Chapel of the Ascension

History

Nearly three centuries after Jesus's death, early Christians gathered secretly in a small cave on the Mount of Olives. The Edict of Milan in 313 ended government persecution of Christians. By the time pilgrim Egeria visited Jerusalem in 384, veneration had moved to the present location; she witnessed the Ascension celebrated at an open hillock uphill from the cave, which had been integrated into the Constantinian Church of Eleona. Between 384 and 390, the wealthy Roman aristocrat Poimenia financed a Byzantine-style church around Christ's last footprints.

This first complex, called Imbomon (Greek for 'on the hill'), was a rotunda open to the sky, surrounded by circular porticoes and arches. The Imbomon, along with the Eleona Basilica and other Mount of Olives churches and monasteries, was destroyed in 614 by the armies of the Persian shah Khosrow II during the final phase of the Byzantine-Sassanid Wars. A later legend falsely attributes the first church to Empress Helena, claiming she identified the Ascension site during her 326–328 pilgrimage and ordered construction upon returning to Rome.

Christian historian Socrates Scholasticus, writing over a century later, only mentions that Helena built a church on the mountain of the Ascension. The church was rebuilt in the late 7th century. The Frankish bishop Arculf, visiting around 680, described it as a round building open to the sky with three porticoes entered from the south, eight lamps shining through windows facing Jerusalem, and an inner edicule containing Christ's footprints impressed in the dust inside a railing.

Description of the chapel

The chapel's main structure dates from the Crusader era, with Muslim additions including the stone dome, octagonal drum, and exterior walls. Only the arches and marble columns supporting them are original Christian work. The entrance faces west; the south wall contains a mihrab indicating Mecca. Inside, an edicule surrounds the Ascension Rock, a stone slab said to contain Christ's right footprint; the left footprint was taken to the Al-Aqsa Mosque in the Middle Ages.

Rabi'a Mosque and the Byzantine burial crypt

Southwest of the former Church of the Ascension stands the zawiya of Rabi'a al-'Adawiyya, consisting of an upper mosque and an underground chamber reached by a staircase. The chamber includes a 2 m deep, 1.2 m wide, 1.8 m high cell on its east side. On the southern wall near the tomb, a Greek funeral inscription from the Byzantine period mentions the name Domitilla, likely indicating the tomb's owner, though a Byzantine tradition also identifies it as the tomb of Saint Pelagia.

Archaeologists Jon Seligman and Rafa Abu Raya, who excavated outside the mosque's southern wall in 1995, dated the chamber to the Byzantine period and identified it as the burial crypt of a chapel that was part of the Church of the Ascension. The crypt lies east of the mosque, opposite the entrance; to the right of the entrance, a cenotaph or sarcophagus stands within a niche. Each of the three Abrahamic religions attributes the tomb to a different female holy figure.

The Christian tradition of Saint Pelagia is the oldest; her vita states she built herself a cell on the Mount of Olives, lived disguised as a monk, and was buried there. Most Western Christian pilgrims of the 14th century venerated the tomb as that of Saint Mary the Egyptian, though the Pelagia tradition continues. A Jewish tradition attributing the tomb to the prophetess Huldah is recorded from 1322 onward, starting with Estori Ha-Parhi, while another tradition from the 2nd-century Tosefta places Huldah's tomb within Jerusalem's city walls.

Environs

The Greek Orthodox Monastery of the Ascension, featuring a small church built between 1987 and 1992, sits directly across the street. To the south and slightly downhill, a different monastery holds the ruins of the Constantinian Eleona Church and the 19th-century Church of the Pater Noster. About 200 meters northeast, the Russian Orthodox Convent of the Ascension, constructed in 1870, now houses roughly 40 nuns. The Muslim Makassed Hospital stands across the street, while the German Protestant Ascension Church, part of the Augusta Victoria compound, lies further northeast.