Historian have long argued over the Crusader legacy, is it bloody slaughter, subjugation of Jews and Muslims and the imposition of an alien faith to the region?
Crusader Buildings in Jerusalem
Certainly it’s all of the above, evidenced mainly by the narrative of early writers. A more tangible legacy is the one that can still be seen, touched and wondered over – the host of churches, fortresses, hospices, monasteries and convents built by the Crusaders. Some now only piles of rubble but others still standing, restored and functioning as they were originally intended.
Church of St Anne Jerusalem
One of the most delightful and evocative of the surviving Crusader buildings in Jerusalem is the church dedicated to St Anne, (Hebrew Hannah), mother of the Virgin Mary and believed to have been built over her place of birth.
The church of St Anne, constructed in the early part of the 12th century, is a building of simple beauty proudly standing next to the Bethesda Pool, which is though to be the site where Jesus healed a paralytic, a man who had been ill for 38 years (John 5:1-15). Today pilgrims access the building by entering Jerusalem’s Old City through the Lion's Gate in the Muslim Quarter.
As if to confirm the multiple forms of worship that Jerusalem has witnessed over the centuries, St Anne’s rubs shoulders with the ruins of an ancient Roman temple dedicated to the god Aesculapius and the Muslim holy places of the Al Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock, perched high on the Temple Mount (Haram al Sharif).
Yishai Eldar, a former editor of Christian Life in Israel describes St Anne’s as a, “ Domed basilica with a nave and two aisles…” He describes the interior as plain perhaps attesting to the fact that after 1192, around five years after Saladin took the city, the building was used as a madrasa, a Muslim religious school.
In 1856 the church was returned to Christian hands (Roman Catholic White Fathers), a gift from the Ottoman sultan for French support during the Crimean War.
While Eldar described the building as “plain” the White Fathers, who still operate the church, have noted its “sober lines and astonishing acoustics.” Some pilgrims who stop to wonder also mention a tilt in the building, a potent symbol of Jesus’ last hours on the cross they say.
The White Fathers acknowledging the difficulties of living and studying at the church of St Anne in Jerusalem say, “ We want to continue being involved in the encounter taking place between men and women of different cultures and religions, so as to journey together with them in search of God and of a more just world.”
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