Abroad in the Orient: Caesaria, Many Cities

A Note on the Touchy Stuff

The tour of Caesarea inadvertently touched on the Arab Israeli Conflict. In fact--most things in Israel do. This is because the conflict, which began in 1918, remains unsolved and every developing nation in the region has been shaped by it. Whether it's Caesarea's abandoned mosque or the Arabs in Haifa whose parents and grandparents were begged by Haganah's Carmeli Brigade to stay after the city was taken; everything is linked to it.

This blog isn't really the best forum for discussing the Arab-Israeli Conflict in the depth it deserves nor am I the most qualified person to discuss it. For a well written, peer reviewed, and highly acclaimed neutral scholarly work which presents a thorough overview of the conflict; I recommend Ian J. Bickerton and Carla L. Klausner's A History of the Arab-Israeli Conflict.

However, the 19th century buildings clustered amid the Roman ruins deserve mention. I will not fail to mention what I see or have seen which starkly reflects the conflict. I'll present in as neutral a fashion as I can, and you may draw your own conclusions--though I suggest reading, skimming, or acquiring a copy of the aforementioned book.

***

Caesarea is one of Israel's lesser known cities for good reason. The city has been sporadically populated and decimated throughout it's history. It was created during the reign of the infamous Herod the Great(first of his name, of House Targaryen...just kidding). Herod is most widely known through his depiction in the New Testament. Herod was a Jewish king who reigned in the last few decades of Judea's sovereignty before the nation was destroyed by Rome. At this time however, Judea is already a tributary of the Empire.

Best reconstruction of Herodian Caesarea I
could find. Courtesy of The Best in Heritage.

In 22 BCE, as part of a plan to increase Judea's status in the Empire, Herod began to build a new city with a deep sea harbor. He named it Caesarea in honor of Rome's rulers, and patterned it off of a typical Roman city. He began by building an artificial breakwater by using sunken pylons filled with a new type of concrete that hardened once it was submerged. He covered the pylons with earth and raised his fortified harbor atop them. Next he constructed a mammoth lighthouse and a large temple at the harbor's entrance...dedicated to the goddess Roma and the late Emperor Caesar Augustus. (The temple is the large building just to the left of the lighthouse.) He also erected a large palace for himself just behind the harbor (in the very distance at the top of the picture behind the lighthouse) which jutted out into the sea. Additionally he built an arena for hosting gladiatorial games, a theater, and a hippodrome for chariot racing. (The hippodrome sits along the shore between the lighthouse and Herod's palace; the rest of the aforementioned buildings are not distinct in the picture.)

The city remained a mercantile hub throughout the Byzantine period, though its' population began to dwindle in part due to ruinous earthquakes. During the Byzantine period the Herodian temple was converted into a church. After the city was conquered by expanding Arab empires the church was subsequently converted to a mosque.

When the Crusaders invaded, the entire population either was slaughtered or fled and the new Crusader city established there became an important hub of trade and a destination for pilgrims entering the Holy Land. The temple-turned-church-turned-mosque was torn down and a new Romanesque church built upon its' foundations. The city was heavily fortified to resist assault; but when the assault came during the fall of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem Caesarea was unable to withstand it. The entire city was torn down and the population was either slaughtered or fled.

From this point the town ceased to be any more than a sleepy little fishing village. In the 1880's under the Ottoman Empire it was repopulated by Bosnian Muslims fleeing turmoil in their homeland. The town flourished.

Under the British Mandate of Palestine a tragic turn of events led to the town's depopulation. In late 1947 a civil war broke out in British Mandate between Jewish and Arab military organizations. The local leader of the village approached the Jewish Agency (acting government for the Jewish population of the British Mandate)and singed a non aggression pact. Caesarea would, under this agreement, accept the sovereignty of whichever side controlled the territory and would not aid either side.

On January 31st of 1948 a Jewish terrorist organization called Lehi (לח"י) blew up a bus outside of Caesarea which caused much of the population to flee for fear of their lives. In April 1948 Lehi with the aid of a right wing militia called Irgun (אִרְגּוּן)also carried out a vicious raid and massacre in a small Arab village called Dier Yassin which had signed a similar non-aggression pact with the Jewish Agency.(Both Lehi and Irgun were acting independently of the Jewish Agency.) Fearing for their lives, more of Caesarea's population fled in panic. When regular Jewish forces arrived in February 1948 the town was all but deserted. The remaining twenty inhabitants were forcefully removed and most of the houses and buildings demolished to prevent the town from becoming an enemy base of operations.

***

Oblivious to all of this, I arrived on the tour with my International School classmates at Caesarea. The first thing that I noticed was that on the sings, Caesarea's Arabic name was spelled using a sound distinct to Arabic, the Qaf ق (pronounced like a 'Q' in the back of your throat).

Road sign--not the one I saw, but this
is what they look like. The one for
Caesarea featured the Arabic nameقيسارية‎ ,
the Kauf is highlighted in red.

This suggests that the name (which King Herod chose from Latin) had been integrated into the Arabic a long time ago.

I knew relatively little about Caesarea, but this seemed interesting. Next I noticed how spread out all the buildings were and the size of the houses. Most of the older Israeli cities tend to be built so closely together that there isn't hardly any green space. Owning a house in any of these is extremely uncommon if not outright unheard

Jaffa Street, Haifa.
Courtesy of WikiCommons.

of, simply because there isn't any room to build them. Most people live in condominiums. In Caesarea--there were villas! And a golf course. The fact that there was room to build all this meant that most of the town was new. Not all of it was, however.

A Caesarea villa.
Courtesy of
C&M Real Estate.

Many of the ones found near the shore were older, and looked not unlike the Jerusalem stone sort of architecture from the late 19th and early 20th centuries which we saw elsewhere in Israel. Like the apartments you see above in the picture of Jaffa Street. The older buildings in Caesarea had been re-purposed as gift shops and restaurants to serve the tourists coming to see the Herodian Ruins. One building which stood out, though not because of its' size--but because of a large tower attached to it. The tower was too small to have served as any kind of battlement. It looked like a minaret, and after asking the tour guide I discovered that's what it was.

Minaret at Caesarea

Or had been rather, the building was now a restaurant.

Seeing this confirmed any suspicions I had, I asked the tour guide about it. He said that the Muslim population had been primarily Bosian aristocracy who had fled Bosnia during the troubles in the 19th Century. They had re-established in Caesarea, but had "left in 1948 because they didn't want to live as a Muslim minority in a Jewish state. It's terrible what they did to the old mosque though...it's a restaurant now and they serve alcohol there."

I didn't want to press the tour guide any more about the specifics of what had taken place here. In Israel, as in many parts of the world, politics is volatile. And in Israel (as in many parts of the world) historical memory is political. Each side has their own recorded history, and in many cases there were no objective sources to record what happened. But even if there were it doesn't really matter. Because societal memory cannot be commanded by the academics in their ivory towers who study the objective history and arbitrate just from unjust, truth falsehood. What people believe in Israel, as we all do in all parts of the world, is the version of history which appeals to us.

Maybe one day, as Sir Terry Pratchet once wrote, "the truth will set us free" and we can learn to look past mutual wrongs and build anew. But the day in Caesarea wasn't that day, and I certainly wasn't going to press our tour guide for more details. So I constructed my own hypothesis based on what I'd seen and knew.

I knew that many villages had become completely depopulated after Dier Yassin as refugees fled what they thought was an impending slaughter. Israeli Haganah (regular military) forces had arrived to find them completely empty.

Ghosts of the past,
courtesy of Ghost in the Machine.

I convinced myself that this is what had happened in Caesarea, or most likely at any rate. It gave me the stupefying chill that I get when I find myself standing in a place haunted by ghosts of the past. I knew something had happened and hoped I wasn't standing on the spot of a forced depopulation.

Wall and gatehouse

Though those ghosts were the first that day, they were far from the last. The tour began by entering the gatehouse of a very mundane looking wall. It was a proper city wall--built to withstand assault. That much was certain, though not much of the wall itself was left standing. It was older than the 19th century Jerusalem stone...with a cursory glance I guessed early Ottoman Era and snapped a picture of a Herodian capital lying by the entrance. Then we entered the gatehouse.

Herodian capital

At first it began as an immense feeling of deja vu. I had seen this, or something very much like it somewhere else before...Herodian? No, the vaulting wasn't Roman. Ottoman? No, the vaults definitely weren't Ottoman. They looked European...

Gatehouse

The immense realization struck me with the force of a mace. I'd seen pictures of chambers like this a thousand times. I was standing inside the remains of the Crusader era fortification.

Suddenly everything I'd read became real. The window, tapering to let light in but narrow enough to keep arrows out. Robust walls a foot thick to resist siege engines. A sharp corner to reach the exit on the right--if the door is breached make the invaders turn a corner so you have time to close the tower's exit behind you and trap them on the inside. And a series of elegant vaults supporting the roof; I could almost hear the sounds of battle between Crusader and Saracen echoing through them...

Gatehouse Capital

But this was only the beginning. I had heard of Roman ruins and seen pictures. I imagined the ones in Caesarea looking like those advertised on the poster--forlorn aqueducts half buried in sand. A army of tumbled pillars on the seashore eroded by time. The tour guide told us that the hippodrome was 'well preserved' along with the amphitheater. I pictured the Colosseum in Rome with its' crumbling walls and collapsed floor. Which was when we turned the corner and entered the hippodrome. There we were standing before a phantom audience, beside an iron chariot sitting in its' starting gate, on the floor of an arena centuries old. In truth the bleachers and wall were only a frac-

Remains of a
fresco in the
arena.

The starting gates
were attached to
the pillars behind
the chariot.

tion of the original. It had been taller, with an elevated stand for the wealthy which had collapsed long ago. But on seeing the bleachers I knew what I had to do. (Yes Classicists, I know that this particular sign was reserved for gladiatorial competitions. But the hippodrome was briefly converted into an arena for such competitions when Caesarea's arena was closed for maintenance.) This is probably the most tourist like picture that I've taken so far--but I'm sure it won't the last. The feeling of sitting in the place of one of Caesarea's former residents and looking out on the hippodrome was incredible.

"Maximus the
merciful!"

Wall in the
hippodrome

We moved on to the remains of Herod's palace. Unfortunately, unlike the hippodrome, there wasn't much left to see besides the long forgotten remains of a columned central hallway. There was, our guide pointed out, a pool by the see which was thought to have been a freshwater pool for the king and his courtiers. However, recent finds he suggested that it was saltwater--same as the ocean. He was about to give us more information, when the tour was interrupted by a workman. He was speaking Hebrew but I understood what he was saying. We needed to leave because the park was being closed for restoration work. Our guide protested that he hadn't been told and asked for forty more minutes. He tried haggling the workman down to twenty, but the workman insisted. Fortunately by this time we'd seen the main sites--the hippodrome, the palace, etc. The arena was still being excavated. But what we didn't get to see was the amphitheater, which is so remarkably well preserved that the acoustics still work and it's used to host classical concerts. I took some pictures outside, longing to go in, to stand at the center and hear my voice echo in the same place as Roman dramatists. But it was time to go. As we left them all behind--Bosnians, Crusaders, Saracens, charioteers, and kings; I knew I would have to come back at least to see the amphitheater if not all of it again.