The Old City of Jerusalem is dense with religious significance — its fabled walls cram a maelstrom of holy sites. I feel ‘the weight of the centuries’ as I walk on Via Dolorosa (the ‘Way of Grief’), the route Christ walked with the cross on his back. The distance he is said to have covered is about 600m. “Archaeologists bicker over the veracity of this claim and nobody knows the route Jesus took that day. But Via Dolorosa is the road pilgrims have been taking for at least the last 1,000 years in the Holy City,” says Paule, my local guide. “It’s all about the symbolism rather than retracing the exact steps,” she adds with a smile.
I look around to find people from different faiths on their way to prayer: Muslims walking to the Dome of the Rock, the most famous Islamic site in Jerusalem; Christians headed for the Path of Sorrows (another name for Via Dolorosa); and Jews to the Western Wall.
A melee of sights and sounds greets us at Via Dolorosa. Gaggles of shop owners selling Dead Sea mud and rosary beads made of olive stones (pits), loudspeakers carrying the call of the muezzin for prayer, the heady fragrance of burning incense and the noisy falafel stalls almost everywhere.
Every Friday afternoon, hundreds of Christians join in a procession through the Old City, stopping at the 14 Stations of the Cross and re-enacting scenes that help them identify with the suffering of Christ on his way to Mount Calvary, the site of his crucifixion. The groups carry a lightweight version of the cross as they sing and pray along the route.
Kalpana Sunder is a Chennai-based travel writer