If you have been keeping a mental checklist of sites associated with the life of Christ, you'll have noticed that I haven't mentioned one big one: the Upper Room. Now Biblical scholars like to argue back and forth about whether there is only one Upper Room or many, because a lot happened there: the last supper, the appearance of the risen Lord to the disciples, the descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, but you still think there should be something.
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| The Fransican chapel |
Today we finally went there, and there is not much, only a crusader church that has been converted into a mosque and then nationalized right next to Dormition Abbey on Mount Zion. According to the Jews and Muslims the place we hold as the site of the upper room is the site where King David is buried, so they want to commemorate David there. There is no real proof for either site being correct, but both were in the general region. There are two chapels, one Armenian and one Catholic (run by the Franciscans per usual), on either side of the site, and we had mass at the Franciscan site.
After that, I stopped by the upper room site, which has a synagogue in the lower part, and nothing really in the upper room site. It has nice crusader arches, but no art as befitting an ex-mosque. I didn't get any pictures because there was a large eastern European Catholic group there at the same time as me. Then I went back, packed, and spent about an hour at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher and did the route of Golgotha, anointing stone, and the tomb one last time.
We start traveling tonight very, very late (at about 12:30) and will hopefully be back around 4 or 5 on Friday. Hopefully there won't be any delays and hopefully we get through customs well.
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