JESUS tomb open to public

A major restoration project at the shrine inside the Jerusalem church where Jesus is said to have been buried was completed Monday ahead of its inauguration, an AFP reporter said. On Wednesday, the renovated site will be inaugurated in the presence of senior political and religious leaders from Greece, as well as Holy Land clergy.

Work at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in the Old City began at the end of last May.

It was carried out by Greek specialists who reconstructed the Edicule, which for decades had been supported by metal beams following an early 20th century earthquake. The restoration and cleaning has uncovered the original details of the Edicule, the reporter said.

The work also included opening what Christians believe to be Jesus's tomb for the first time since at least 1810, when the last restoration work took place after a fire, and possibly earlier.

The work was funded by the three main Christian denominations that share the Holy Sepulchre -- Greek Orthodox, Franciscans and Armenians -- as well as from public and private contributions. The church also contains the area where Jesus is believed to have been crucified and his body anointed.

Gone is the unsightly iron cage built around the shrine by British authorities in 1947 to shore up the walls. Gone is the black soot on the shrine’s stone facade from decades of pilgrims lighting candles. And gone are fears about the stability of the old shrine, which hadn’t been restored in more than 200 years.

“If this intervention hadn’t happened now, there is a very great risk that there could have been a collapse,” Bonnie Burnham of the World Monuments Fund said Monday. “This is a complete transformation of the monument.”

The fund provided an initial $1.4 million for the $4 million restoration, thanks to a donation by the widow of the founder of Atlantic Records. Jordan’s King Abdullah II and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas also chipped in about 150,000 euros each, along with other private and church donations, Burnham said.

 

The limestone and marble structure stands at the center of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem, one of the world’s oldest churches a 12th-century building standing on 4th-century remains. The shrine needed urgent attention after years of exposure to environmental factors like water, humidity and candle smoke.

Three main Christian denominations guard separate sections of the church, but they put aside their longstanding religious rivalries to give their blessing for the restoration. In 2015, Israeli police briefly shut down the building after Israel’s Antiquities Authority deemed it unsafe, and repairs began in June 2016.

A restoration team from the National Technical University of Athens stripped the stone slabs from the shrine’s facade and patched up the internal masonry of the shrine, injecting it with tubes of grout for reinforcement. Each stone slab was cleaned of candle soot and pigeon droppings, then put back in place. Titanium bolts were inserted into the structure for reinforcement, and frescos and the shrine’s painted dome were given a face-lift.

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