By Jim Rutledge JERUSALEM — Plagued by years of delays over funding, thousands of visitors and worshippers are touring the recent re-opening of one of Christianity’s holiest sites, the restored tomb of Jesus located inside a small cave edifice inside the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, one of the world’s oldest churches. After nine months of restoration and nearly $4 million in donations, this ornate shrine called the Holy Edicule is a small burial structure inside the church built by Roman emperor Constantine I in the fourth century. The shrine covers the cave in which the faithful believe Jesus was buried and afterward, resurrected. For more than 70 years, the church’s outside stone structure has been a grim and unsightly structure with metal building struts supporting the ancient church to prevent collapse. Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christians believe the Holy Edicule is the original burial chamber, an ancient cave, where Jesus was buried and entombed and rose from the dead after his Crucifixion more than 2,000 years ago. The shrine is built around the original cave where visitors can kneel before a marble niche and peer through a small window that shows a stone wall upon which Jesus’ body was thought to have rested, church researchers say. The restoration work finally began last May and was recently completed in time for the faith’s Christian holidays. A Greek conservation team from Athens led the restoration work. They spent nearly a year removing parts of the stone wall and putting them back in place. The shrine has been worn down by centuries of water damage, fire, candle smoke, humidity and bird droppings, according to a description of the work by the Greek conservators. While the stone slabs were chiseled and cleaned, titanium mesh and grout were inserted into the wall’s stone construction to strengthen the structure’s core. Most strikingly, observers said, was the removal of the unsightly and 30-foot-high iron cage built around the shrine in 1947 to reinforce the building. Stone from three exterior sides of the building had to be treated with the special masonry bond. Workers also used radar, laser scanners and drones. The shrine was nearly destroyed by fire in 1808 and was restored two years later but since then had been poorly maintained with many of the wall’s stone chunks buckling outward. “I would venture to say that if the intervention hadn’t happened now, there was a very great risk there could have been a collapse,” Bonnie Burnham of the World Monuments Fund, a nonprofit group in New York that helped raise the $4 million in funding, told The Associated Press. Both King Abdullah of Jordan and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas each donated $165,000 to the project. “For the first time in over two centuries, this sacred edicule has been restored,” said the Greek Orthodox patriarch, Theophilos III of Jerusalem, at opening day ceremonies in late March. “This is not only a gift to our holy land, but to the whole world.” Six religious entities – Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox, Armenian Apostolic, Syrian Orthodox, Ethiopian Orthodox and Copts – share custodianship of the shrine. Disputes between the groups over the years have held up restoration, according to various media accounts. Disagreement erupted among various church leaders who were previously unable to agree on how to fix the shrine until Jewish authorities determined the shine had to close because of fears it would collapse. A team of 50 experts from the National Technical University of Athens, led by university professor Antonia Moropoulou, worked mainly at night to carry out the work in order to allow visitors and pilgrims continued access to parts of the shrine. This is the same team that previously worked on damage to the Acropolis in the Greek capital and to the ancient Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, which at one time was a Greek Orthodox Basilica, later an imperial mosque, and now a museum. |