Old City of Jerusalem

Rare card · No. 61889

The Old City of Jerusalem (Hebrew: הָעִיר הָעַתִּיקָה, romanized: Ha'ír Ha'atiká; Arabic: المدينة القديمة, romanized: al-Madīna al-Qadīma) is a 0.9-square-kilometre (0.35 sq mi) walled area in East Jerusalem. In a tradition that may have begun with an 1840s British map of the city, the Old City is divided into four uneven quarters: the Muslim Quarter, the Christian Quarter, the Armenian Quarter, and the Jewish Quarter. A fifth area is the Al-Aqsa Mosque Compound or Al-Masjid Al-Aqsa (Temple Mount hill) and home to the monumental Dome of the Rock, the Qibli (Al-Aqsa) Mosque, and was once the site of the Jewish Temple. The Old City's modern walls and city gates were built by the Ottoman Empire from 1535 to 1542 under Suleiman the Magnificent. The Old City is home to several sites of key importance and holiness to the three major Abrahamic religions: the Temple Mount area and the Western Wall for Judaism, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre for Christianity, and the Al-Aqsa Mosque Compound including...

Read on Wikipedia · Image Edmund Gall, CC BY-SA 2.0