Talk:Church of the Holy Sepulchre

possible typo "Christian orthodoxs"
In the article it says Christian orthodoxs. Is that a typo or a way to spell the plural of the word orthodox?

Mount Moriah
This location is not on Mount Moriah, but on Zion and excluded Biblically from being the location. 2600:6C40:7E7F:F9E8:41B8:366E:1464:A94E (talk) 17:30, 21 July 2023 (UTC)

Royal Crusader tombs
hi. Please do reverse your latest edit. You are presenting opinions as facts.

Judging by the latest research on what happened to the tombs of the female royals at the Tomb of Mary, where the Greeks did precisely that what Burton says, that is: throw them out and destroy them, it seems at least plausible that the same could have happened at the Holy Sepulchre. As long as there's no proof, your guess is as good as mine, anyway. And as they're digging around that area right now, we might (might) have a positive answer quite soon about the presence of human remains deep below the floor. No clarity about what the Greeks did though. But think of the fact that the only remains of the tombs are in the Greek Patriarchate's museum. And Burton came just a few decades after the events. Would a jury indight and sentence based on this? I don't know. Would I start a new Crimean War because of it? I'll totally leave that to comrade Vladimir Vladimirovich. Cheers, Arminden (talk) 22:12, 23 August 2023 (UTC)

PS: The Greek Orthodox did what they considered to be their historic right, taking back for ortho-doxy what Crusaders and later schismatics had stolen. As they did with the Latin-inscribed silver star at the Grotto of the Nativity and wherever else it was "needed". PC is totally out of place here, those were not woke times. Arminden (talk) 22:19, 23 August 2023 (UTC)


 * I see no reason to rely on Burton's book (she was not an historian, she was extraordinarily biased in other ways, her book is not a reliable source for anything except gossip and hearsay). The citations also must have become confused at some point, because they also (here and in the Baldwin IV article, at least) pointed to a page in one of Denys Pringle's books, which says nothing about the Greeks. The only reliable source that was cited here is the Re'em/Ingrand-Varenne/Berkovich article. They mention the anti-Greek gossip spread by the Latins, but I don't think it's appropriate to say it is undoubtedly true. If the recent archaeological work uncovers anything, we could of course add it here. Adam Bishop (talk) 00:58, 24 August 2023 (UTC)
 * See conclusion based on recovered remains and the work by Jacoby in Re'em, Caine, and Tchekhanovets (2022), pp. 28-29. Hardly any doubt in their mind. So: please do reverse edit, or even much better: re-edit using this sources (Re'em, Jacoby). Sorry, but I cannot do that properly right now. N.b.: 19th c. bias by Westerners doesn't mean the Greeks didn't remove the tombs, just that the tone is emotional and the historic perspectives are skewed. Fact as opposed to style. Cheers, Arminden (talk) 08:59, 24 August 2023 (UTC)
 * Alright, I've made some edits that are more representative of what Re'em et al. say in the cited article. I'm not sure what you mean by "Re'em, Caine, and Tchekhanovets (2022)" - the link you gave is to the article that is already cited (Re'em, Ingrand-Varenne, Berkovich). Adam Bishop (talk) 17:21, 24 August 2023 (UTC)
 * Thank you.
 * I took the authors from the table of content, where the relevant pages, 28-29, would seem to correspond to the 1st article. But you're right. Arminden (talk) 05:50, 25 August 2023 (UTC)

Useful Holy Sepulchre pictures
Our colleague Magnolia677 has removed from "External links" a website, NOT introduced by me, with excellent photos due to the fact that the website is of a commercial nature. I have just written to her and intend to revert her edit - once. Here is what I wrote:

I just recently removed a homepage of an actress-turned-real estate vendor because it was pure advertisement with no information value to the actress's Wiki article. So no need to convince me about such cases. But here
 * 1) it's a website with EXCELLENT PICTURES nobody else has, some from the current excavations!, which together are of GREAT BENEFIT TO THE USER.
 * 2) I have no connection to the website.
 * 3) It's in Polish, I understood nothing of the text, DIDN'T EVEN REALISE THE PICS ARE FOR SALE! So zero commercial benefit if user not Polish-speaker.

(B.t.w.: there is no price, no $ or € symbol, no icon of a shopping cart, NOTHING to indicate they're trying to sell anything! So actually quite stupid/useless as a sales platform, if indeed it is one?, on the WWW!)

I have ABSOLUTELY no interest in edit-warring on this. I'm just firmly convinced that the pics are of great benefit for users & editors accessing from home, and I know a lot about the site and I've been editing a lot at this article. So pls, leave it in.

Thank you! Arminden (talk) 12:36, 27 September 2023 (UTC)

1009: wrong refs

 * "Christian Europe reacted with shock: it was a spur to expulsions of Jews and, later on, the Crusades. [Ref1: Bokenkotter, Thomas (2004). A Concise History of the Catholic Church, page 155. Ref2: MacCulloch, Diarmaid (2009). A History of Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years, page 1339.]"

Both refs don't seem useful. Bokenkotter p. 155 mentions neither Hakim & 1009, nor the expulsion of Jews; MacCulloch p. 1339 is hard to find (e-book; the indicated URL, a search result, leads to table of content page referring to smth else), if page number added directly to URL (PA1339, RA1339) it leads to much earlier events, plus: searches for Hakim or 1009 are leading nowhere, access date is missing... The edit isn't trustworthy!

In short: two correct statements, but as of now completely unsourced.

PS: We know about the Crusades. Re. Jews, see for instace Persecutions in France (987–1137), in Limoges etc. Arminden (talk) 21:17, 12 December 2023 (UTC)


 * Good catch. Is the text on the original diff any help? https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Church_of_the_Holy_Sepulchre&diff=prev&oldid=588107143 --Dweller (talk) Old fashioned is the new thing! 23:02, 12 December 2023 (UTC)


 * Of course, it's to the point & well sourced. Maybe too narrow (one very localised example), but w/o more research, that's what we have, and Wiki & decency rules oblige. Cheers, Arminden (talk) 00:34, 13 December 2023 (UTC)

Move "2018 tax/land affair"
I very much doubt it should be placed under Status Quo: this connection was only claimed in a 2018 statement written by church leaders involved in the dispute and penned in a very rhetorical tone. The issue of land sales to commercial companies A) didn't, and cannot possibly affect in any way any right inscribed in the Status Quo regulations, as it didn't touch on any holy site at all, and B) if we are even to start talking of it here, although it has NO tangency with the Status Quo, property prices fell substantially as lease contracts approached end of their (50? 100-year?) duration and large numbers of house owners & tenants feared huge losses in property value or outright eviction. This concerning commercial ownership by the 2nd largest real estate owner in the country, i.e. the Greek Orthodox Church. In any less "holy" land, this wouldn't have made the int'l press, and if, then only in order to attack the hypocritical wolf-in-sheep's-skin ecclesiastical institution, see Vatical scandals.

The Ateret Kohanim purchase, which was a secret deal between two unpleasant parties, a Jewish-fundamentalist "all is ours" side, and a Greek "screw the Arabs" side, is also framed in rhetorical, propagandistic terms ("Christian access to HSC will be denied"). Access to the HSC is through 2 gates, the western one is nowhere next to the Ateret purchases (there's just a mosque there), while the other gate is just somewhat near, but in no way adjacent to the new Ateret grabs. So the usual PR BS, move along, nothing to see here. This in terms of Status Quo, not of aggressive expansion of ultranationalistic Jewish settler presence, and of interethnic and financing & administrative issues within the Orthodox Church.

Last not least: much of the land property of the Orthodox Church in Palestine is the result of purchases which postdate at least the 1750s firman, if not the 1850s follow-ups. They really aren't covered by any SQ clause, which only deal with holy sites, not with 19th-century real estate developments like the Muristan. The church leaders tried to use their only strong leverage by temporarily closing the HSC, but that's an artificial means of creating an otherwise inexistant connection.

So let's find another context for all this, preferably NOT in this article, and certainly not under Status Quo. Arminden (talk) 01:35, 28 December 2023 (UTC)


 * Here is an interesting article with a video. "Entire neighborhood behind one door in the Old City of Jerusalem:
 * 10 families, 100 kids, 70 students, a yeshiva, and a synagogue - all tucked away in a hidden Jewish neighborhood in the Christian Quarter."
 * Arutz Sheva Staff, May 29, 2017. They call it Naot David (typo, actually Ne'ot David or Neot David), and the building previously housed the Orthodox Saint John's Hospice. "(T)he structure which now houses Naot David is technically owned by the Greek Orthodox Church, but rights for its use were purchased by Ateret Cohanim in the 1990s for some 3.6 million shekels, some $950,000 at the time."
 * The video shows at 1:32 a door with a window towards the Mosque of Omar. The bell tower and dome of the HSC are visible behind & to the right of the minaret. This can help with locating the exact footprint of the building on C. Schick's Muristan plan. PASSIA has started doing it, see their plan on p. 26 (text at pp. 37-38), but that dot, No. 11, is too vague.
 * The 360° photo here is useful. The building which is actually facing the Parvis, or courtyard of the HSP, is rather small and houses an Orthodox chapel, a dependency of the Greek Gethsimane monastery (see door lintel with Greek inscription, "Metochion Gethsimanis"). Left of it is the eastern gate. Outside the gate, inside the same small house, is the HSC's police station. So the Ateret settlers are far from controlling the gates.
 * I don't intend to pay the NYT fee, but there's a 1990 article about Ne'ot David stating that "(t)he settlement is a four-building complex of 72 rooms renamed Neot David", so it must be checked which the other 3 buildings are, to be 100% sure.
 * There's a Wikimedia category on Neot David here. Hebrew Wikipedia has an article which adds very little to these other sources.
 * Who can help with the NYT "4 buildings" article? Arminden (talk) 12:34, 28 December 2023 (UTC)
 * The NYT article has been at the Wayback Machine since May 2015: https://web.archive.org/web/20150525195841/https://www.nytimes.com/1990/04/13/world/jerusalem-melee-with-christian-prelates.html Mcljlm (talk) 20:24, 28 December 2023 (UTC)
 * thanks! Read it now. Not sure I'm any wiser. The "4 buildings comprising 72 rooms" might well be just one house with 4 wings around a courtyard, or 4 connected houses in a row.
 * I can't find the right map. Schick's gets cut exactly at the wrong place, see here: we need what's behind (S of) Omar's Mosque! It must be behind the "Omar-Moschee: Minaret" (seen on the left in the video) and the "Gethsemane-Kloster" (metochion), probably adjacent & to the S of the latter. I give up. Arminden (talk) 21:36, 28 December 2023 (UTC)