Nothing in the shared parts may be altered without the consent of all the communities with rights there.

Where It Came From

Disputes between the Latin, Greek and Armenian communities over the holy places ran through the whole Ottoman period, and the Ottoman authorities settled them by issuing decrees, firmans, in favour of one party or another as circumstances and diplomacy shifted. A firman of Sultan Osman III in 1757 restored a set of rights to the Greek Orthodox. The decisive act came in 1852, when Sultan Abdulmejid I issued a firman confirming the existing arrangements at the holy places and declaring them unchangeable. That is the settlement the phrase Status Quo refers to. Article 62 of the Treaty of Berlin in 1878 recorded that the status quo of the holy places was not to be altered, the British Mandate administration maintained it, and it has been maintained by every authority in Jerusalem since.

The standard published description of the arrangement in English is L. G. A. Cust, The Status Quo in the Holy Places, written for the Government of Palestine and printed in 1929, which remains the reference text used by the communities and by the civil authorities. The 1852 firman of Sultan Abdulmejid I and Article 62 of the Treaty of Berlin of 1878 are the documentary anchors named in that text.

The Six Communities

Three communities are described as major, holding rights over the principal shrines, and three as minor, holding specified chapels and rights of procession.

The division of rights summarised above follows Cust's 1929 description and the current published accounts of the communities themselves, principally the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem and the Custody of the Holy Land. Details of particular rights are contested between the communities in places, and this table is a general orientation rather than a legal statement.

What It Feels Like In Practice

The Status Quo governs which lamps belong to whom, who sweeps which step, the hour at which each community may censer the Edicule, and the route of every procession. Because a repair to shared fabric requires unanimity, urgent work has been delayed for decades at a time, which is how the Edicule ended up in a steel cage from 1947 until 2017. Tempers have occasionally broken into scuffles between clergy, which the international press enjoys reporting.

The Catholic reading of this should be plain and unembarrassed. The arrangement is an accommodation to a real failure, which is that Christians who confess one Lord and one baptism cannot hold one building in common. The Second Vatican Council's decree Unitatis Redintegratio teaches that divisions among Christians contradict the will of Christ and damage the preaching of the Gospel, and this church is where that teaching is easiest to see with your own eyes. The three major communities did agree on the Edicule restoration, and the Greek Orthodox Patriarch, the Latin Custos and the Armenian Patriarch stood together at its completion in March 2017. That is worth as much attention as the scuffles get.

15. The Key, the Ladder, and the Feasts

Two of the best-known things about this church are small: a door key and a ladder. Both are consequences of the arrangement described above.

The Muslim Families at the Door

The church is unlocked in the early morning and locked at night by members of two Jerusalem Muslim families. The Joudeh al-Ghudayya family keeps custody of the key. The Nusaybah family works the door, receiving the key and operating the lock. The ceremony is worth watching: because the door is bolted from within at night, a wooden ladder is passed out through a small hatch in the door so the doorkeeper can reach the upper lock from the courtyard.

Both families describe the office as hereditary and trace it back to the early centuries of Muslim rule in Jerusalem, the Nusaybah family to the surrender of the city in the seventh century and the Joudeh custody of the key to the settlement under Saladin after 1187. Firm documentary evidence for the arrangement in the form we have it comes from the Ottoman period. What is certain is the reason it persists: the Christian communities sharing the building have never been able to agree that any one of them should hold the key, and a custodian outside all of their disputes solves the problem. Christians and Muslims in Jerusalem have kept that particular peace for a long time, and it is one of the few uncomplicated good things in the story of this building.

The account above rests on the families' own published statements of their role, which both the Joudeh and the Nusaybah families give in interviews and on the historical record of the office in Ottoman documentation. Claims of an unbroken succession from the seventh or twelfth century are the families' own tradition, and this page reports them as such rather than as documented fact.

The Immovable Ladder

On the cornice beneath the right-hand upper window of the facade stands a short wooden ladder. It is in an engraving of the facade dated 1728 and in photographs from the middle of the nineteenth century onward, and it has been there ever since. Why it was put there is unknown; the likeliest explanation is that the ledge served a community with rights to the window and the ladder was left after some ordinary piece of work. Why it stays is entirely clear. The facade and its ledges are common ground, no community may alter common ground on its own initiative, and moving a ladder would be an alteration. It has been disturbed and returned on rare occasions.

Pilgrims photograph it and laugh, and then usually stop laughing. A small ladder that no one may touch for three centuries, on the front of the building that holds the empty tomb, is an accurate emblem of the cost of Christian division. Look at it, and then go inside and pray for unity, which is a better response than a photograph.

The Feasts and the Holy Fire

The great days here are Holy Week and Easter, celebrated twice, since the Greek Orthodox, Armenian, Coptic, Syriac and Ethiopian communities keep the Julian reckoning of Pascha and the Latin Catholics keep the Gregorian date. In the Roman calendar, 14 September is the feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross, a feast whose origin is the dedication of Constantine's basilica in September 335 and the showing of the wood of the Cross on the day following. That is the church's own feast day, and Catholics keeping it anywhere in the world are keeping the anniversary of this building.

On Holy Saturday of the Julian calendar the Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Jerusalem enters the Edicule alone and emerges with lighted candles in a ceremony called the Holy Fire, from which flame is passed to thousands of candles in the church and flown to Orthodox countries. It is an ancient and much loved Orthodox observance, attested in Jerusalem for well over a thousand years, and it draws enormous crowds. The Catholic Church takes no part in it and has issued no judgment on it. Since 17 May 2024 the Church's own procedure for assessing any alleged supernatural phenomenon is set out in the Norms for Proceeding in the Discernment of Alleged Supernatural Phenomena, under which the competent authority ordinarily refrains from declaring any phenomenon supernatural and reaches one of six possible conclusions governing whether public devotion may proceed. The first of those, a nihil obstat, permits public devotion while declaring nothing about supernatural origin. No such process has been applied to the Holy Fire, and a Catholic pilgrim who attends is a respectful guest at another community's liturgy.

Source: Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith, Norms for Proceeding in the Discernment of Alleged Supernatural Phenomena, published 17 May 2024 and available in full on the Holy See website. The six possible conclusions are the Dicastery's own terms. The Holy Fire is a ceremony of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem and this page describes it without endorsing or disputing any claim made about it.

16. Frequently Asked Questions