Image Details

Probably the most important church in Palestine, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre marks the traditional location of Jesus’ tomb, preserved in the Rotunda. Built on Constantine’s orders, the church also preserves, in a room of its own, a rock identified as Calvary, the hill on which Jesus is believed to have been crucified. The original basilica, called the Martyrium, adjoined the inner atrium, on the other side of which lay the Holy Sepulchre in an open courtyard. Sometime between Constantine’s death and the first written description of the completed church, in 347, a centric-plan memorial, the Anastasis, was built around the Holy Sepulchre. The area outside the circle of columns in the Anastasis probably served originally as an ambulatorium.