Finishing our to Israel

On Friday, we drove from Zfad along the Lebanese border (more or less) to Rosh Hanikra, where we had tickets to take the cable car down to the grotto. The drive was quite beautiful, through a hilly, forested countryside past a number of small towns of various stripes and with occasional glimpses of Israeli border security.

Rosh Hanikra is right on the Lebanese border and right on the Mediterranean. The cable car takes you down a steep cliff:

to the space between two former railroad tunnels built by the British not long before the War of Independence. The idea was to connect Lebanon to Egypt, running through much of the British controlled territory, and to help them maintain control. Unfortunately (for them) a group of Israeli freedom fighters blew up the bridge between two of the tunnels (it was not clear if it was between these two or between one of these and a third one entirely within Lebanon. At any rate, the tunnels have been repurposed, with this one leading to the beach and a golf-cart-and-bicycle rental place (we did not rent either).

This one is now used to show a film about the tunnels and the natural processes that formed the caves of the grotto.

The grotto was formed by rainwater dissolving the limestone far enough to create crevices, and then a combination of further rainwater and the surf carving out a series of interconnecting caves. The cool thing about grottos anywhere is the wonderful color of the light bouncing through the water, not to mention the cool temperatures of caves, which was a welcome relief from the hot sun.

Although the beach south of the south tunnel is marked as a military restricted area with no entering the water allowed, it does seem to be okay to kayak through there to the grotto, which on this day of relatively calm seas was full of kayaks. Looked like a lot of fun.

A better view of the chalk cliffs the grotto is carved out of:

And at this end, you can see the fence and the military presence indicating the Lebanese border. If you could follow the cable into the water and out into the Mediterranean, you would see a series of buoys continuing the border out to sea. But those are things better seen with the human eye than the camera lens, so we didn't even try.

As the cable car gets close to the cliff face on the way up, you can see thousands of little pebbles either embedded in the limestone by wind and wave action or revealed as the softer chalk erodes away.

Driving further down the coast, we revisited Acre (aka Akko) because we still had some sites left on our combined ticket that included Rosh Hanikra and the sites we visited a couple of weeks earlier. Here, we are walking through the relatively new Turkish bazaar section of the market. A really good ice cream store is just at the left of this picture.

And the last site on our agenda was the old Turkish bath and "the story of the last bathhouse attendant." Another slightly hokey movie and animatron, but you got the idea. Fortunately, the baths were no longer heated, as it was plenty hot that day without any extra help.

Back to Dina's where we were invited for another Shabbat dinner, complete with 2 or 3 rabbis. As usual it started late and went long, but was a very pleasant evening, with everyone there either a native or a very competent English speaker.

Now we are in Oldenburg, Germany, where I was an exchange student 42 (!) years ago, and am back for the first time in at least 30 years.

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Goin' to the Golan

On Thursday, we had scheduled an early agricultural tour on Kibbutz Sha'ar HaGolan, where David was a volunteer shortly after the Yom Kippur War (he got there right at the new year in 1974). After an hour's drive down the east side of the Kinneret (Sea of Galilee), we arrived there just on time and drove past this bicycle storage with a wonderful fence of recycled bikes.

With a little difficulty we found the young woman who was to give us the tour, and she essentially placed herself at our disposal for as long as we wanted. We started by touring the living areas of the kibbutz, one of the few that have still not privatized. The difference between it and Kibbutz Gal On was quite striking, although probably not all of the difference was due to the still-cooperative nature of the community. Nevertheless, the grounds were immaculate, and the community buildings such as the dining room (below) were still in full operation.

Inside the dining room on two walls facing each other across a series of tables, were two tapestries made of of individual cross-stitched blocks about a foot square contributed by each family on the kibbutz in celebration of the 50th (?) anniversary of the kibbutz. The kibbutz was founded in about 1936.

 

We then drove out to the fields, very close to the Yarmuk River, which forms the border with Jordan.

The kibbutz is part of a large experiment being conducted about how to reduce water used for banana growing, so many of the plantings were covered in mesh of various designs. The water consumption, yields, and other parameters of each field are being compared in a multi-year experiment.

After showing us an informative, but rather silly, movie about kibbutz agriculture, our guide showed us the way to the archaeological museum and left us to visit that on our own. The Yarmuk excavations have uncovered the oldest pottery sherds in Israel, dating back to about 700 BCE. Along with arrowheads, grinding tools, and pots, there were many carved stone and clay figures used as cultic objects by these early inhabitants.

From the kibbutz, we headed up a steep and winding road to the top of the Golan Heights. As Avi had explained to us a couple of weeks ago on our first visit to the Kinneret, this is a very flat mesa formed by lava oozing out and covering the rock below. After a stop for lunch and a bit of shopping in the artist colony of Moshav Ami'ad, we headed for the Gamla Nature Reserve. Having seen enough archaeological ruins for one trip, we skipped the archaeological site and instead took a nature walk.

Not exactly a cool experience, this walk started out through fields of small lava lumps, which made the going somewhat difficult even though the terrain was level. In one area, there were a bunch of dolmens, which are about 4000 years old. These consist of large stone slabs set on top of two upright slabs to form a sort of table beneath which bodies are thought to have been buried. The entire structure was probably once covered with earth, which has since eroded or blown away

The goal of our hike was the Gamla waterfall, the highest in Israel, at 51 meters. This is the view from the top of the fall, showing the strikingly more lush vegetation.

And here is the entire length of the fall from the north rim of the canyon.

Most exciting for us was a good view of the vultures the area is famous for. This guy got quite close to us before we were ready to take his picture, but this is the best we could do. Based on some models in the vulture observatory, we concluded that he was one of the Egyptian vultures. Either he and his mate, or perhaps two others, entertained us for quite a while with their effortless soaring, going many minutes at a time without flapping their wings.

We hoped for a glimpse of the really enormous Griffon vultures, but the only ones we saw were these two taxidermied examples, which were victims of a terrible poisoning in 2007, in which an estimated 20 vultures were killed. This mother and her chick died within minutes of each other as the naturalists watched helplessly.

As we were hiking, we kept hearing explosions that we assumed were live fire exercises at the nearby tank range. An interesting country where you pass signs like "Caution: Tank Crossing Ahead." Anyway, as we were leaving, we were chatted up by a young Israeli who asked where we were from and if we weren't concerned about the explosions. We told him what we assumed they were, and he said, no, they were Syrian forces battling the rebels. We weren't sure whether he was pulling our leg until we talked to Dina that evening and found out that the nearby (about 20 miles by road, closer as the vulture flies) town of Kuneitra had been captured by the rebels and then retaken by Assad's forces. Sometimes ignorance really is bliss!

We headed back down to the Kinneret and into the town of Zfad (or Safed) to see if we could find dinner. Zfad has become a nexus of kabbalistic and Hassidic Judaism of late, and everywhere you look, you see black hats, payis, and tallit shirts. But it also has an old city surrounded by walls, and the remains of a citadel originally built by Josephus Flavius and remodeled by the Crusaders, if memory serves. It was also the site of one of the decisive battles of the War of Independence, so you see lots of memorials to the 42 or 50 (depending on the sign you're reading) fighters who lost their lives in the battle. Also, a memorial crediting the notoriously inaccurate Davidka mortar that supposedly "scared the Arabs to death and caused them to abandon the town," in the words of a memorial on top of the Citadel.

 

Zfad turned out to be an impossible city to navigate around, much less park, but eventually we found a spot and explored a bit on foot. We found a reasonable dinner and breathed a huge sigh of relief when we not only found the car again, but also found our hotel.

 

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Zippori to Tzfat

We're coming down to our last few days in Israel, so we are taking one last multi-day trip to the upper Galilee. We've reserved a room in Tzfat (aka Safed) for two nights, but on our way there, we wanted to see the remains of yet another major Roman settlement, at Zippori. This had a majority Jewish population for many years and survived the first Jewish revolt in 66 CE by choosing not to revolt. As a consequence, it was spared the destruction that those that revolted were subjected to. It became a major center of Jewish learning.

The first thing you see when you visit the site, and perhaps the most interesting, is the underground reservoir and connecting tunnels that stored and conveyed water to the city. The reservoir could hold 4300 cubic meters (over 11,000 gallons) of water, or enough to supply the city for two weeks. A tunnel 235 meters (256 yards) long connected the reservoir to the city. Those Romans knew their plumbing!

You can see here that the reservoir was as high as 10 meters in some places:

but necked down very small in others. It was not clear whether the larger hole above was original, or due to a collapse.

The tunnel was, unfortunately, temporarily closed.

The city itself had the usual grid of streets with the standard N-S Cardo and E-W Decumanus, both paved with limestone into which the wheeled carts had carved ruts over the years:

The thing the city is perhaps most famous for is its plethora of relatively well preserved mosaic floors. This one, a bit hard to see in the picture, depicts the Nile gushing forth from some mythical beast's mouth, its depth being measured, and celebrations over the abundant water supply in the year depicted.

 

 

In particular this one, in the so-called Dionysus House, the opulent dining hall sported this incredibly detailed mosaic depicting various events in the life of Dionysus. In a medallion at one end, "the Mona Lisa of Zippori" seems to follow you with her eyes as you move (if you have a good imagination).

Others were more purely decorative.

The Citadel, or fortress, built by the Crusaders on top of the remnants of some earlier structure was interesting for its reuse of building materials, including a number of rubble-filled Roman sarcophagi used as cornerstones.

 

A Roman theater and a synagogue, neither of which show well in my photographs, completed the tour. By this point, it was after 3 pm, and we hadn't had any lunch, so we drove to Nazareth (about 5 km away) looking for food. A gas station near the edge of town appeared to have food, but we headed into Nazareth proper until we decided it was too crazy to try to deal with the traffic or parking, much less identifying a good choice of restaurants, so we headed back to the gas station. To one side there was a really good Arab-style restaurant at which we had a huge lunch consisting of "salad" for one person -- actually 14 different dishes plus two types of pita. All this, and bottled water, for about 20 bucks.

By the time we finished lunch, another friend of David's from Kibbutz Gal On, Nir Shapira, was home in the next town over. By pre-arrangement, we visited them at their house in the communal settlement (essentially a housing development) of Shimshit. In the intervening years, they had lived in Philadelphia and about 6 years Rohnert Park! We really need to connect up with Gal On Bet, the group of ex-Gal On residents in the Bay Area.

 

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Visiting the Past at Kibbutz Gal On

Yesterday, we rented a car and drove to Kibbutz Gal On, where David was a member for about 3 years before he left Israel for good in 1989. It's very close to where Hanan and Adi's wedding was held two weeks ago today, but we didn't have time then to make a stop.

We are staying in the guest accommodations, which didn't exist when David lived here and aren't actually run by the kibbutz. But they are right on the kibbutz, so they make an easy jumping off platform to visit old friends. Shlomo, who runs the accommodations, gave us the page from the telephone book that has this kibbutz's members, and David made his way through the Hebrew and found a number of friends. Unfortunately, one man whom he had really looked forward to seeing again died a couple of months and his wife just a couple of weeks ago.

But we did find a number of people, including Mark Freidman, who offered to take us to the caves at Bet Guvrin today. After a wonderful night's sleep (so much quieter than Kfar Saba!) and a proper kibbutz breakfast (mostly salad), we set off.

Bet Guvrin-Maresha National Park is located on the sites of Maresha, settled several centuries BCE near an important crossroads. The composition of the population varied over the centuries as Persians, Sidonians, and even Greeks joined Egyptians and Jews already living here. In 40 BCE it was demolished by the Parthians.

By 68 CE, Bet Guvrin had sprung up nearby and was captured by the Romans. It was quite a large city in the Byzantine era. Most of the caves for which it is famous were dug during the early Muslim period, and there was even a small Crusader city here in the 12th century CE.

The so-called bell caves, after their shape, were dug by creating a small hole in the harder overlying rock called nari. Beneath that, the softer rock called kirton could be quarried out and removed through the hole. The quarried rock was used as building material for the above-ground city. As the workers quarried deeper, they could widen out the caves into the characteristic bell shapes. These bells often intersected to form much larger caverns, many of which were used as cisterns. These often had stairs spiraling down to the bottom to access the water as it was drawn down during the dry season.

Here you can see a channel for water collection alongside the steps.

This one had grooves worn into the lip of the cistern where ropes were lowered to the water.

Yet another use for the caves, after quarrying, was as pigeon coops, or columbariums. Some were just repurposed quarries with niches carved into the sides for the pigeons, while others were quite elaborate, often cross-shaped structures with hundreds, if not thousands, of niches.

Many of the caves were used as factories. This one was used for making olive oil and still contains the olive crushing device. Here you can see the crude axle around which the lens-shaped stone revolved, propelled by animals.

The crushed olives were collected in flat baskets, which were stacked in these niches, and the extra-virgin olive oil allowed to drain off first. Then the log shown here was placed on top and weighted down with the stones below. Pressured was increased by cranking the shorter pieces of wood around to lift the stones, and the oil was collected. We saw several of these caves, each with several niches. Mark pointed out that this method required either a tremendously strong building or a building built into the bedrock (i.e., a cave), lest the downward pressure on the olives lift the building off its foundations.

We also visited the Sidonian burial caves. Built between the 3rd and 2nd centuries BCE, these caves were elaborately decorated. The decorations were carefully sketched by their discoverers in the early 20th century, but then destroyed by the Muslims after the archaeologists were done and left the area. Seen here are restorations done following the sketches. This wall, by the way, is not curved; it is an artifact of the app I use to stitch the photos together.

There were two long walls of burial niches surrounding this more elaborately decorated central room, probably also a tomb.

This is the second long wall. You can see that this population already has an extensive knowledge of African animals, as well as mythological beasts.

Cerberus guards the door.

All of the above was in the Biblical and Hellenistic city of Marresha. From there we walked to the Roman-Byzantine city of Bet Guvrin by way of the ruins of the church of Sandahanna. This was built during the Byzantine period, renovated by the Crusaders, and largely demolished by the Ottomans. Sandahanna in thought to be an Arabic mispronunciation of Santa Anna, Latin for St. Anne, the mother of Mary. Obviously there are two conflicting traditions about where St Anne was from, if you remember the church in Jerusalem where Mary was supposed to have been born,

The caves in Bet Guvrin are considerably more complex, with multiple rooms made from intersecting bells. Not surprisingly, these hugely undermined areas often collapse despite efforts to add modern supports.

In a nearby collapsed cave that had later been an Arab farm complete with fig and olive trees and lots of much-appreciated shade, we took a break and had watermelon, thoughtfully supplied by Mark.

Then we visited a number of interconnecting caves, including this partially collapsed one, which we entered by ignoring the sign telling us it was too dangerous.

Most fascinating about this cave were a couple of Arabic inscriptions:

And a couple of crosses carved nearby.

Then it was on to the Roman city, which Mark thinks was mostly for R&R for Roman soldiers. Certainly, it contained entertainment centers, such as this remarkably well-preserved amphitheater, baths, and a cauldron or "hot room."

 

In the 12th century CE, a Crusader fortress was built on the remains of the Roman city. These are the remains of the Crusader church.

And behind it were the remains of dwellings, probably a mixture of Roman, Crusader, and Ottoman architecture.

 

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