Layard paid a second visit to Mosul in 1842 as an assistant to the British consul general in Constantinople. This time he was accompanied to the Koyunjik mound by the newly appointed French consul to Mosul, Paul Emile Botta, who not only shared Layard’s interest in history, but also had, with the backing of his government, begun excavation there. Though Botta had yet to find much, his enthusiasm inspired Layard.
In November of 1845 Layard secured a loan of 150 pounds sterling from the British ambassador in Constantinople, Stratford Canning, whose own interest in archeology had led him to acquire for the British Museum the so-called “Canning Marbles” from Bodrum, Turkey. With help in Mosul from Christian Rassam and a British merchant named Henry Ross, Layard began to lay out trenches. Luck was with him. After just a few days of digging, the 28-year-old archeologist began to uncover what turned out to be the palace of the mid-ninth-century-BCE Assyrian king Ashurnasirpal, one of the largest and most magnificent structures of the 300-year neo-Assyrian period, 911 to 612 BCE. Layard’s success was met well back in London, and the British Museum soon agreed to grant him funds for more extensive excavations. The funding would include a salary for an on-site supervisor who spoke both Arabic and English. That duty fell to Christian Rassam’s young brother Hormuzd.
Hormuzd Rassam came with much to recommend himself. Fluent in Arabic, English and Chaldean, he also added “inexhaustible good humour, combined with necessary firmness, to his complete knowledge of the Arab character,” wrote Layard. “Mr. Hormuzd Rassam lived with me,” he continued, “and to him I confided the payment of the wages and the accounts. He soon obtained an extraordinary influence over the Arabs, and his fame spread throughout the desert.”
Within weeks at Nimrud, Rassam took on increasingly more of the field duties, which afforded Layard, an accomplished draftsman, the time to record the extraordinary finds that were, it seemed, turning up every day. A 1911 obituary written for The Geographical Journal described how Rassam “developed rapidly,” having possessed “that instinctive skill in locating ancient remains.” He quickly climbed to the rank of foreman, second in command only to Layard.
Most of the finds at Nimrud, Layard observed, differed in style and even “surpassed in design and execution” much of what had been revealed recently a few kilometers north at Khorsabad, at the palace of Sargon II, at the time the only other excavated Assyrian palace. At Nimrud, Layard was able to capture much of the detail depicted in the many wall reliefs that were like windows into the Assyrian court: the king performing religious functions, hunting lions, defeating enemies. Layard also noted floor plans of the palace rooms and courtyards as workers were uncovering them.
One find in particular impressed Layard as being “the most remarkable discovery.” A black obelisk measuring almost two meters high and dating from the time of Shalmaneser III (858–824 BCE) offers a record of the Assyrian king’s “capture of nations” over his 32 years of rule. Of particular interest to Layard was the second panel from the top, showing what Layard and Rassam conjectured, based on the illustrated attire of boots and pointed caps, to be “some race living to the north of Assyria.” One of those shown paying tribute is Jehu, king of Israel, which proved of particular interest to Layard for its verification of Biblical accounts.
Layard and Rassam continued working at Nimrud until May of 1847 when, curious as to what else might be found in the area, they moved to survey the two mounds at nearby Nineveh. The smaller, called Nabi Yunus, was accepted locally as the site where the body of the prophet Jonah rested, and that made it off limits to excavations. There were no local objections, however, to excavating the larger mound, Koyunjik. Layard and Rassam began soundings and, based on their trenches, Koyunjik appeared to be even more promising than Nimrud.
On June 14, 1847, Layard wrote the secretary of the British Museum:
The discovery of this building and the extent to which the excavations have been carried out, I conclude, establish our claim to the future examination of the mound should the Trustees be desirous to continue the researches in this country.
In his introduction to the 1970 edition of Layard’s book, Nineveh and Its Remains, British Assyriologist H. W. F. Saggs noted, “it was owing to this fortnight’s work that the British Museum could afterwards claim the rights by which it obtained the famous collection of more than 20,000 cuneiform tablets and fragments from Koyunjik upon which Assyriology is based.”
But it was growing late in the season for archeology. Ten days later Layard left Mosul for England, and he took Rassam with him. “The best time of the year for explorations in Mesopotamia is from September to November inclusive, and from the beginning of March to the end of May,” wrote Rassam, “because, during December, January and February the days are short, and the weather generally wet; and from June to the end of August the heat of the sun is so powerful.”
In England Layard helped Rassam obtain a place at Magdalen College at Oxford. Rassam’s father had died some years before, and Christian and his English wife, Matilda Badger Rassam, agreed to pay Hormuzd’s expenses.
Rassam did well at his studies. He did even better at making friends. He learned to ice skate—and to even think it funny when he fell through the ice. He gave his new friends gifts of his own calligraphy, and he waxed proud when one of his examples was exhibited in the university’s Bodleian Library. He became a favorite of the local bishop, who invited Rassam to dinner so often, Rassam wrote Layard, that it became rumored he might marry the bishop’s daughter.
He did not, and in 1849, at the request of the British Museum, Rassam rejoined Layard in Constantinople to return to the Koyunjik mound in Nineveh.
Digging in the mound’s southwest corner, Layard and Rassam soon came upon the vast “palace without rival.” It had been built by the late seventh-century-BCE King Sennacherib, and within it was one of the most spectacularly detailed reliefs of its epoch: a room devoted to a complex relief telling of Sennacherib’s destruction of Lachish, an outpost of Jerusalem at the time of Jehu, the same king who was represented on the black obelisk. Twelve meters long and more than five high, the relief showed Assyrian battering rams and chariots attacking and breaching the city walls as well as the punishments meted out to the rebel leaders afterward.
Days later Layard’s team came across two large chambers “of which the whole area was piled a foot or more deep in tablets.” This was the seventh-century-BCE library of Sennacherib’s grandson Ashurbanipal, the largest of its time by far.
Although the discoveries were extraordinary, the work conditions were abysmal. By the summer of 1851, the heat and infestations of mosquitoes had taken their toll on Layard who, ill with malaria, left the region, never to return to Nineveh.
With Layard’s departure, the British Museum in 1852 entrusted Rassam, then in England, to carry on the excavation. As Rassam was still only 25 years old, the trustees of the museum asked him to “take charge of the excavations under the general control of Colonel Rawlinson,” an English cavalry officer turned linguist, who then served as British resident in Baghdad, some 320 kilometers to the south of Mosul.
Rawlinson was celebrated for his work copying the trilingual cuneiform inscriptions carved in the sixth and fifth centuries BCE by the Achaemenid King Darius high on a towering rock at Behistun, 550 kilometers southeast of Mosul. Teetering on long ladders, Rawlinson had copied the Old Persian and Elamite inscriptions on several visits beginning in 1836 and, with the help of a telescope and two Kurdish boys, completed copying the Babylonian inscription in 1847. By comparing the three languages, Rawlinson and other scholars came to a crucial determination: Cuneiform was not a language in itself but rather a writing system that, over some 3,000 years, was used for many languages. This meant more work for archeologists: To decipher the languages, linguists needed more tablets.
His ambition was thwarted, however, by Rawlinson and the French consul at Mosul, Victor Place, who agreed to divide the area of Mesopotamian exploration between them as the lure of ever-greater discoveries began to pit the French against the English in a race to claim each potential site. The agreement allotted the north part of Koyunjik to Place.
Rassam was devastated. In his mind, not only was Koyunjik an original British claim, but he also knew that part of the mound was private property upon which the British had long been paying rent. “Moreover,” he wrote, “it was understood, and indeed it is an acknowledged etiquette, that no agent of any museum was to intrude in the sites chosen by the other.” The situation that followed might have been different had Place begun excavating there, but he showed little interest: The French archeologist was making good progress nearly 20 kilometers southeast at Khorsabad and, with limited funding, was not in a position to overextend himself.
Convincing himself that Rawlinson had had no right to assign the northern part of Koyunjik to the French, who in any case seemed uninterested, Rassam resolved to conduct “an experimental examination of the spot at night.” On
December 20, 1853, Rassam gathered his men.
The first three nights brought disappointment. On the fourth, they came upon an ascending passage, which experience had taught Rassam would likely lead to a main building. His instinct did not let him down, and he watched as “a large part of the bank which was attached to the sculpture fell, and exposed a beautiful bas-relief in a perfect state of preservation.” The sculpture represented a king, later determined to be Ashurbanipal, “standing in a chariot, about to start on a hunting expedition.”
It was Ashurbanipal’s north palace, and within it lay some of the greatest treasures ever unearthed in Mesopotamia. These include the now-famous bas-reliefs of the king’s ritual lion hunt, arguably the finest Assyrian reliefs ever found.
Days later, they came upon the main part of one of the libraries of Ashurbanipal, whom scholar Jeanette C. Fincke of the University of Heidelberg credits as having been blessed with “great intelligence,” and “talents to learn the scribal art.” His instructions as king of Assyria, maintains Fincke, to “collect all the tablets as much as there are in their houses” eventually led to chambers filled with compilations of thousands of inscribed terracotta tablets with hieroglyphic and Phoenician characters dating as far back as the Sumerian period (5000–1750 BCE).
Rassam, scheduled to return to England in spring of 1854, worked feverishly. He excavated as many of the better-preserved lion-hunt panels as he could, and he packed them for shipping to London under Rawlinson who, short of money, asked Place to make room in his cargo raft for the British finds. Place had intended to accompany what was now the combined shipment, but the Louvre insisted that Place travel with it only as far as Baghdad. It was a mistake. As the rafts neared the port of Basra, pirates rammed them and sank them.
Place lost everything excavated in his two years at Khorsabad, including all his notes. The British lost one shipment of lion-hunt reliefs, but most of the wall slabs, and nearly all of the tablets, would make it to England by May of 1856. None of the lost treasures were ever recovered.
By this time, however, Rassam had begun a new chapter. Shortly before leaving Oxford, he wrote to Layard, now a member of the British Parliament. Rassam asked his mentor if he might find him, once the dig was over, a diplomatic post. Layard recommended Rassam to the port of Aden at the southwest tip of the Arabian Peninsula, strategic gateway between the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean. In making his recommendation, Layard remembered well Rassam’s innovations in employing gangs of seven men carrying on simultaneous, different excavating tasks. Indeed Rassam rose quickly in Aden to first assistant political resident, a position comparable to a lieutenant governor under the directors of the East India Company.
His work was varied and interesting. He was proud that no one ever asked to reverse one of his decisions while serving as a magistrate, and his genuine interest in helping people won wide praise. In diplomacy he was commended for settling a border dispute with neighboring Muscat (now capital of Oman).
So it was that in the summer of 1864, it seemed only natural that the British government would select him for a sensitive mission: Negotiate freedom for several British missionaries who were being held captive in Abyssinia (now Ethiopia). Warned that it could be both complex and dangerous, Rassam nonetheless set sail in July for the port town of Massowah.
The mission fared badly. It took some three years to resolve—and then only by a British army. Although Rassam was commended for bravery, the British press suggested he had been the wrong man for the job. In 1869, at age 43, he left the foreign service, married Anne Eliza Price, an Englishwoman of Irish descent, and settled in Twickenham, Middlesex, England. There he set out to write his own account of Abyssinia, which he published in 1869.
Three years later an Assyriologist named George Smith with the British Museum used tablets Rassam had found some 18 years earlier in an Ashurbanipal library to decipher the Epic of Gilgamesh. The story, written long before the earliest manuscript of the Biblical book of Genesis, told of a great flood, of a man who builds an ark, and of a dove released in search of land. The resemblance between this and the Biblical Flood accounts both alarmed and fascinated the European public. The texts, however, were deemed incomplete. Missing were records believed still buried at Koyunjik. To satisfy the resurgent interest, Rassam agreed to once again pack his cases and return to Nineveh, now in search of as many more tablets as he could find for, as he wrote, “the completion of the records which were already amongst the national collection.”
In four expeditions between 1878 and 1882, Rassam unearthed literally tens of thousands of tablets from sites as far away as Syria and the region of Lake Van in eastern Turkey, as well as from Nineveh, Nimrud and Babylonian cities to the south, including an important cache from the temple of Marduk in Babylon itself. During those years he also located and excavated the Babylonian city of Sippar, famous as “the oldest city known amongst the ancients.” At that site alone, Rassam and his team gathered between 60,000 and 70,000 tablets.
Perhaps his most famous find was a sixth-century-BCE terra-cotta cylinder written by Cyrus the Great and excavated in Jimjima. On it is recorded the capture and enslavement of Babylon by Cyrus’s predecessors.
Another spectacular find was two sets of inscribed bronze bands that once adorned the gate of Balawat, near Nineveh, which is still considered among the most informative illustrations of ancient military campaigns in existence.
Aware that large numbers of tablets were appearing on the open market, the museum sent Budge to investigate. For reasons that remain unclear, Budge concluded that not only were the artifacts being stolen and sold by the very workmen Rassam had left to excavate them, but that Rassam had colluded with them.
Layard, who had had his own problems with Budge, was outraged. He rushed to his friend’s public defense, declaring Rassam “one of the honestest [sic] and most straightforward fellows I ever knew, and one whose services have never been acknowledged.” Deeply hurt, Rassam sued Budge in 1893 for libel and won. But the resulting publicity left Rassam’s reputation in tatters. Rather than continue the debate, he retired to Brighton, where he wrote a number of scholarly articles as well as his book, Asshur and the Land of Nimrod, which he dedicated to his old friend, Austen Henry Layard. He died in Brighton in 1910, 16 years after Layard. He was 84, beloved by family and friends.
His considerable contributions to Mesopotamian archeology are well appreciated by those who continue to work in the field, and his name appears prominently in most recent books devoted to the subject.
Perhaps the greatest testimonies to Rassam’s work, however, are the artifacts themselves, the treasures he discovered while working both with Layard and on his own, that today stand among the highlights of the British Museum. Prominently displayed on the main floor, in galleries that transport visitors back millennia, are the famous lion reliefs, panel after grand panel, arranged just as they were found at Koyunjik. The bronze bands of Balawat are now fixed to a replica of the enormous, original gate. A colossal bull and lion from Nimrud still stand as flanking guards at the entrance to the Assyrian galleries, and the Obelisk in Black Marble and the Cyrus Cylinder claim their places among the most visited exhibits in the museum.
Within a decade, Layard and Rassam uncovered three of the four most magnificent Assyrian palaces ever found. Their findings, together with those of Botta, opened the study of Assyriology. Rassam stands alone as the first archeologist both of and from Mesopotamia.
Yogurt does wonders for cooling the body and digestion, so we always enjoyed this healthy, hearty, wholesome dish. The origin of the dish is northern Indian, but many mothers across India make this dish with their own spin. Yogurt is popular in the cooking of northern India, while coconut milk is more common in the southern coastal areas. I have used chicken, but this recipe can also be made using fish or vegetables. It is best served with rice.
In a large sauté pan, heat the oil over medium heat. Add the whole masala ingredients and cook until the spices release their fragrance, 30 to 45 seconds. Add the ginger and garlic and fry until golden brown, 2 to 3 minutes. Add the onions and 2 teaspoons of salt, and cook, stirring, until the onions turn golden brown, 4 to 5 minutes.
Add the ground masala ingredients and stir for 30 seconds. Add 2 cups (480 ml) water, bring to a boil, then lower the heat to medium-low and simmer until the sauce thickens, 8 to 10 minutes.
Add the chicken, return the heat to medium, and simmer, stirring occasionally, until it is about three-quarters cooked, 10 to 15 minutes. Stir in the tomato paste, and simmer until the chicken has cooked completely, 8 to 10 minutes.
In a small bowl, whisk the yogurt thoroughly. Just before serving, gradually mix the yogurt into the curry, stirring slowly. Cook for an additional 5 minutes or so to heat through, without letting it come to a boil.Taste, add salt, if needed, and remove from the heat.
Sprinkle with the chopped cilantro, and serve.
Roni Mazumdar is a New York-based restaurateur. Growing up in Kolkata, India, food played a central role in his household. In 2011 he opened the Masalawala, which he runs with his father. Its success led Roni to open a second location in 2016, followed shortly by Rahi, a modern Indian restaurant named Zagat’s hottest new restaurant in 2017; and recently, Unico, a globally influenced fast-casual restaurant in Long Island City, named in NewYork Magazine’s “Best New Cheap Eats, 2017,” and Eater’s “Hottest Restaurants in Queens.” He has used his success to benefit his community, establishing a scholarship program in West Bengal, India, as well as working to empower victims of abuse and trafficking in New York, and staffing and training students from LaGuardia Community College’s Food Service Management Program.
I am, after all, a gemstone of red jasper from the Arabian Peninsula, something prized among your spiritualists as a healer and bringer of peace. I therefore made no complaint when someone carried me off to a workshop and into my mineral flesh carved a picture—quite a pretty one. I bore the intaglio image of a distinctive parrot perched on a leafy branch. Borrowing the Latin of theserviceman who later owned me, the winged creature is nowadays known as Psittacus torquatus, an alluring green squawker with a bright red neckband, a hooked beak and a long, plumed tail that curves jauntily upward. These exotic birds hailed from north India, but merchants hauled them west in fancy cages to eager buyers in the Levant and across the Mediterranean. One of them appears in a mosaic from the Pergamon acropolis in modern-day Turkey. Prized as companions, these parrots can be trained to chatter in many of your human languages. According to Pliny the Elder, patriotic Roman citizens taught them to screech “Ave Caesar,” but he added that these birds tended to fall forward onto their heavy beaks. For such creatures, Roman poets wrote elegies.
With such an image emblazoned across me, I guess it is no wonder that I can speak to you so well. My next adventure was to be trimmed around my edges, into an oval that measures about 14 millimeters wide. I was then set into a sturdy iron finger ring, where I became a personal signet. But about all who possessed me, I cannot tell. You see, a signet must pledge loyalty to its latest owner, forswearing all before. I still faithfully serve the Roman warrior who acquired me last, and none before him. He was a typical man of his times, muscled and mouthy. Against my nature, I occasionally had to punch those who angered him, leaving a little parakeet bruised into the offender’s jaw. Sometimes I was swung too slow, and it was my bearer who toppled, ironically, onto his own heavy beak.
At his bidding, I journeyed to lands far from Arabia and India. He served his master as I served mine. Roman soldiers lived most of their adult lives in the legions, taking up posts along the vast frontiers of their empire. Many of them wore rings like me, each set with a small but impressive treasure carved from jasper, cornelian, nicolo, amethyst, plasma or quartz. Every gemstone bore a specially chosen image. Some types you would naturally expect as adornments of fighting men: imperial eagles, heroes, horsemen, weaponry, and fierce deities such as Mars. Other stones betray their abiding concern for safety and prosperity with depictions of cornucopiae, money bags and deities of health and fortune. I suppose my parrot meant something personal to my ring bearer, perhaps an homage to a lost pet. Then, too, my owner may simply have liked the exotica of the East and the sense I conveyed of the wondrous world he watched over. To each his own.
Eventually, my bearer and I traveled about as far west as we could go, all the way to the frost-fringe of the known world, a region now called Wales. There he soldiered with me until the fateful day we parted company, the day my life went down the drain. I mean that literally, for I spent nearly 2,000 years clogging a drainpipe that emptied the baths of Rome’s Second Legion Augusta (ii Augusta) in the province of Britannia. Yes, I was lodged in that filthy prison by the swirling bathwater of thousands of soldiers and their dependents, the compatriots of my erstwhile ringbearer. I was hardly alone there, and I shared this unpleasant fate with many other inmates, including the soggy carcasses of frogs, rats, cows, sheep, pigs, fish, ducks, geese and other fowl things. Mostly there were table scraps dropped by bathers. I lay surrounded, too, by shattered glass, broken pots, nails, and a collection of human teeth. If you have ever felt revolted by the sight of a giant clog, imagine me, living in one, for centuries. I would have given the entire orbis terrarum to see the bright skies of Arabia again. It was all dark, damp and deeply depressing.
I know I should not blame the boys of ii Augusta for building the baths that became my prison; they meant well, all 5,000 of them and their families. The latter, of course, were something new by the time I reached Isca. Until the reign of Emperor Septimius Severus, Roman soldiers had to stay bachelors until their discharge after an enlistment of about 25 years. Once the Romans started building permanent garrisons like Isca, soldiers gradually became less mobile, making it possible to marry and more or less settle down. Legionary fortresses, like the three built in Britannia, slowly became cities as their bustling canabae (civilian suburbs) expanded around the original military camp. These areas included family housing, shops, taverns, temples, private clubs and so on.
Why enlist for such a long life in the legions? Well, besides a regular bath at the thermae, you got job training, medical care and money. I remember the smile on the face of my ringbearer, early in the third century ce when Severus’ son, Emperor Caracalla, announced a salary increase of about 50 percent. Not shabby at all, but then his smile dimmed with the news that Caracalla also debased the currency at the same time: Give a gift but take some back, I learned, was something of an imperial motto. The government was trying to stretch its silver while also keeping the legions happy. Times were tough with wars up north in Caledonia, now Scotland—where Severus died—and there were problems along the Danube frontier and big trouble brewing in Syria. Quite a few lads in the ii Augusta had to be temporarily redeployed to these hotspots. Their departures, called vexillationes, left the ranks awfully thin at Isca.
It was about this time that I slipped from my soldier’s hand and, worse, slid down the main drain beneath the baths. How sad I was to see those familiar surroundings gurgle out of sight above me! I remember fondly the palaestra, that colonnaded exercise yard and, in case of poor weather, the basilica, the vast indoor training facility; the natatio, or outdoor exercise pool, stretched alongside the baths holding 365,000 liters of water. Attached to the natatio used to be a beautiful nymphaeum, a fountain-house that cascaded a continuous supply of fresh, clean water into the pool below.
The baths themselves constituted a soaring edifice of brick and concrete faced with dressed stone. Tall glass windows towered overhead, framed by gaily painted walls beneath an amazing triple cross-vaulted ceiling accenting the thermae’s three main chambers. Mosaics decorated the waterproofed interior like an art gallery. Even though the Usk flowed nearby, bathers did not rely on river-water. Such a source could too easily be fouled, so spring-water was drawn down from the hills about eight kilometers away. That explains the coal-dust that afflicted me in the drainpipe, brought there as tiny traces from the coalfields located near the spring.
My memory, you see, is still keen, and at times it was all I had to keep my spirits up. So many times did I observe firsthand the rituals of my bearer and his countrymen bathing. After a bracing round of exercise, or simply to relax in the afternoon, they entered the baths and undressed in the heated apodyterium. There, bath attendants guarded (not always diligently, I heard) everybody’s clothes and other personal belongings. The first of three bathing rooms was the frigidarium because, obviously enough, it featured cold water.
The patron could take a dip in a cold plunge bath and perhaps oil down, scrape away dirt, dead skin and sweat along with a splash of the facility’s perfumed body oils. All of this slurry drained into the main pipe, either through subsidiary lines in the basins or through a large grate in the center of the room. Next, our bathers circulated into the tepidarium, which featured warm water and, finally, the caldarium, which was the hot room. The floors of these two chambers were raised on piers so that furnaces could deliver heat underneath them. This ingenious hypocaust created a steam system and fueled hot bathing pools. Hollow channels in the walls funneled this warmth upward, and in the bitter winters of Britannia, this felt like a miracle to the patrons. Thoroughly refreshed, the patrons wandered back through the building to the apodyterium to retrieve belongings, get dressed and leave.
Mind you, from what I observed, all of this activity at Isca sounded just as loud, and smelled just as strongly, as anything in the more famous imperial baths in Rome itself. If you haven’t had the pleasure, unroll a copy of Seneca’s epistles, and read for yourself. He describes the bellowing and grunting of the patrons, some of them wheezing while trying to lift weights, others crooning as if in love with their own voices, and arguments as hot as the caldarium when they came to discussing sports. You’re deafened by the slapping of expert hands during a massage. Oblivious blokes sing in the tubs or thrash around in the plunge baths, carelessly dousing water on everyone. Professional depilators make grown men cry as they pluck unwanted hairs from armpits and other places. Food vendors stroll the rooms, hawking sausages, cakes and other delights, some snacks, some whole repasts. Their aromas mingle with sweat and filth for a memorable experience. Imagine gym class, lunch and bathtime all rolled into one.
The by-products of this recreational activity usually got swept in my direction. Lead drainpipes linked together all the plunge-baths, tubs and pools of the entire complex, so whatever hit the floor or dropped into the basins would end up where I finally did. In the old days, that journey started in a brick-lined underground channel 60 centimeters wide and 70 centimeters high, sloped with a precise downward gradient. It ran below the building and, some 12 meters beyond the baths, made a sharp left turn in order to travel alongside, rather than beneath, the outdoor exercise pool. That abrupt bend was a mistake, for it disrupted the flow of water. Within a quarter-century the main drain became so congested that drastic measures had to be taken.
During the reign of Emperor Trajan in the second century ce, soldiers remodeled the thermae. They raised all its flooring, unroofed the drain and called on engineers and artifices plumbarii—you call them plumbers—to assess the problems. Their solution was to lay down over the debris a new base of stones and to heighten its walls—in essence building a larger drain on top of the older, clogged one. This new channel was 1.3 meters high, with gentler turns to improve the flow of water. For a while, it drained with the best of the empire’s conduits. Yet, a century later, there I got stuck, by then beyond the reach of even the finest artifex plumbarius in the land.
Like cellmates in the dark, those of us incarcerated in the clogged drainpipe shared miseries in whispers. Beneath me, in the older layer of trash, we heard muffled cries from the detritus of Isca’s beginnings. Those old-timers formed a distinctive group washed down when the aboveground bathers consumed only light snacks, mostly mutton chops, chicken legs, shellfish, eggs and pork ribs. The later legions acquired a taste for heartier fare, and we saw how they filled the upper part of the drainage channel with bones from bigger cuts of meat. In my day, bathers devoured whole meals while relaxing. I’d like to believe that the occasional rodent and frog that came down to join us had been an intruder dispatched in the baths, not something on the menu. I was never quite sure.
I, of course, was never the only gemstone in the clog—hardly. Our roll call eventually included 87 others: 32 in the older channel below and 55 up in the newer drain with me. Every time one of my fellow gemstones took the plunge and joined the clog, we could hear its desperate owner wail after it, with one eye squinting through the drain cover at the hopeless situation down below. I doubt they regretted the cost of the stone as much as its sentimental value.
That was the dilemma, you see. Patrons never liked to leave their talismans in the apodyterium, where they might be stolen. Besides, the soldiers needed their rings to protect them from evil forces that allegedly grew more potent when men were without their armors, leathers and weapons. Of course, gamblers among the lot simply had to wear their good-luck charms. These concerns convinced most Roman bathers to accept the well-known risks of losing gemstones in the thermae. Set into iron rings using bitumen or resin, the steamy, wet conditions easily loosed stones from their mounts, sending them slipping off down the drain and into the sludge that was my millennial home.
You might say that it was an artifex plumbarius of sorts who finally rescued me
in 1979. By then, the plumber had a new title—archeologist. A non-Roman, his name was David Zienkiewicz. The ii Augusta, and with it the empire it protected, were long gone when I emerged from the drain. Liberated at last from my prison, I enjoyed—with no loss of irony—what I had craved for centuries: a nice long bath. I and the other leavings of the lads and ladies have since found a refreshing, dry, well-lit home in the National Roman Legion Museum at Caerleon. Of all the engraved gemstones to gaze upon in these fine new barracks, I am surely the most impressive. After all, you might expect to see gods and goddesses, horses and chariots, soldiers and weapons. But I am the epitome of the Pax Romana that allowed a stone from Arabia to capture a charming little chatterbox from India and bring it to Wales perched on a Roman’s finger. Think about that the next time you sink into a nice warm, civilized bath.
This photograph was both inside and outside of my grandmother’s sister-in-law’s adobe house near Ankara, Turkey. I was seeking scenes of people in liminal spaces such as windows and doors; in addition, a curtain—which both reveals and conceals—can be a metaphor for the difference between a perspective from the inside or from the outside of any situation.
The image used a pinhole camera that I made by hand from a paint can. Along its curve I made four holes and covered each one with electrical tape that worked like a shutter. Each hole exposed adifferent image, making a collage on one sheet of 8x10-inch film. To me, the ephemeral, dreamlike quality of pinhole images underscores the instability of meaning and individual perception. The contingency of the medium mirrors the contingency of understanding and life itself. Although unmanipulated, the image is disorienting because of its multiple exposures and nearly infinite depth of field, which makes it like looking at the surface of reality from another dimension. Meant to create a sense of displacement as well as engagement, it is a kind of paradox that reflects theprocess of disconnection and connection or, more simply, the process of understanding. I believe we can only truly understand others by being in their locations, in their worlds.
—Tuba Koymen
How these carpets arrived in Transylvania not long after they were woven, and how they remain there today, is a story of pluck and perseverance. Recognized by the world’s top connoisseurs and collectors, these carpets have only lately been given their due, and they have animated discussion about the interplay of endangered property, ethnic pride and the ownership of cultural patrimony.
Inhabited in antiquity by Dacians, the region had long been a prize contested by outsiders. Romans, Hungarians and Turks were the most powerful players, even if often from a remove. Romans left behind their Latin-based language, Hungarian kings sent their princes to rule in their stead, and the Turks collected tribute for protection and nearly complete internal autonomy. German Saxons from the southern Low Countries and Rhineland arrived in the 12th century at Hungarian invitation as a population buffer against inruding tribes from the east.
Instead of serving as Hungary’s buffer, however, Transylvania ended up a few centuries later serving as an Ottoman vassal. A 16th-century miniature captures the relationship as Hungarian King John ii Sigismund Zápolya kneels in fealty before Ottoman Sultan Suleiman (the Magnificent) in 1556. This would have been the heyday of Transylvanian Turkophilia, as reflected in the carpet collections of today. Although the demand for Ottoman carpets appears to have dampened by the early 18th century, when the Hapsburgs took control of the region and several Anatolian manufacturers closed, it endured through the early 19th century.
To its advantage, and despite its Carpathian fortifications, Transylvania sat astride a major east-west trade route, with many of its traders doing business with the region’s prosperous German Saxons in towns such as Sibiu, Sighişoara and Braşov. Luxury and other goods were exchanged under what was called “the right of staple,” which meant that passing merchants were obligated to offer all wares at fair prices in the town market.
Among the wares were carpets. A Braşov customs register from 1503 recorded that 500 carpets passed through the town in that year. While Western Europeans were accustomed to placing carpets under foot, Transylvanians often used their carpets to adorn walls—nowhere more than in churches, where they were also frequently placed on pew fronts. There was reason for this: The Reformation came to Transylvania in the late 16th century. Its reformers whitewashed or destroyed Catholic frescoes, some dating from the 14th century, while the new Lutheranism did away entirely with figurative images and icons inside its places of worship. In their places, for decoration, they hung Ottoman rugs, many of prayer niche or arabesque designs, including distinctive white-background designs known as Selendis, after the Anatolian village of their manufacture.
Indeed, as art historian Agnes Balint-Ziegler pointed out, Ottoman carpets were a means by which a church “was stripped of the everydayness and imbued with a sacred character.” In this essentially public setting, Ottoman carpets donated by artisan guilds became equivalent to corporate status symbols, and those given by patrician families became a similar “means of private posturing.”
English writer Emily Gerard, whose essay in Blackwood’s Magazine titled “Transylvanian Superstitions” inspired Bram Stoker’s 1897 Dracula, lived in Sibiu and Braşov in the early 1880s. Her book The Land beyond the Forest: Facts, Figures, and Fancies from Transylvania described Braşov’s mix of Germans, Romanians and Hungarians alongside “other figures red-fezzed, be-turbaned, or long-robed, which, giving the population a kaleidoscopic effect, makes us feel that we are next door to the East, and only a few steps removed from such things as camels, minarets, and harems.”
Bucharest’s National Museum captures well Romania’s multiethnic society at the time. There hang portraits of men with such titles as serdarul, or cavalry officer, a word derived from Persian via the Ottoman language; negustorul, or merchant, the name taken from Latin; and voievodul, or prince, this one from Old Church Slavonic. (For each, the Romanian suffix –ul, denotes a definite article, just as the name Dracula, from drac, means the devil.)
“In the church itself,” Gerard observed further, “hang some of the most exquisite Turkish carpets I have ever seen—such tender idyllic blue-green tints, such gloomy passionate reds, such pensive amber shades, as to render distracted with envy any amateur of antique fabrics.” Unfortunately, Gerald continued, these masterpieces were not “purchaseable for even the untold sums of heavy gold.”
Awestruck by the value and beauty of the carpets, Gerard wrote, some foreigners coveted them, yet their longings were in vain, for they were not for sale. “There was ein verrückter Engländer (a mad Englishman) here some years ago,” a churchwarden informed Gerard, “who would have given any price for the pale-blue one up yonder, and he remained here a whole month merely to be able to see it every day; but he had to go away empty handed at last, for these carpets are the property of the church, and not even the bishop himself has power to dispose of them.”
Not until 1898 were the rugs catalogued, and Romania’s 50-year period of communism further isolated them from scholars and enthusiasts. Only recently has an Italy-based Romanian independent scholar named Stefano Ionescu taken on the task of cataloguing, protecting, replicating as necessary and generally defending the carpets as one of Transylvania’s most beautiful artistic treasures, one that should stay in its historic place.
Braşov’s Black Church, believed to be the largest church between Vienna and Istanbul, is so called because of a fire in 1689 that burned many of the carpets in the nave. Those held in the sacristy survived, and it still holds almost half of the carpets still in Transylvania. Only some can be easily seen: The more valuable ones, including those brought from the town’s other parishes of St. Bartolomeu and Blumena, as well as those from the nearby fortified village churches of Prejmer, Sânpetru, Râşnov and Hărman, are stored away. Many, however, still hang throughout the church, giving its interior the appearance of a tactile patchwork of red and yellow pile threads against the austerity of its flat, white walls.
Ionescu, along with a Lutheran church administrator named Frank Ziegler and a handful of pastors in nearby towns, work as the carpets’ foremost champions. Ionescu calls the survival of these carpets a “fascinating intercultural phenomenon” and attributes their number to more than mere trade—not just in carpets, but also tenting, blankets, towels and fine clothing. (Local Hungarian nobles and urban Saxons, with Greeks and Bulgarians, were among the first Europeans to adopt articles of Eastern dress.)
Ionescu largely credits the religious tolerance of Transylvanians to explain the presence of the rugs’ frequent Islamic symbolism in a Christian setting, noting also the practical role that carpets play in everyday life—as a kind of bridge walked across, whether from one side of the room to another or from one culture to another. German Saxons certainly saw them in almost entirely secular, commodified terms—as prestige items—as painter Robert Wellmann showed in “The Adornment of a Saxon Bride,” an early 20th-century painting that shows, draped on a table beside a young woman being dressed, a Selendi “bird” carpet.
Similarly, it was not uncommon for 19th- and 20th-century Romanian painters to feature Ottoman carpets in their interior scenes. Nicolae Grant, whose English father was a diplomat and rug merchant, studied under the famous French orientalist painter Jean-Léon Gérôme in Paris. Modernist Gheorghe Petraşcu painted Transylvanian rooms in the style of Henri Matisse’s Moroccan tableaux, strewn with patterned textiles and upholsteries.
Ziegler notes that for some time it was a Transylvanian tradition to honor visiting dignitaries with gifts of carpets from the municipal guilds. In the 17th century alone, an estimated 1,000 carpets were given away.
Among Ziegler’s favorites, is a Lotto—so called after Lorenzo Lotto, an Italian painter who favored this style in his paintings. “Red, with yellow branches, and a narrow border, it represents 100 percent our uninterrupted heritage here,” he says. “It was never bought or sold again once it was given to the church, possibly after a funeral when the casket of the donor’s relative rested on it at the altar, or maybe it had dressed the church for a wedding or baptism. In any case, it transmits the value of past generations to all of us living today.
“We are not as much interested in holding copies as we are in maintaining the originals. Each bit of missing pile or stain speaks of our story too,” Ziegler adds. Some carpets have donation inscriptions written on the borders in black ink, “so we know the names and dates of the carpet’s donor.” For example, an early-17th-century prayer rug given to the church in Sibiu is noted with the date 1720 and “D. Mays.” Still vividly hued, a late-17th-century double-niche carpet was given to the church in Ghimbav in 1706 by Hannes Merglers. And more.
Nineteenth-century English writer and poet Charles Boner traveled through the Carpathians and wrote of its various guildsmen—furriers, goldsmiths, cabinetmakers and others—sitting in St. Margaret’s Church in Mediaş, a two-and-a-half-hour drive from Braşov’s Black Church. There, he wrote, “oriental carpets hung upon a great number of the pews as a sort of arras,” and carpet fragments were used as seat covers and possibly wintertime lap rugs.
St. Margaret’s still holds the most exquisite of the collections, including four Holbeins and an Ottoman çintamani design marked by its tiger stripes: three dots and a squiggly line, lightheartedly translated into German as katzenpfoten (cat’s paw). The collection also comprises those with vogelkopf, a “bird-head” pattern, as the name implies. A replica carpet with an animal motif woven a few years ago in the Anatolian town of Konia, based on a 1930s photograph of a now-lost carpet, hangs next to a 16th-century Holbein fragment that first hung in a nearby church in Băgaciu; also there is a 17th-century, fully intact Lotto from Agârbiciu.
Such esteem goes a long way toward explaining why Teodor Tuduc, one of history’s greatest rug forgers (to the extent that carpet buyers often call any kind of fake “a Tuduc”), who worked in Braşov between the two world wars, chose to make and sell hundreds of fake Transylvanians before trying his hand at faking Persian, Caucasian and even Spanish carpets. As a result, there are still many unrecognized Tuducs in the market, and even some of those known for what they really are have become collector’s items in their own right.
According to Walter Denny, a professor of art history at the University of Massachusetts and a carpet consultant for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Tuduc’s fakes can tell us much about how the original carpets were valued and perceived at the time the forgeries were made. “He imposed a precision and symmetry on artistic traditions that today we know once valued more improvisation,” says Denny. Thus to an expert, Tuduc’s fakes are easy to spot precisely because they were too perfect in pattern. They “imposed an element of outline and linearity on traditions we now realize exploited color first and foremost.” In other words, he exaggerated the perfection of form and neglected to perfect his color palette.
An Ottoman fatwa dating from 1610 may help solve another mystery about Transylvanian carpets: Why are there among them so many “double-niche” carpets? These are carpets in the style of a traditional Islamic prayer rug, in which a pointed center field, designed after the Islamic mihrab that, in a mosque, points the direction of prayer. The double-niche carpets, however, show two points to the center field, as if the mihrab has two directions. This is no small question: According to a recent worldwide inventory, among 17th-century Ottoman carpets, 337 are double-niche designs, most in collections outside Turkey, and many in Transylvanian churches.
Ionescu believes there may be a connection between this and the 1610 edict by Ottoman Sultan Ahmad i that forbade the export of carpets with specifically religious patterns to Europe: By adding the mihrab’s mirror image on the opposite side, a carpet woven for export could not be considered—strictly speaking—a prayer rug.
At some point in Transylvania, one encounters Dracula. The northern town of Bistriţa figures in the first chapter of Bram Stoker’s novel. Protagonist Jonathan Harker heads there and, as he says in the novel’s opening, “The impression I had was that we were leaving the West and entering the East.” After spending a troubled night, “I did not sleep well though my bed was comfortable enough…. There was a dog howling all night under my window, which may have had something to do with it; or it may have been the paprika.”
It is odd indeed that Stoker, giving voice to Harker, should blame his insomnia on paprika. The Ottomans introduced the dried and powdered New World pepper spice to eastern Europe in the 16th century—just about the same time that the first Ottoman carpets arrived in Transylvania. From a purely culinary point of view, Harker might as easily have blamed other Romanian staple foods and beverages with names borrowed from the Turks—ciorbă, or soup; ceai, or tea; and covrig, a pretzel.
Bistriţa also provides its own tale, this a cautionary one on the nexus of community and patrimony, as told by Hans Dieter Krauss, the ebullient pastor of the town square’s grand gothic church. Pastor Krauss is trying hard to keep his flock intact despite its dwindling numbers in the latter years of the 20th century—first from the depredations of war, then communism and finally the call from the Federal Republic of Germany for ethnic Germans to return to the homeland. The 1910 census recorded 12,000 Germans in town, but that dropped to 5,000 in 1940, and by 1996 there were only 223 counted. (Since the fall of communism, some 1.5 million Germans have left Romania, leaving behind a national total of 36,000.)
Krauss, however, mourns more than the loss of community. In 1944, fearing the arrival of the Soviet Red Army, the town’s Saxons took 53 fine Ottoman carpets from the church for safekeeping in Germany, where they remain today in the Nuremberg Museum. Now he wants them back “because they are ours,” he says simply, “and they belong to their home parish.” He cites the principle of national patrimony as well as the basic property rights of Romania’s Lutheran Church and its Saxon culture.
Because Krauss stayed put when so many of his fellow ethnic Germans left, he feels a personal claim for their return. In the interim, Ionescu and others are arranging for authentic facsimiles to be made in the Sultanhanı weaving center and to donate to Bistriţa. Such work requires high-resolution photos and knot counts transferred to precise designs, and no fewer work hours as the originals. A red field-column carpet has already been donated to celebrate the church’s 500th anniversary.
Bruno Fröhlich is the senior pastor of the main German parish in Sighişoara, first recorded in 1298 as a Dominican church that later converted to Lutheranism. Among its 40 carpets is one with a donation inscription dated 1646. Pastor Fröhlich notes how in the 19th century the church took over from the guilds as the custodians of German patrimony, as industrialization displaced the highly skilled craft workers. As the laymen lost status, churchmen became the community’s symbolic representatives.
He muses about the carpets engaging in a kind of unspoken interfaith dialogue for the 21st century. “Romania is a meeting place of many faiths and ethnicities,” he says. “Go to Dobrogea [the Black Sea region], where prayer is called daily from minarets in Babadag, Constanţa, and Mangalia. And they are not just ethnic Turks and Tatars in mosques there. Many Arab students came to Romania during the Soviet period, and married and stayed on. Just as Braşov merchants controlled the Eastern trade routes, the physical distance—or should I say proximity?—has not changed in today’s times.”
Despite the ethical and moral rights of custodianship, others question the degree to which small churches are able to care properly for carpets that now carry so much value. Light and heat are damaging; there is a risk of theft. The fortified church of Biertan, a unesco World Heritage Site near Mediaş built high on a crag and for three centuries the bishop’s seat, has two Selendi white field carpets. Five years ago in a London auction, a similar carpet sold for over a third of a million dollars, despite a condition report indicating reweaves, repairs, repiling and uneven overall wear—nothing like the fine state of those in Biertan. Carpet thieves are not necessarily deterred by having to climb a crag.
In Sibiu, the Brukenthal National Museum displays carpets that have helped make Transylvania’s Ottoman legacy most famous. Ionescu lauds an early-17th-century prayer carpet there as the best-known example in the world: Its lobed mihrab and star-and-cartouche border, with a lamp motif in the spandrels, is modeled, he says, on the stained-glass design in Sinan the architect’s great 16th-century Mosque of Suleiman, a conclusion Sinan scholar Gülru Necipoğlu-Kafardar called “fascinating.”
Other pieces in the Brukenthal collection help close this story’s circle. A painting of St. Jerome by Lorenzo Lotto, whose painting of another saint, “The Alms of St. Anthony,” in Venice, gave his name to the most recognized design motif in all Anatolian carpets, hangs not far from a Lotto carpet originally from a nearby church. Just across the floor from this is a painting by the Romanian Theodore Aman, also born nearby, of an Orientalist room strewn with Ottoman rugs. Might his models have been some of the carpets now in the museum, once displayed in churches, one of them, perhaps, that very same Lotto?
Earlier, on the opposite, eastern side of Jerusalem, I spent most of a day with the serene crunch of my own bootsteps on a dry trail that echoed down through the canyon of Wadi Qelt. Velvet heat rose in waves. At the end, the palm trees of Jericho appeared through salty lashes like beach umbrellas, stuck into liquid heat-haze on the floor of the desert in the distance below.
“Walking like this makes a new connection to Palestine. Your belonging becomes less poetic and more concrete,” says Rosann, a local college graduate.
Palestinians have always walked the land. But now walking is changing how many Palestinians feel about the land.
“The previous generation—I’m talking about the 1930s and 1940s—they were out there walking, especially Wadi Qelt in spring, when everywhere is filled with flowers,” says Ali Qleibo, professor of anthropology at Jerusalem’s Al-Quds University. “We see them in old pictures. This is part of the foundation of the Palestinian identity.”
But even earlier, when walking was a necessity for the lack of transport (other than four-legged varieties), Palestine still had a tradition of walking for pleasure. Qleibo mentions local writer Raja Shehadeh, who describes the concept of sarha in his 2007 book, Palestinian Walks:
It was mainly young men who went on these expeditions. They would take a few provisions and go to the open hills, disappear for the whole day, sometimes for weeks and months. They often didn’t have a particular destination. To go on a sarha was to roam freely, at will, without restraint.
The idea of walking for pleasure survived war and social dislocation. Shehadeh himself led walks in the hills around his home city of Ramallah in the 1980s and 1990s. But since the intensification of Israeli occupation two decades ago, checkpoints, road closures and other impediments have made it difficult for Palestinians to move around the West Bank.
Horizons shrank, says tourism entrepreneur George Rishmawi. Many people live their lives in and around their home neighborhoods. Walking in the countryside faded from view.
“There are generations that don’t know Palestine,” he says.
Beside the physical blocks, there’s also a mental one. Arabic has no word for “hiking.” Different dialects substitute their own circumlocutions, but Palestinian Arabic relies on sarha, which connotes a less purposeful kind of wandering, or shattha, which means an enjoyable outing, such as a picnic. Neither really fits, and an idea without a name is always hard to grasp.
Rishmawi was involved in the first of Palestine’s initiatives to reintroduce long-distance walking for pleasure. In the late 1990s, as part of the un-backed “Bethlehem 2000,” the Palestinian government sponsored the creation of the Nativity Trail. Developed by tour operators Alternative Tourism Group and Siraj Center, this trail forms a 160-kilometer walking route from Nazareth south to Bethlehem that roughly follows the journey taken by expectant parents Mary and Joseph before Jesus’s birth.
Rishmawi remembers the first thru-hike, in December 1999: “We arrived to Manger Square in Bethlehem with three camels, a donkey and a lady on the donkey who was pregnant [representing Mary, soon-to-be mother of Jesus].”
At that time Palestinian walkers didn’t really feature in the equation.
“The idea was to attract foreign tourists,” says tour operator and walking guide Mark Khano. At Khano’s invitation in 2000, two British explorers, Tony Howard and Di Taylor, walked the Nativity Trail and published a pioneering English-language guidebook.
“Palestine wanted products, and the Nativity Trail was one of the first ideas linked to mass-market tourism,” says Raed Saadeh, a leader in sustainable tourism development.
“This sort of ‘alternative pilgrimage’ attracted a lot of visitors who felt a link to Palestine. But tourism is a platform for identity. What we’d like to see is a trend toward connecting to the local community, rather than just a trend to walk.”
A sunny fall morning in Bethlehem sees municipal workers clearing leaves in Manger Square, the main public space. On the edge of a small group of fit-looking Europeans and Americans kitted out for hiking, two middle-aged Palestinian men are getting acquainted. Silver-stubbled Yusuf Salah, with a few belongings clutched in a plastic bag, says he’s done a bit of walking before, but never this route.
His new-found trail buddy, Hani Abu Taih, smiling under a straw hat, concurs.
“This will be my first time walking long-distance in the countryside,” Abu Taih says. “Twenty years I’ve been walking—one or two hours every morning, but just around my village near Nazareth, and always alone. I want to try walking with a group.”
Slightly removed by language and appearance from their fellow hikers—some of whom are tourists, some resident expatriates—the two pals psych themselves up for the day ahead walking the Masar Ibrahim, now the best known of Palestine’s long-distance hiking trails.
Masar is the Arabic word for path, and Ibrahim is Arabic for Abraham, the founder of Judaism, Christianity and Islam: The name translates into English as Abraham’s Path.
Unlike the region’s numerous and ancient pilgrimage routes, the Abraham Path is a modern creation, devised in 2006 by a group from Harvard Law School in the us headed by William Ury, a specialist in negotiation strategy. Ury’s idea was to help fuel cross-cultural understanding among the peoples of the Middle East—and bring transformational socio-economic benefits—through the power of the simple act of walking. As he puts it, walking creates space for people to envision fresh solutions to long-standing challenges.
Abraham is said to have walked with his family all across the Middle East from Ur, his place of birth (often identified with Ur in Iraq, but also linked with Urfa in southern Turkey), through Syria and Jordan to Palestine, where his tomb is honored today at a mosque in the city of Hebron. Further traditions place Abraham—known as al-Khalil (the Friend), for his embodiment of loyalty and hospitality—in Egypt and Saudi Arabia.
There is no documented historical evidence for Abraham’s existence 4,000 years ago, or for the routes he might have followed. No pre-existing path links these places. All we have are stories. After listening to local people, however, researchers with Ury’s nonprofit Abraham Path Initiative (api) were able to begin mapping a constellation of traditions, folk memories, tales and legends that suffuse the multiethnic cultures of the Middle East. A trending line began to emerge, connoting linkages in a shared Abrahamic heritage. From that a physical walking route could be plotted.
For most of the last decade, api has painstakingly built local capacity along sections of that route through a loosely affiliated network of trekking scouts, community-outreach volunteers and partner organizations on the ground. Today, as api steps back from trail development toward a quieter role in funding, ownership of the route’s active sections has passed fully to local partners.
In Jordan, for example, guides, tourism professionals and community activists built on the Abraham Path’s early growth in one remote highland region to develop a full-blown national hiking project. The result was the Jordan Trail, launched in 2017 as 36 day-hikes that link together to form a six-week, 650-kilometer trekking route from one end of the country to the other.
Elsewhere, southern Turkey had 170 kilometers of Abraham Path trail open by 2012, though war in Syria cut further progress short. Specialists are currently working with api to explore trail development in Saudi Arabia. In Egypt, three Bedouin tribes, backed by ngos and local volunteers, in 2015 launched the 250-kilometer Sinai Trail, which links the Red Sea coast with the summit of Egypt’s highest peak, Mt. Katherina.
Support is shared: Partners of the Sinai Trail, beside the Jordan Trail Association, include Masar Ibrahim al Khalil, the Palestinian ngo that has developed api’s route in the West Bank.
That route begins at Rummana, at the northernmost limit of the West Bank near Jenin. It winds south, through the cities of Nablus, Jericho and Bethlehem, to end among the villages south of Hebron: 330 kilometers in total, divided into 21 day-hike stages. It deliberately zigzags, binding otherwise marginalized rural communities into what has become a national trail.
“Masar Ibrahim bypassed the old trails,” says Raed Saadeh. “It is a community endeavor, built in such a way as to induce community empowerment.”
It has also drawn substantial international funding: In 2014 the World Bank gave the project $2.3 million over four years. The French agency for international development, afd, provided €1.4 million ($1.7m) in 2016, and French ngos and private-sector bodies continue further support.
This has paid for trail development, waymarking, training for guides, ancillary support along the trail such as homestays and guest houses, a staff of 10 at offices near Bethlehem, and a subsidized public program of weekly walks. High-quality digital cartography by us trail developers David Landis and Anna Dintaman forms the basis of a detailed website. Local and online marketing gets the word out.
Such open access to the trail, however, means assessing success is difficult. Rishmawi, who serves as executive director of the Masar Ibrahim ngo, explains that by using data from partners, guides and guest-house owners, he can estimate that last year, 6,000 people walked on the path. Between a half and three-quarters of them were Palestinian—some individuals, but mainly organized groups that included students and youth associations.
Rishmawi speaks passionately about the value of creating new reasons for Palestinians to visit the countryside.
“We have such a beautiful country, but it’s not been utilized before for this kind of [local] tourism. This is an opportunity for people to reconcile their heritage,” he says.
One of Masar Ibrahim’s founding partners is the Rozana Association, set up to help overcome rural problems of economic disadvantage and loss of community. Headquartered in the pastoral university town of Birzeit, a tight tangle of cobbled lanes in the hills north of Ramallah, Rozana has facilitated architectural restoration in Birzeit itself, including converting an Ottoman mansion into a science center that draws school groups and establishing an annual cultural festival that now brings 35,000 visitors to this town of around 7,000 residents.
“The question was, how to strengthen this attractiveness? You need to have tourism demand, especially local,” says Saadeh, founder of Rozana.
“So, in 2008 we created the Sufi Trails. This is different from Masar Ibrahim, which is a long trail that zigzags from village to village. The Sufi Trails starts with a hub, then creates a cluster of routes to villages.”
The resulting web of generally unmarked footpaths connect to centuries-old monuments to Muslim mystics, known as Sufis. Many such sites dot the hills of the northern West Bank, and today they often stand half-forgotten.
“Walking helps protect this type of heritage,” Saadeh says, explaining that Rozana sources funding both for preservation of the buildings and conversion of the surrounding areas into small community parks. “They’re spiritual, sentimental places that tell stories. They become an attraction,” he says.
Rozana’s principle of clustering also avoids imposing a new system of external management by combining the abilities of pre-existing community organizations. In the highland village of Deir Ghassaneh, one of Rozana’s rural hubs, the head of the local women’s association, Insaf Shuoibi, speaks of the economic benefits that have accrued by joining forces with a neighboring village to work on their local trails.
“Five years ago it was mostly foreigners visiting, but now the word is spreading, so we have more Palestinians,” she says.
Another of Masar Ibrahim’s founding partners is nonprofit tour operator Siraj Center. For Siraj’s ebullient director Michel Awad, the last few years have seen an astonishing shift.
“People never thought of walking as a journey. It was just a way to get from point A to point B,” he says.
“Now they’re discovering hiking for pleasure. They’re beginning to understand the beauty of this land.”
Ramallah-based mountain guide Wael Haj runs Palterhal, a firm offering rural hikes and eco-retreats for companies.
“Managers used to organize corporate retreats indoors, in hotels, but now they’re asking us to take their staff out to small villages and into nature,” Haj says. “This makes a big change in how Palestinians see their own country.”
After chatting in Bethlehem’s morning sunshine, the hikers in the Masar Ibrahim group that includes Yusuf Salah and Hani Abu Taih take their first steps, down the steep streets leading out of Manger Square. Their route soon leaves the city behind, passing a spring in the hills before winding through a fertile valley to end almost five hours later in the village of Tuqu’.
There, householder and construction worker Salim Saba greets the walkers, bustling them through the narrow hallway of his house and out to a shaded rear balcony where glasses of cold juice and sweet tea await.
“The walk was better than I was expecting,” grins Abu Taih, looking across to the 2,000-year-old hilltop fortress Herodium just beyond Tuqu’.
“The guide, the company, the landscapes—what a great opportunity to share this path.”
As Saba shows the group into his dining room for a home-cooked lunch of chicken, rice and salad, he tells me: “I believe in this 100 percent. For economic reasons, it helps support my family, but I’m really enjoying it, meeting all these people.”
He shows me the guest rooms he has fitted out with help from the Masar Ibrahim ngo, which split its cost with him. The ngo will retain ownership for five years, after which the beds (and their neatly branded covers) become his. Then he takes me through to the half-built extra rooms he is adding to the house to accommodate the increasing numbers of walkers passing through.
The group’s Palestinian guide is George Giacaman. Wiry, pencil-thin in Lycra, he explains that he just came from leading a group of 35 Norwegians on an 11-day Nativity Trail trek, and that he is proud to be involved.
“The Masar Ibrahim is especially helping women in the villages, who work at home. They make food for people walking through, or products to sell,” he says.
This is a familiar model for sustainable development: Relatively small amounts of external funding spur creative input from local minds building trust and skills that help open new markets, bringing new consumers into direct contact with rural suppliers.
Dutch economist Stefan Szepesi was another of those who grasped the potential early on. He arrived in Palestine in 2006 to work on governmental projects with the European Union. But he had itchy feet.
“I first started walking out of curiosity. What was Palestine like beyond the confined view of a diplomatic car?” he writes.
Eventually, the walking took over. Szepesi switched jobs to become executive director of api to work with the Masar Ibrahim ngo and others. He also published a thick, full-color guidebook of walks around the West Bank.
But, as he readily acknowledges, English-language books have limited local readerships, and foreign tourism is simply not big enough in Palestine to deliver sustainable economic growth.
Enter social media: Over the past decade, it has brought walking into the Palestinian mainstream.
Outdoor enthusiasts have created dozens, maybe hundreds, of online and email groups where like-minded people can share information on routes and publicize excursions and weekend hikes.
Szepesi’s Facebook group “Walking Palestine” was one of the first, alongside others created by students in Ramallah, Nablus, and elsewhere. Szepesi has stepped back from active involvement, he says, but “Walking Palestine” continues with almost 5,000 members.
“Walking didn’t happen until it became formalized, thanks partly to the work of Stefan Szepesi,” says Ihab Jabari, director of the Holy Land Incoming Tour Operators’ Association.
“I’ve just done Wadi Qelt with my kids. This is so new for us as families. It gives you a sense of belonging again.”
Seeing shared images posted by local walkers out in the countryside, and hearing their first-hand accounts, has brought a fresh sense of scale, immediacy and possibility, says Walking Palestine’s current moderator, Simon Jaser.
“It’s the 35-to-55 demographic who are really into walking. These are professional people,” he says.
Sharing tea at one of Ramallah’s busy sidewalk cafés, Jaser tells me he has covered most of the West Bank on foot.
“First, I study Google Earth to find possible trails. Then I try to do experimental hikes on my own before I bring people out. Every Sunday I take a taxi somewhere and walk into the hills.”
Besides working part-time as a consular official, Jaser is a successful independent guide who also channels some of his profits back into rural communities; he also offers his services for free. Each weekend he advertises a walk via Walking Palestine, which can draw as many as 120 people.
One of his regulars is Issa Abu Dayeh, 74.
“Last Friday we were around 100 people, ladies and young men—I’m the only old one!” says Abu Dayeh.
“I love it: the wilderness, the trees, open nature. We pay very little, only around $10 to cover the bus.”
Jaser is clear about his motivation.
“I want Palestinians to walk throughout the land, and not just a kilometer or two outside their city,” he says.
“That’s my priority—to show people the vast open spaces.”
A striated wilderness of canyons and scree slopes reaches out near Rashayida village, southeast of Bethlehem. This patch of highland desert—a rarity for Palestine—leads out to cliffs that gaze east directly into a breathtaking sunrise over the Dead Sea. It’s gaining renown as a weekend getaway.
“Lots of people go onto my Facebook page asking about these landscapes. ‘Can we really go there?’ ‘Do we need a permit?’ ‘Is it safe?’ These are Palestinians from Hebron or Nablus: They have no idea such places even exist in Palestine,” says Farhan Ali Rashaydeh, a guide from the local Bedouin community.
“It’s only in the last couple of years that Palestinians have started coming. Now, month by month, you can count more and more of them. They are amazed by it all. ‘Oh wow, this is our country, this is a magic place.’ I see the relationship between these people and the land deepen while they’re here.”
The impact of online networking is being felt everywhere.
In Battir, Sabrina Zaben was out for a country walk with her partner, Ahmed Abu Haniya, and two children. “When I have a chance, I like to walk here. It’s easier than before, by following social media. There are lots of hiking groups online,” she explains.
“Social media lets people come together and plan something. It’s becoming much simpler,” says hiker Joudeh Abu Saad, resting outside Bethlehem with friends after a day’s walk.
Nearby, one of his companions pipes up: “We’re creating our own story. Facebook is the only way I could have found my way here.”
For tour operator Mark Khano, the last few years have seen a happy coming-together of influences.
“Masar Ibrahim began focused on foreign tourism, but inadvertently also started the ball rolling domestically,” he says. “Technology has lowered the barrier to entry for new players, creating new ways of mobilizing groups.”
For Ghaida Rahil, program manager at Masar Ibrahim, networking on Facebook led her to set up the Palestinian Women Hikers Club, a group of around 30 women who meet once a month to spend a day on the trail.
“We need to teach women to take care of themselves. Women don’t have the same chances as men to go outside, but why should we only see the people around us? No, we should go out and experience other places and other people,” she says.
This all makes the trails more than simple footpaths. The Masar Ibrahim, the Nativity Trail, the Sufi Trails and the informal path networks in Battir and elsewhere all exemplify a bottom-up, community-led model of both cultural and economic inclusivity. They become platforms for a form of national reconciliation, linking far-flung communities together in a shared experience of outdoors.
That sharing extends to the most deprived. On the edge of Jericho, the Masar Ibrahim diverts into Aqbat Jaber refugee camp, a low-income neighborhood where in 2014 the local women’s association converted a traditional mud-built kindergarten into a guest house.
“It was an idea from Masar Ibrahim, to let people passing through from Wadi Qelt stay here,” says association director Jamila Abul-Assal.
The ngo split conversion costs with the community, which now has a marketable resource: The Mud House is the only lodging of its type in Palestine, and it draws outsiders looking for experiences they can’t get anywhere else.
“We know more people, we have more relationships, life has changed a lot. Aqbat Jaber is now on a par with other communities because of Masar Ibrahim,” says Abul-Assal.
It’s a similar story at Rashayida, where Bedouin patriarch Mohammed Ali Rashaydeh, known as Abu Ismail, has carved out a business catering to walkers and weekenders seeking desert solitude.
“First, I made just one communal tent here, in a quiet place outside the village. But nobody knew about it. I had to go to Bethlehem to tell tour guides myself. By chance, I met George Rishmawi and brought him here.”
That meeting led to an offer of partnership with Masar Ibrahim. Under the ngo’s shared costs approach, Abu Ismail built a sleeping block and toilets, and he brought in beds and bedding. Now his tent is an overnight stop on the national trail.
“Life feels very different now,” he says with a hawk’s frown, and eyes to match.
“Even Palestinians are coming to experience nature and our Bedouin culture. Everyone working here is making money from tourism. I’m supporting my community. I’m very proud.”
After lunch in Tuqu’, Yusuf Salah returns home to Bethlehem, but Hani Abu Taih presses on, crossing the desert with Giacaman, his guide, and the group for a night of campfire conversation—and that amazing Dead Sea sunrise—with Abu Ismail.
As we stand by the tent flap after breakfast slurping a glass of hot, sweet tea, I ask Giacaman if he ever gets tired of walking.
“Never,” he says. “We are pioneers. We are opening up Palestine for Palestinian people.”
With a shout, he gathers his group, shoulders his pack, and hits the trail, destination Hebron, two days away.