5/15 – 5/16/15. Jerash, Jordan
Getting here yesterday was an ordeal. The scenery along the highway from Amman was a picturesque blend of wooded hills and grassy valleys, lush enough even in these last weeks of spring to make one forget the desert fifteen or twenty miles away. Jordanian traffic, however, left me scant leisure to appreciate this beauty. There are, as I quickly discovered, no lanes in Jordan. Even Italians paint, and sometimes even observe, medians. This is particularly problematic at major intersections, where the lack of a left turn lane invariably generates a mass of waiting cars stretching into the middle of the road. Jordanians understand and observe only two rules of the road: (1) try not to kill anybody, or at least not yourself; and (2) obey soldiers. Military checkpoints are ubiquitous on the main highways: in less than an hour, I was flagged to the shoulder twice, only to be immediately waved ahead both times when the attendant saw that I was a foreigner driving a rental car. I was still looking nervously over my shoulder after the second checkpoint when I missed my turn into Jerash, the first of the many navigational mishaps.
My hotel’s location was marked on my reservation sheet as “about 9 km NW of Jerash.” My guidebook was equally unhelpful, suggesting that I follow signs for the village of Suf “until a sudden and unmarked turn.” As might be expected, I became very, very lost. Signs for Suf were everywhere; at one intersection, there were Sufs in three directions. I apparently chose the wrong Suf, because I soon found myself on an eight-foot wide track in the middle of a remote olive grove. Several times, another car came barreling down this one-lane street in the opposite direction, forcing me to hug the lip of a steep and rocky slope. Eventually, I did find Suf, where I became even more lost than before. The low point came when, after rounding a hairpin turn at 50 Kph, I ramped off a camouflaged speedbump and landed with an impact that caused the malfunctioning GPS to fly off the windshield and crack me in the head.
It was only after more than an hour of searching, when I had given up hope and was on the way back to Jerash to ask for directions, that I suddenly spotted a tiny sign reading simply “hotel” tacked to an olive tree. So I finally found my hotel. The first room had a puddle of water two inches deep on the floor. The second had a live centipede under the sheets and a broken toilet. But once I was finally given a room without any obviously crippling deficiencies, I opened the curtains to discover a small balcony overlooking a stunning vista of wooded hills dotted with little white villages. I’m not sure the effort was worth the view, but I don’t mind the trade.
I began this morning my descending the steep (c. 40 degree incline) access road from my hotel and following the main highway to Jerash, site of the fabulous ruins of Roman Gerasa. For students of Roman architecture, the city’s layout is literally a textbook example of urban planning in the years of the Empire’s greatest prosperity. Between the Emperor Hadrian’s visit in 132 and the death of Marcus Aurelius in 180, the local notables of Gerasa – a prosperous city, but not particularly large or important – transformed the public spaces of their city into monumental showplaces. The same process transfigured hundreds of cities across the Roman Empire – but Gerasa, critically, was abandoned in the early middle ages, a circumstance that spared its buildings from extensive stone robbing. When the first archaeologists arrived in the early twentieth century, accordingly, they found the monumental center of Gerasa virtually untouched, its hundreds of columns still lying where they had fallen after a great earthquake in the eighth century. Many have been re-erected since in the context of a massive and ongoing restoration project, allowing (as at Ephesus, Aphrodisias, and precious few other well-excavated sites) a real feel for the experience of the ancient city.
Entering through the so-called Gate of Hadrian, an elaborate monumental arch that may have been erected in anticipation or commemoration of the emperor’s visit, I proceeded through the south gate of the city proper and into the famous oval plaza, an elliptical colonnaded space designed to mask a change in street alignment.
After a series of photo panoramas of the whole site from atop the south theater and a niche in the cella wall in the imposing Temple of Zeus, I walked awestruck along the so-called Cardo, the city’s colonnaded principal thoroughfare.
Passing the first tetrapylon (four pillars topped with statues) at the street’s intersection with one of the Decumani (main cross streets) and an impressive nymphaeum (monumental fountain), I soon came to the city’s most impressive building, the brilliantly designed Temple of Artemis. Although the temple building itself was a fairly standard octostyle Corinthian structure, it was entered through an elaborate series of propylons and stairs that dramatically augmented its visual effect: worshippers filed up a long colonnaded processional way, passed beneath a massive triple arch, and climbed seven flights of seven broad steps before finally emerging into the brilliant sunlight of temple precinct. Other structures, such as the beautifully preserved North Theater (actually a bouleuterion) and fifth-century cathedral, were nearly as impressive. The favorite moments of my visit, however, were spent in the ruins of the Propylon Church, a small Late Antique basilica overgrown with wildflowers. I sat on a stone block eating my lunch, basking in the peaceful scenery – until a bleating herd of goats surrounded my perch and ate all the flowers.
Early in the afternoon, I drove thirty kilometers to Aljoun Castle, a rather dilapidated fort built by Saladin to oppose the crusaders in the Holy Land, and used in the centuries after as an administrative center. As military architecture, the castle, overrun by Jordanian teenagers and young families out on a weekend daytrip, was not particularly impressive; its setting, however, was absolutely stunning, affording views over the tan and green hills toward the distant trough of the Jordan river valley.
I finished my day at the isolated ruin of Mar Elyas – that is, St. Elijah – which I only found after receiving detailed (and contradictory) directions from two of the staff at the Aljoun ticket office. This lonely hill is the place identified by tradition as the birthplace of the prophet Elijah, and local archaeology – without being able to confirm the claim – has at least identified the ruins of Iron Age villages in the area. In Late antiquity, and particularly between the fourth and seventh centuries, the site became a major center of pilgrimage, and an enormous basilica, ringed by baptisteries and martyria, was erected on the crown of the hill. After the Arab conquest, the basilica gradually fell to ruin, but the site itself continued to venerated by locals, both Christian and Muslim. Today, only the foundations (and some of the beautiful mosaic floors) of the basilica survive, surrounded by ancient olive trees. When I arrived, the only movement came from the hundreds of ribbons tied to a tree in the middle in the ruins, which fluttered before the vast painted backdrop of Palestine. Tall grasses sighed and olive boughs waved – but otherwise, everything was still. Seldom have I visited a place so evocative; I left with reluctance.
