Church · Holy Land

Church of the Holy Sepulchre

Old City of Jerusalem, Israel

"The Church of the Holy Sepulchre, built on the site of Christ's tomb is the holiest Christian site. Click to read its history and more info"

Highlights

1Traditionally believed to be the site where Jesus was crucified and also housing his empty tomb where he was buried and resurrected, there has been much debate whether this is the exact location
2Decades later in 135 AD, the Roman Emperor Hadrian had the rock-cut tomb of Jesus filled and over which a temple dedicated to Jupiter or Venus was built
3After his conversion, Constantine sent his mother to Jerusalem to look for the tomb of Jesus
4Once the ruins of the Roman temple were removed from the site, the rock-cut tomb of Jesus was revealed once again
5To facilitate veneration of this holy spot, the Emperor had a round building erected slightly to the west of the exact spot

Getting There

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Address

Christian Quarter Rd, Jerusalem

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Directions

The church is in the Christian Quarter of Jerusalem's Old City. From Jaffa Gate, walk through the Christian Quarter Road (10 minutes). From Damascus Gate (Muslim Quarter), via the Via Dolorosa (20-minute walk of the Stations of the Cross). International flights to Ben Gurion Airport (Tel Aviv) with connections to Jerusalem by train or bus.

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Timings

Current time — Jerusalem Time (IST)

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When	Hours	Note
Church Open daily from	5:00 AM

Edicule (the Tomb) Queue throughout church hours — can be 1-3 hours No charge for entry. The queue for the Edicule (Christ's Tomb) can be 1-3 hours at peak times; arrive very early morning for shorter waits. Modest dress required. Photography is permitted in most areas but not during liturgies.

Masses & Events

Franciscan Mass at Calvary

6:00 AM daily

Early morning Mass on the site of the

Crucifixion Greek Orthodox Divine Liturgy

Various times

check with church — The principal Orthodox celebration at the main altar above the tomb Saturday (Holy)

Fire Ceremony

Holy Saturday (Orthodox calendar)

The miraculous Holy Fire ceremony — the most significant annual liturgy at the Church

Must See

Calvary (Golgotha)

Upper level, reached by stairs inside the entrance The rocky outcropping of Golgotha is enclosed within the upper level of the church. Two chapels stand on it: the Latin Altar of the Nailing to the Cross and the Greek Orthodox Altar of the Crucifixion. Below the altar, pilgrims kneel and reach through a hole in the floor to touch the rock of Calvary itself. The queue moves slowly. What cannot be measured is what happens in the person who kneels there.

The Stone of Anointing

Ground floor, immediately inside the entrance A long red marble slab marks the place where the body of Jesus was anointed and wrapped for burial. The stone is covered with flowers and candles. Pilgrims prostrate themselves over it and press rosaries, icons, and photographs to its surface. It is the most tangible expression of the bodily reality of the Passion.

The Edicule

The Tomb

Centre of the rotunda The Edicule is the small marble structure enclosing the Tomb. Pilgrims enter two or three at a time, kneel in the antechamber (the Angel's Chapel), then enter the Tomb itself, where a marble slab marks the stone bench on which the body was laid. The queue can be hours long. Those who enter describe the experience as being beyond words.

The Rotunda

Around the Edicule The vast circular space, built by Constantine and rebuilt in Crusader and later periods, surrounds the Edicule. The dome above it, rebuilt by the Crusaders, is still lit by natural light through a central oculus. The combination of the ancient structure, the competing liturgies, the incense, and the awareness of what stands at the centre is extraordinary.

The Ethiopian Roof Monastery

Exterior rooftop

via the Coptic entrance [OUTDOOR] The Ethiopian Orthodox community maintains a small monastery on the roof of the Chapel of St Helena — reached by stairs from outside. The mud-walled cells, the small courtyard, and the monks in white robes constitute one of the most quietly moving places in Jerusalem. They have lived here since the 17th century.

Intentions

Carry these intentions into the Basilica with you — pause at each sacred spot and lift them to God.

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For the unity of Christians — for the day when the six communities sharing this church may also share the Eucharist

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For the peace of Jerusalem and of the Holy Land

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For the local Christian communities of Palestine and Israel, struggling to survive in their ancestral home

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For those who come here carrying the heaviest griefs of their lives

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For the dead we bring with us to the tomb, knowing that the tomb is empty

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For a renewed faith in the Resurrection — not as a proposition but as a reality

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For pilgrims of all traditions who kneel at the same stone

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For all who have been here, changed, and taken the change back to their ordinary lives

Reflection

The church is chaotic, crowded, dark, and shared among six communities who sometimes argue. The incense from six traditions mingles. Six different liturgies are conducted in six different languages on any given day. The stone of Calvary is under an altar that belongs to two different churches simultaneously. And in the middle of all of it is the empty tomb. The chaos and the emptiness together are the Church of the Holy Sepulchre's most honest statement about Christian history: we have never agreed about much, but the tomb was empty when we got here, and that is enough.

Suggested Scripture — John 20:6-7

He saw the strips of linen lying there, as well as the cloth that had been wrapped around Jesus' head. The cloth was still lying in its place, separate from the linen.

Read in full on Bible Gateway →

A Pilgrim's Prayer

Lord of the empty tomb, I come to this church with all its noise and all its crowds and all its beauty and all its dysfunction. I come because this is where it happened. I stand on the ground of the Resurrection. Whatever I believe or doubt about what happened here, I believe that the emptiness of this tomb is the most important fact in human history. Let me live from that fact. Amen.

Arguably the holiest shrine in Christendom, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, lying in the northwest quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem, has a history that goes back to the day Jesus was crucified. Traditionally believed to be the site where Jesus was crucified, and also housing his empty tomb where he was buried and resurrected, there has been much debate over whether this is the exact location.

The Roman Era

Christians fled Jerusalem in 66 AD, shortly before the Jewish Rebellion — an uprising that sought to overthrow Roman rule over Judea. The city and its temple were completely destroyed by the Romans when they retook it in 70 AD. Decades later, in 135 AD, the Roman Emperor Hadrian had the rock-cut tomb of Jesus filled, and over it a temple dedicated to Jupiter or Venus was built. And so it remained until the time of the conversion of Emperor Constantine.

Constantine and St Helena

The proclamation of the Edict of Milan in 313 AD by Emperor Constantine, and the acceptance of Christianity in the Roman Empire, was a turning point in the history of early Christianity. The Emperor ordered the reconstruction of the Holy Sepulchre, stating “that it should surpass all the churches of the world in the beauty of its walls, columns, and marbles.” The Roman temple was demolished, and in its place a massive 250-foot-long basilica, having an open-air colonnade enclosing the traditional site of the Crucifixion, was erected.

St Helena, a Christian of Greek origin and mother of the Emperor, was a great influence in bringing about this change. After his conversion, Constantine sent his mother to Jerusalem to look for the tomb of Jesus. Once the ruins of the Roman temple were removed from the site, the rock-cut tomb of Jesus was revealed once again. This was the spot where Jesus had risen from the dead. To facilitate veneration of this holy spot, the Emperor had a round building erected slightly to the west of the exact spot.

Centuries of Conflict

The Church of the Holy Sepulchre has seen numerous events in its history, being burnt and razed to the ground, subjected to earthquakes, and rebuilt and renovated as it changed hands between the various powers that held Jerusalem at different points in history. The Persian Sassanid Empire invaded Jerusalem in May 614, captured the original True Cross and burnt down the Constantine structure. The Roman Emperor Heraclius retook the city in 630 AD and had the church rebuilt.

By this time Islam had been founded in the early seventh century. The Rashidun Caliphate, a newly established Muslim power in Arabia, conquered Jerusalem in 637–638 AD. It remained, however, a Christian church under the early Muslim rulers, who prohibited the destruction or misuse of Christian sites. Muslim rule continued until 1099, during which period the city saw incessant warfare between various Muslim tribes, in addition to an earthquake in 746 AD that severely damaged the Holy Sepulchre.

The Crusades

Heeding the call of Pope Urban II, who in 1095 called on Christian powers to assist the Byzantine Empire, the Crusades were launched to regain territory that had been taken over by the Muslims. Four years later, on 15 July 1099, the Crusaders had reached Jerusalem, which they took from the Fatimids, who had only a year previously ended a quarter century of Turkic rule. The victorious knights rushed to the Holy Sepulchre, where they immediately ejected the Greek Orthodox clergy who controlled the church. The Crusaders suspected them of being complicit with the previous Islamic rulers, and considered the Greek Orthodox, who had broken away from the Roman Church in 1054, to be heretics.

When the Crusaders entered the once majestic structure, it was in a state of disrepair, having been battered by years of neglect and earthquakes. The Crusaders had the church rebuilt in the grand Romanesque and early Gothic style, uniting for the first time all three areas into a single structure which survives to this day. The Holy Sepulchre was lost to Saladin in 1187, and except for a brief period after the Third Crusade, it remained in Muslim hands until the modern era. The church standing at the site in the present day dates mainly to 1810, although significant repair and restoration has been undertaken since.

Shared Custody

The actual control of the church has been split between various church denominations in complicated arrangements that have remained unchanged for a long time. The primary denominations that share control of the Holy Sepulchre are the Greek Orthodox, Roman Catholic and Armenian Apostolic Churches. In the 19th century the Coptic Orthodox, the Ethiopian Orthodox and the Syriac Orthodox Churches acquired lesser responsibilities and also control of some of the shrines and structures in the complex. There are frequent squabbles between the various churches, and an uneasy peace was brokered by the Ottoman status quo in 1757.

It might come as a surprise to learn that the gatekeepers of the holiest Christian shrine are Muslim. The Nuseibeh family has, since the 7th century, been responsible for opening the door, as a party that treats all denominations impartially. When in 1187 Saladin captured Jerusalem, the keys were entrusted to the Joudeh Al-Goudia family. The Nuseibeh family remain the doorkeepers to the Holy Sepulchre to this day.

The Tomb

Known as the Aedicule, the shrine that encloses the tomb has largely been under the Greek Orthodox Church. In 2016 the tomb was opened for the first time in centuries, and samples of mortar were taken from its limestone surface and the marble slab covering it. The results dated back to 345 AD, providing evidence of the first structure erected by the Emperor Constantine. This finding acquires great significance and confirms the historical sequence of rebuilding the tomb of the man whose influence over mankind remains unparalleled in the annals of history.

Monuments of the Church

Some of the monuments at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre include the Aedicule — the building above where Christ’s tomb used to be, the current version built in 1810; the Tomb of Joseph of Arimathea, under the jurisdiction of the Syrian Jacobites; the Anastasis Rotunda, commemorating the resurrection; the Chapel of the Apparition to the Virgin, under the jurisdiction of the Roman Catholics; the Virgin’s Pillars, Greek Orthodox; the Chapel of the Finding of the True Cross, Roman Catholics; the Chapel of St Varian, Ethiopian Orthodox; the Parvis, the colonnaded entryway, jurisdiction shared by Greek Orthodox, Roman Catholic and Armenian Apostolic; the Stone of Anointing, where Jesus’s body was anointed after being removed from the cross; the Chapel of the Three Marys, commemorating where Mary the mother of Jesus, Mary Magdalene and Mary of Clopas watched the crucifixion; the Chapel of St Longinus, the Roman centurion who pierced Christ and converted to Christianity; and the Chapel of Helena, commemorating Empress Helena.