Templars

View over the valley

I looked out the window of the fort. In the distance on one side I could see the outlines of Tel Aviv, on the Mediterranean. On the other, the foothills beyond which lie the holy city, Jerusalem. The Knights Templar formed in around 1100, to protect pilgrims who had to pass through the badlands between Jaffa on the coast (where I was yesterday) and Jerusalem. Their network grew out from the Middle East to cover much of Europe, so that a pilgrim could deposit valuables in, say, London, and retrieve them once safely in Jerusalem, perhaps the first precursor to today's system of banks and cheques. In the 1300s they had become too powerful, and most were dispatched in the favoured manner of medieval monarchs - forced to confess and burnt at the stake. According to Dan Brown they had a side business in hiding Jesus' descendents, and later morphed into the Freemasons, however no serious historians endorse this story (because they don't want you to know the truth!)



The lookout

The ruins are surrounded by vineyards, olive groves and wheat fields in the valley below, and trees growing up the sides of the rolling hills beyond. The view was probably pretty similar when it was built, although the highway would have been dusty and spotted with pilgrims rather than cars, and you would have been able to see all the way to Jaffa and the glimmering Mediterranean that is now blocked by skyscrapers in Tel Aviv.



Trenches run through the complex

Joni found a piece of pottery stuck in the mud that looks like part of the base of a jar used for storing grain. It was probably used by the Templars a thousand years ago, although he said he was going to clean it, give it to his girlfriend and tell her Jesus used it for making mate. After almost falling through a hole into a subterranean storage cavern, I remarked to Oz that in any other country this kind of site would have guard rails and signs all over the place, a visitors centre selling trinkets and swarms of giddy tourists posing with tunics and accidentally lopping each others' heads off with heavy swords. He laughed and replied that on the coastal planes alone there are over 5,000 ruins that are still mostly buried because they are too numerous to excavate.



Inside a storage room

Afterwards we went to the picnic area of Canada Park, which includes the Templar fort, a monastery and a swathe of territory around it. We lay around on the grass with hundreds of other families, and I went for a wander up the hill to get a better view. I looked up the park when I got home and learned that it was created after two Arab villages on the site were razed and their 10,000 residents were expelled during the 1967 Six Day War, on the orders of General Yitzhak Rabin (later an Israeli Prime Minister, who was assassinated in 1995 after receiving the Nobel Peace prize, by a Jewish fundamentalist who considered him too soft on Arabs). I'm not going to write about politics today (I will later), but it seems like in Israel it's impossible to avoid history for long, ancient and recent alike.



View of the complex from its highest point

Check out the rest of the photos on flickr.