Constantine’s church
In the second century the Romans had built a temple on the site, inside the rebuilt city. In the 320s the emperor Constantine, whose victory of 312 is celebrated on the Arch of Constantine in Rome and who had made Christianity a favoured religion, ordered it pulled down. According to the bishop and historian Eusebius, the builders found beneath it a rock-cut tomb, identified as the tomb of Jesus. Constantine had a magnificent complex built around it, consecrated in 335: a great basilica, an open courtyard with the rock of Calvary in one corner, and a round church over the tomb, called the Anastasis, “the Resurrection”.
It was one of the great building projects of the first Christian emperor, alongside the churches of Rome and his new city of Constantinople. Pilgrims came from across the Roman world, and the round church over a sacred spot became a model copied in many places.
Destroyed and rebuilt
The church was damaged during the Persian conquest of 614 and repaired. In 1009 the Fatimid caliph al-Hakim ordered it destroyed, and much of the tomb itself was cut away. Under an agreement with a later caliph, the Byzantine emperor Constantine IX Monomachos paid for a smaller rebuilding, finished around 1048, centred on the rotunda.
The crusader church
The crusaders took Jerusalem in 1099 and decided to bring all the holy places under one roof. They added a Romanesque church east of the rotunda, joined it to the chapel of Calvary, built a bell tower and the double doorway on the south side, which is still the only entrance. The new church was consecrated in 1149, fifty years after the conquest. Its carved capitals and pointed arches look like those of a church in France, because many of its builders came from there.
Generations of pilgrims left their mark. On the walls of the stair down to the Chapel of Saint Helena, hundreds of small crosses were carved by medieval visitors.
The Edicule over the tomb
Inside the rotunda, a small shrine called the Edicule encloses what remains of the tomb. After a fire in 1808 it was rebuilt in 1809-1810 in a Baroque-Ottoman style. By the twentieth century it was so unstable that the British held it up with iron girders in 1947. Between 2016 and 2017 a team from the National Technical University of Athens restored it, with the agreement of the communities that share the church.
A church shared by many
Several Christian communities have rights in the church. The main ones are the Greek Orthodox, the Roman Catholics, represented by the Franciscans, and the Armenian Apostolic Church; the Coptic, Ethiopian and Syriac Orthodox churches also hold chapels. Their rights are fixed by the Status Quo, a set of arrangements confirmed by Ottoman decrees in 1757 and 1852, which says who may use which space, at which time. By long tradition, the keys of the main door are kept by Muslim families of Jerusalem.
One small sign of the Status Quo is a wooden ladder on a ledge above the entrance. It has stood there since at least the eighteenth century, and because no change may be made without agreement, it has stayed.
Where to see it
The church stands in the Christian Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem, reached through a small courtyard off narrow streets. It is an active place of worship, open to visitors outside services, with modest dress expected.
Sources
- Custodia di Terra Santa, “Basilica del Santo Sepolcro”.
- Eusebius, Life of Constantine 3.25-40.
- National Technical University of Athens, Holy Edicule rehabilitation project (2016-2017).
- M. Biddle, The Tomb of Christ (Stroud, 1999).
