Tent Work in Palestine: A Record of Discovery and Adventure

by C. R. Conder

Nazareth is probably not a very ancient place, for it is not noticed in the Old Testament, though situated very near the boundary of Zebulun; nor was it probably ever a very large town, for it has but one spring. Its name is most likely derived from the colour of the hills around, and may mean “white,” though the early fathers loved to render it “flower,” and others make it to mean “watchtower.” Ancient Nazareth probably stood rather higher on the slope than modern Nazareth; the place, in fact, has slid down the hill, as is indicated by the position of the old cisterns and tombs. Thus the “brow of the hill” is more probably one of the cliffs now above the town, or perhaps another hidden beneath the houses, and there is no necessity to seek it at so great a distance as that of the Saltus Domini precipice.

It is curious that Jerome scarcely seems ever to have been in Nazareth, though travelling far and wide over Palestine. In 700 A.D. Bishop Arculph found it an open village, with two churches—one over the grotto, one over the spring, both very large; but soon after troubles began, and it was not till the time of the Crusades that Nazareth became a bishopric. In 1102 Sæwulf found it entirely wasted, only a few columns remaining at the fountain, and though enjoying a temporary prosperity under the Christian monarchy, it was again devastated by the Moslems, and in 1322 Sir John Maundeville writes of it that it was “formerly a great and fair city, but now there is but a small village;” whilst of its inhabitants he says, “they are very wicked and cruel Saracens, and more spiteful than in any other place, and have destroyed all the churches.” It is not only Sir John, unfortunately, who can attest this fact: the zealous missionaries who have seen Moslem and Christian, Latin and Greek, shedding one another’s blood, Captain Burton who there nearly lost his life, and my own party who fared but ill in the neighbourhood, will alike bear witness to the turbulence of the Nazarenes—an evil character for which they seem to have been notorious ever since the days when they sought to stone our Lord, and gave cause yet earlier for the Jewish proverb, “Can any good thing come out of Nazareth?”

The people of the town are remarkable for the gay colouring of their dresses, and the Christian women for their beauty. Many a charming bit of colour, many a shapely figure set off by picturesque costume, many a dark eye and ruddy cheek, have I seen in the streets or by the spring. This beauty is peculiar to the Christians of Bethlehem and Nazareth, and various reasons are given which agree, however, in supposing a mixture of European blood. As to the dress, the causes are manifest; the costume is that commonly worn by Christians, and is only striking by contrast because the villagers of the neighbouring places are Moslem; the townsmen are also richer, and can afford better dress, and this partly accounts for the superior beauty of the better-fed women when contrasted with the worn faces of the overworked and half-starved peasant women of the surrounding poor hamlets.

A more special description of the people, their dress, customs, and religion, must, however, be reserved until they can be treated with the rest of the natives in a future chapter: suffice it here to notice that they present a far more pleasing and picturesque appearance than most of the inhabitants of Syrian towns. Leaving the question for the present, we may next turn attention to the two sacred places of Nazareth—the Grotto of the Annunciation and the Virgin’s Spring.

The site of the Holy House was shown, as noticed above, as early as 700 A.D. in a rock-cut grotto. The pillars of the Crusading church built round it were still visible in 1620 A.D., but the new building erected in 1730 A.D. with the rest of the present monastery, has no connection with the plan of the former, the foundations of which still exist beneath. The modern church is a whitewashed, square structure, seventy feet long and fifty broad, directed north and south. The high altar above the sacred grotto is reached by a flight of stairs, from each side of the seventeen marble steps which lead down to the vestibule, called the Chapel of the Angel, where left and right are the altars of St. Joachim and the angel Gabriel. Behind the high altar is the choir, dark and roomy like that at Bethlehem. Descending into the grotto and passing through the vestibule, the old Franciscan led me into the little rock-cut chamber, with marble floor, and an altar on the north wall. This is the outer half of the grotto, and a wall of separation divides it from the inner half. The outer is called Grotto of the Annunciation, the inner that of St. Joseph. From the roof of the former, which measures twenty feet across and seven feet in depth, hangs pendant near the west side the shaft of a red granite pillar, apparently a column of the old chapel in the grotto, and believed to be miraculously suspended over the very place where the angel stood when bringing the message to Mary. Lighting the little taper on the altar, and kneeling for a moment in prayer, the monk drew the veil from before an Italian picture of the Annunciation, soft and mellow in colour, with a sweet Virgin face, and tawdry silver crown and nimbus sewn on above her head and that of Gabriel.

By the narrow entrance on the right we passed into the inner part of the chapel, dark and damp, equal in width, but double the depth of the outer part. It is only just about high enough to stand in: its altar is placed at the back of the last described, with a picture of St. Joseph. From this a narrow passage twenty feet long, with seventeen steps, leads up obliquely to the inmost part of the cave, a chamber of irregular shape, traditionally supposed to be the Virgin’s kitchen, with a chimney hewn in the rock on the east, and an entrance, now walled up, on the west, by which the father informed me the Virgin used to go out to fetch water from the spring. The whole place is very dark and low, with a damp odour, and resembles the ancient cisterns of which many exist in Nazareth; yet for nearly twelve centuries this spot has been visited by millions from every Christian land as the early home of Christ and of His mother. I observed to the monk that it was dark for a dwelling-house, but he answered very simply, “The Lord had no need of much light.”

It is hardly worth while to describe the modern sanctuary of “St. Joseph’s Workshop,” a Latin chapel, built only in 1859, about two hundred yards north of the monastery, in the Moslem Quarter; or the Mensa Christi, a block of rock rudely oval ten feet across and three feet high, in a church built in 1861 in the west quarter of the town. The only other ancient site is that of the Virgin’s Fountain, six hundred yards north-east of the Latin Monastery at the end of a lane hedged with prickly pear, and near the flat camping ground among the olives.

As early as 700 A.D. we find Bishop Arculph visiting here a church over the spring. The present building is only about eighty years old, but occupies the same site. It is dedicated to St. Gabriel, and even the Latins admit it to be on the site where first the angel became visible. It is curious that no artist has pitched upon so charming a subject as that suggested by a meeting with the Heavenly messenger at the Fountain, an idea not discordant with the words of the Gospel. As in the eighth century, so now the spring is under the floor of the church, which is itself half subterranean. The water is led to the left of the high altar, past a well-mouth, by which it is drawn up for pilgrims, and so by a channel to the masonry fountain, where it comes out through metal spouts under an arched recess broad enough for fifteen women to stand side by side. A pool is formed below at the trough, and here the constant succession of the Nazareth women may be seen all day filling their great earthenware jars, standing ankle-deep in water, their pink or green-striped baggy trousers tucked between their knees; their heads are covered, if Moslems, with the moon-shaped tire, if Christians, with a gay handkerchief or the hair platted in long tails. A negress in blue here and there mingles with the crowd, which is chattering, screaming, gossiping, and sometimes fighting.

The Protestant buildings in Nazareth are the most conspicuous, because higher placed than either the beautiful minaret of the mosque or the strong pile of the monastery. The hospital, presided over by Dr. Varten, an accomplished surgeon and a kind doctor, stands towards the north; the church, well built with a pretty garden and capable of containing five hundred persons, is to the west, tastefully decorated within, and having over the altar-table, in Arabic, the words read by the Saviour in the Synagogue of Nazareth, “the Spirit of the Lord is upon me ... to preach the Gospel to the poor; He hath sent Me to heal the broken-hearted, to preach deliverance to the captives” (Luke iv. 18).

Highest placed of all, however, half-way up the hill, the great orphanage has been building since 1872, and is now complete, and designed to hold two hundred girls. It is built in the symbolic but very inconvenient form of a cross with the sides filled in, and is but ill designed though well executed, and externally a very fine building. From its esplanade the town is visible, spread out almost like a map on the lower slopes, with olive and fig-gardens, cactus hedges and yellow threshing-floors, backed by barren stony hills.