Nazareth, Israel

... More

most shops are closed, is Sunday and not the Sabbath. In fact, however, Sunday is usually a day of hectic activity, for many young couples are married in the Church of the Annunciation on that day, after which they drive about the town with the whole wedding party, horns blaring.

As the place where the Archangel Gabriel announced the birth of Jesus to Mary and where Jesus spent most of his life, Nazareth has attracted Christian pilgrims for more than fifteen hundred years.

History

Nazareth is not mentioned in the Old Testament, and in pre-Christian times was probably an insignificant village. Excavations from 1955 onwards, however, showed that the hill on which the Church of the Annunciation and St Joseph's Church stand was inhabited from the time of the patriarchs (second millennium B.C.). The little houses of the village were built on top of tombs of the second millennium and underground chambers hewn from the local tufa which had been used in the first half of the first millennium B.C. as store-rooms.

The name of Nazareth first appears in the New Testament in the account of the Annunciation (Luke 1,26-33). Jesus lived here until after his baptism by John (Luke 3,21), but after he began to teach spent most of his time round Capernaum.

In the early Christian period the Grotto of the Annunciation became a much venerated place of pilgrimage, and the present church is the fifth built on the site. An early place of Christian settlement, Nazareth was taken in 614 by the Persians, who, in conjunction with the Jews, destroyed it.

Thereafter the Christian population declined. In 629, however, Nazareth was recovered by the Byzantines, who took their revenge by destroying the houses of the Jewish population. The place was not rebuilt until the time of Tancred, the Norman Crusader who took Nazareth in 1099 and ruled as Prince of Galilee.

Nazareth suffered further destruction in 1263 at the hands of Baibars and his Mamelukes. Thereafter no Christians were allowed to live in the town until the Druze ruler Fakhr ed-Din revoked the ban in 1620. The town developed in the 19th and 20th centuries under Ottoman and later British rule. In 1948 Nazareth became part of Israel, and the new Jewish settlement of Nazerat Illit (Upper Nazareth), with its own administration, grew up on the hills above the town.