The mountain Zion in Jerusalem is considered a sacred site for several religions. According to the Christian tradition, Jesus Christ is said to have celebrated his last sacrament there, which is why the first crusaders already built a church and the sacrament room on the mountain. Archaeologists have now made graffiti from the Middle Ages and even family coat of arms of noble visitors visible on the walls of this Coenaculum. They testify to the great importance of this pilgrimage century ago.
On Thursday before Easter, Christians are reminiscent of Jesus Christ’s last sacrament. On this meal on the eve of the Jewish Passover Festival, Jesus and wine with his disciples – model for the Christian Eucharist – shared the betrayal by Judas. According to historical tradition, the “Obergemach”, in which this last sacrament took place, was on the upper floor of a Roman villa on Mount Zion, southwest of the old town of Jerusalem. However, this villa district was destroyed by the Romans in the conquest of Jerusalem in 70. In the fourth century, Byzantine Christians then built a first church on Mount Zion, the Hagia Sion.
In 1099 the army of the first crusade conquered Jerusalem and the Zionberg was also a sacred place for the crusaders. In memory of the events located after biblical tradition, they built a larger church there, Sancta Maria in Monte Sion. This includes a hall that should remind of the sacrament room. This Coenaculum still attracts Christian pilgrims from all over the world.
Pilgrim graffiti and aristocratic coat of arms
Archaeologists around Shai Halevi from the Israeli authority for antiquities discovered medieval inscriptions on the walls of the sacrament room and made it visible again with the help of digital imaging. These scratched or drawn graffiti mostly come from the late Middle Ages when the sacrament room was part of a Franciscan monastery. “These graffiti throw a new light on the geographical diversity and the international pilgrimage movement to Jerusalem in the Middle Ages,” explains co-author Ilya Berkovich from the Austrian Academy of Sciences.
Many of these medieval graffiti were left by Christian pilgrims – including some high -ranking visitors from Central Europe. A drawing shows the family coat of arms of the Teuffenbach tristram from the Murau region in Styria, as the archaeologists report. The Austrian noble of Teuffenbach accompanied the Archduke and later emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, Friedrich von Habsburg, to Jerusalem in 1436. At that time, the pilgrim’s road comprised more than 100 nobles from the Habsburg Empire. The research team also discovered the city coat of arms of the southern German city of Altbach and the coat of arms of the Bernese patrician family of Rümlingen on the wall of the Coenaculum.
Inscription documented the presence of the Armenians in 1300
However, the archaeologists see an Armenian inscription from the Middle Ages as one of the most historically significant graffiti discoveries. The inscription is simply “Christmas 1300”, as Halevi and his colleagues report. However, this could answer a question of the Armenians campaign for centuries and the Mongols allied with them against the Mamlukken in 1299. At that time, the army around the Armenian king Het’um II defeated the Mamlukken in the battle of Wadi al-Khazandar under the Egyptian Sultan Salah ad-din Chalil. These had previously conquered and occupied large parts of the Middle East and Armenia. However, it has remained controversial to this day whether the Armenians also reached Jerusalem after this victory. The inscription now discovered in the Lord’s Supper speaks for this. Your date and its position high on the wall – typical of the epigraphy of the Armenian nobility, are an indication of this, according to the archaeologists.
In addition to the graffiti of people from Armenia, Syria and German -speaking countries, pilgrims from Serbia, the Czech Republic and numerous Arabic speaking Christians have also left their mark on the walls of the sacrament room. A special find is, for example, an Arabic inscription fragment on the Coenaculum wall. You can still read “… Ya al-ḥalabīya”. The archaeologists conclude from the female ending “Ya” that it is the graffito of a Christian pilgrim from the Syrian city of Aleppo – a rare trace of female presence in the pre -modern pilgrimage world. Together, these pilgrim graffiti provide unique insights into the origin of the visitors of this Christian sanctuary at the time.
Source: Austrian Academy of Sciences; Specialist articles: Liber Annuus 74 (2024), pp. 331–74