RECENTLY UPDATED FOR 2022! With high-resolution images, maps and a detailed tour itinerary, this is the definitive guide to Jerusalem’s most important sites: the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Dome of the Rock and Western Wall
A wonderfully complex and multi-layered city, Jerusalem is the crossroads of the world’s three great Abrahamic faiths: Christianity, Islam and Judaism. The ancient monuments erected to celebrate these religions still pulse with their original sacred energy. They are yours to discover.
What’s in this guidebook
★ Tour of the city’s highlights. Following our tradition of being the most valuable resource for culture-focused travelers, we offer a tour of Jerusalem’s most iconic structures: the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, the Temple Mount’s Dome of the Rock and the Western Wall (details below). For each, we reveal its most important architectural and decorative features and provide a discussion that ties it all together. To make things come alive, we have packed our review with high-resolution images.
★ Advice for getting the best cultural experience. To help you plan your visit, this guidebook offers logistical advice, maps and links to online resources. Plus, we give our personal tips for getting the most from your experience while on location.
★ Information the way you like it. As with all of our guides, this book is optimized for intuitive, quick navigation; information is organized into bullet points to make absorption easy; and images are marked up with text that explains important features.
★ NEW! Customers can now print this guidebook with our new PDF-on-Demand service. See the final chapter in the book for details.
TOUR ITINERARY
★ Church of the Holy Sepulchre. For the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, which encloses the sites of Jesus’ crucifixion and burial, we explore the changes that the structure has undergone through the ages in response to adversity and changing requirements. Specifically, we examine the how the present church’s architectural layout relates to those of the three earlier edifices that occupied the site: the enormous 4th century Constantinian church; the modest rebuilt 11th century Byzantine church; and the expanded 12th century Crusader church.
★ Temple Mount. Crowning the Temple Mount, the iconic 7th century Dome of the Rock is one of the earliest surviving Islamic structures. We explore its history, architecture, decoration and political significance. Further, we profile the Temple Mount’s other highlights: Al-Aqsa mosque, Dome of the Chain, Golden Gate and two Mamluk monuments.
★ Western Wall. The Temple Mount’s history far pre-dates Islam’s presence on the scene. The Mount was the site of the three Jewish Temples, the first of which was built in 950 BCE. This guide discusses these temples — their histories and what they looked like — and profiles the only vestige of their existence, the Western Wall, the most sacred of Jewish religious sites.
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- Travel + Leisure
