Travels Routes

To visit Jerusalem is to visit one of the world's great cities, a golden repository of 3,000 years of history, a city established by King David. With its ancient lanes and markets and its modern areas, Jerusalem is an exhilarating mixture of sights, sounds and cultures. There is no other city like it.

Jerusalem stands on the crest of rolling hills 835 metres above sea level. People talk of going ``up'' to Jerusalem from every other part of the country, in both a spiritual and physical sense. This is a city where crenellated 16th-century walls enclose 200 acres of tightly packed history and archaeology. Here a colourful population of Jews, Moslems, and Christians tread the same paths that countless pilgrims have walked.

Yet Jerusalem is far from being simply a memorial to the past. Outside the walls of the old town lies a modern, vital new city, where industry, luxury hotels, a thriving academic and medical community, the arts, parks and up-to-date residential sections - even discos - provide an everyday reality for more than 557,000 people.

On Fridays, Franciscan friars in mediaeval robes lead pilgrims along the Via Dolorosa, the Way of the Cross, as they have been doing for 600 years. Narrow streets house churches and shrines of Armenian, Coptic, Syrian, and Ethiopian Christians.

At the magnificent grey-domed El-Aksa Mosque on the Temple Mount, Moslem worshippers touch their heads to the ground in devotion, after the voice of the muezzin has called them to prayer. In contrast, Orthodox Jews, in the black garb worn by 18th-century Polish noblemen, and women modestly dressed in stockings and long sleeves even on the hottest days, pray at the Western Wall and hurry along the streets in areas that resemble the intimate European ghettos of their ancestors.

And in the new city, secular residents and visitors survey the passing parade from cosmopolitan outdoor cafes on Ben-Yehuda Street, and spend the night hours in discos and pubs.