Nicolas Faucherre, Heike Hansen, Andréas Hartmann-Virnich, Aix-Marseille Université

The church of Abu Gosh, near Jerusalem, built around 1160 by the Hospitallers on a site identified by a tradition of uncertain origins with the Emmaus of the Gospel, is most famous for its magnificent Byzantine mural paintings, executed shortly before the conquest of Jerusalem by Saladin in 1187. The Romanesque building stands on a perennial spring that rises within its crypt itself, captured by a masonry conduit predating the church, forming a pool into which one could descend and ascend by two flights of side steps. Conducted in 2016-2017 and destined to be resumed in the autumn of 2021, our program of archaeological and archival survey and study has considerably modified the vision of the chronology and function of the building, whose first level, previously interpreted as a Roman cistern opportunely taken over and raised by the builders of the church, was in reality built ex novo as an integral part of the monumental program of a two-story church, destined to organize and enhance the access to the basin. The descent into the water was organized by a sort of valve or hammer that allowed the water to be retained and the level to be raised. In fact, the entire plan of the building and the circulation allowed access to this lower place of worship either directly through a lateral portal or through two semi-superstitial corridors in the western half of the building, which visitors could reach through the portal of the upper church, the first two parts of which were probably reserved for the laity, while the two eastern and the tri-absidal chevet, which were entirely painted, were reserved for the monks, who could use private accesses from the monastery buildings to the east. The importance given to water suggests that it played a central role for visitors, including pilgrims on their way to Jerusalem. However, the survey of lapidary signs has identified an Arabic inscription on the upper level of the main apse. This remarkable lapidary document, contemporary with the construction of the building, does not mention the Emmaus of the Gospel — identified, moreover, from the Byzantine period, with the competing site of Nicopolis — but the names of the prophet Samuel and of the patriarchs Isaac and Jacob, alongside the word “nahr”, a reference to the water conduit, which lay exactly in line with the inscription. The future archaeological campaign, dedicated to the study of the related buildings, must specify the link of the church with its environment and in particular with the previous building insofar as the study of the photographs prior to the restorations and constructions of the beginning of the XXth century has shown that the church was built against a pre-existing architectural body, thus confirming the results of the excavations of the middle of the XXth century.

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