Sunday we headed north and drove through the heartland of Israel. We passed many Muslim (have mosques with minarets) and Jewish towns on the way.
We stayed at the bottom of Mount Carmel and took the funicular railway up to the top for a view of the city and to see the Bahai Gardens.
I had heard about the Carmelit but this was the first time I rode on it. It is supposedly in the Guinness Book of World Records as the shortest train system in the world (6 stops). Was quite fun and how odd to be on an angle all the time.
This is the view from the top of the port and part of the city of Haifa. About halfway into the distance you can see a tall building that is called the Sail Tower. A close up (from the internet is the next image)
This makes sense in a port city to have a building called the Sail Tower. The architect is an Israeli named Dina Ammar, completed in 2002
Our hotel in Haifa is a converted private residence from the 1870s for the son of the Ottoman governor of Haifa. It has lovely gardens, marble stairs, arches, interesting woodwork and floor detail. During the British Mandate it served as a police station and until recently housed Haifa’s judicial court. Everything above the sign looks like it was a recent edition when it became a hotel.
The Bahai Temple and gardens occupies a central location in Haifa. The temple itself enshrines the boy of Siyyid Al Muhammad who died in 1850, known as the “Bab” who proclaimed the imminent arrival of the Promised One. It is a World Heritage Site designed and built in 1953.
We could not access the bottom part of the gardens and the temple on the day we were there but one can see the amazing terraces (19 total) symmetrically laid out over a kilometer of land. Members of the Bahai faith consider the Temple and gardens to be “a gift to humanity”.
Acre has a humus shop called “Humus Said” where every day they make a certain amount of humus and keep selling it until they run out and then they close. We went for lunch and took out humus, warm pita, and pickles/peppers/tomatoes/olives to a nearby square for an impromptu lunch.
Supposedly people come from all over Israel for this humus. It was pretty darn good.
These two little girls watched us have our picnic and then asked us to take their picture.
The citadel of Acre, expanded by Muslim rulers over the quarters of the Knights of the Hospital (Crusaders) is in the process of being restored. It too is a World Heritage Site.
This is once again a reminder of the structural strength of arches- this huge structure with very tall ceilings is filled with arches.
This room could have served as a dormitory or administrative center during the Middle Ages.
The rooms open up into a very large courtyard. Just to give you an idea, the sign on the wall says only 900 people can be in this space at once. Glad they aren’t here now. You can see the restoration going on above.
My favorite room was this one- the refectory in the Gothic style (rib vaults) has three massive columns in the center of the room.
As we waited to enter the Turkish Bath we were so confused about all the different audio guides they had given us. Terri was wired!
Don’t panic, this isn’t a petrified human body- it’s a bronze or other material they set up in the bath (with a hokey movie) to explain about the Turkish Bath. It was built by el-Jazzar and is in excellent condition though no longer in use. It was described in Crusader times so we know it has existed at least that long.
Israel is a very small country, about the size of New Jersey and one can drive from the furthest point north to the furthest point south in about 5 hours. Haifa is a working port city with a population of about a half million people in the metropolitan area. It sits on a bay of the Mediterranean with a mountain (Mount Carmel) dropping down to the sea so most of it is quite hilly. We had a little driving adventure in the evening when we went out of Haifa to the east to visit some relatives of Terri’s who live in Karmiel, supposedly a half hour from Haifa that turned into a two hour trek. We have a GPS with the car we rented and it did not recognize the spelling of the street they lived on so we made a lot of circuitous tours of Karmiel. The computer voice on the GPS also has the most hilarious pronunciation of Hebrew words so it’s some extra entertainment along the way.
On Monday morning we visited the Bahai Temple which sits in a beautiful garden in the center of Haifa. The Bahai faith is a monotheistic one with a belief in the unity of all humankind. The tenets of this faith are meditation, prayer, and service to others. One can see how a garden and temple such as this could foster that. In the afternoon we drove north to Acre, probably one of the most interesting, and under visited places in Israel or anywhere. It seems everyone from the Egyptians, Crusaders, Alexander the Great, Medieval Italians, Richard the Lion Heart, the Ottomans, and even Napoleon either ruled here or tried to. El-Jazzar, an Albanian soldier of fortune who had taken over the entire Galilee as an independent fiefdom until he was assassinated. Most significantly, with the aid of a British fleet he successfully defended the city of Acre from Napoleon’s troops in 1799. Napoleon was moving north from Egypt in order to open a route to India that would have changed history. In the afternoon we drove to Nazareth and again what should have been about a 40 minute drive ended up taking 2 hours but we arrived safe and sound. More on that next posting.
Poetry Without Words 