While Katzrin (also spelled Qatzrin) is a planned town in the Golan of about 7000 people, it has also been inhabited since the Bronze Age and there is an archaeological park well excavated and “restored.”  Restoration is always a tricky thing as sometimes it goes too far and becomes more recreation than restoration.  We saw that first hand in Myanmar and those of you in Art 1B learning a bit about this in our discussion of Tibet: Temple at Mustang.

Katzrin has an active educational program where they do demonstrations about life in the 3rd to 4th century when Katzrin was an active Jewish village that was subsequently destroyed by an earthquake and abandoned.  We visited on a day that there were no demonstrations so we did some guessing on “life” in Katzrin, especially revolving around olive oil production, something that is a major commodity produced in the Golan today.