Good day Worthy Knights,

In this part 39, The Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem                          (Wikipedia)

The Church of the Holy Sepulchre (Greek: Ναός του Παναγίου Τάφου, Latin: Ecclesia Sancti Sepulchri is a church in the Christian Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem.

The Church contains, according to traditions dating back to at least the fourth century, the two holiest sites in Christianity: the site where Jesus was crucified at a place known as Calvary or Golgotha and Jesus’ empty tomb, where he was buried and resurrected. The tomb is enclosed by a 19th-century shrine called the Aedicula.

Within the Church proper are the last four (or by some definitions, five) stations of the Via Dolorosa, representing the final episodes of the Passion of Jesus. The church has been a major Christian pilgrimage destination since its creation in the fourth century, as the traditional site of the resurrection of Christ, thus its original Greek name, Church of the Anastasis (‘Resurrection’).

Following the siege of AD 70 during the First Jewish–Roman War, Jerusalem had been reduced to ruins. In AD 130, the Roman emperor Hadrian began the building of a Roman colony, the new city of Aelia Capitolina, on the site.

Circa AD 135, he ordered that a cave containing a rock-cut tomb be filled in to create a flat foundation for a temple dedicated to Jupiter or Venus. The temple remained until the early 4th century.

Constantine construction

After seeing a vision of a cross in the sky in 312, Constantine the Great converted to Christianity, signed the Edict of Milan legalising the religion and asked his mother Helena to go to Jerusalem to look for Christ’s tomb.

With the help of Eusebius Bishop of Caesarea and Macarius Bishop of Jerusalem, three crosses were found near a tomb, leading the Romans to believe that they had found Calvary.

Constantine ordered in about 326 that the temple to Jupiter/Venus be replaced by a church. After the temple was torn down and its ruins removed, the soil was removed from the cave, revealing a rock-cut tomb that Helena and Macarius identified as the burial site of Jesus around which a shrine was constructed.

The Church of the Holy Sepulchre was built as separate construction over the two holy sites: the great basilica (the Martyrium visited by Egeria in the 380s), an enclosed colonnaded atrium (the Triportico) with the traditional site of Calvary in one corner, and across a courtyard, a rotunda called the Anastasis (“Resurrection”), where Helena and Macarius believed Jesus to have been buried.

The church was consecrated on 13 September 335.

Egeria,

Etheria or Aetheria was a woman, widely regarded to be the author of a detailed account of a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. The long letter, dubbed Peregrinatio or Itinerarium Egeriae, is addressed to a circle of women at home. Historical details it contains set the journey in the early 380s, making it the earliest of its kind.