ENTERING the Hospitaller Fortress in Akko’s Crusader city is like being Alice in Wonderland: one minute I am normal sized, crossing a sunny palm-shaded courtyard, the next I am a tiny dot in a labyrinth of vast stone halls. At the Fortress, also known as the Knights’ Halls and Akko Fortress, only a wooden door and gentle slope separate the two worlds of bustling Mediterranean seaside town and the capital of the Crusader Kingdom of Jerusalem (following Jerusalem’s fall to Saladin, in 1187).
Inside the subterranean Northern Halls, with their soaring Romanesque arches, shadows dance across the expanse of stone floor. Pottery from the Greek and Roman periods, Florentine florins, and delicate Ottoman seals reveal how Akko —once called Acre, and, in ancient times, Ptolemais — in northern Israel, has been a coveted location for expanding civilisations throughout history, owing to its natural harbour and access to ancient trading routes.
The Crusaders were only one wave in a long line of settlers in the city. Akko is considered one of the longest continuously inhabited settlements in the world; in 2001, the Old City became a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
The Hospitaller Fortress was built by the Order of St John of Jerusalem (also known as the Knights Hospitaller), a monastic order originally providing care to sick and injured pilgrims in Jerusalem, before their expansion throughout the Crusader Kingdom. The Order was militarised when its function extended to offering armed escorts to pilgrims. And, in the 13th century, Akko became its headquarters until, in 1291, the fall of the city to the Mameluks from Egypt ended the Crusader Kingdom.
Akko’s tourist appeal and World Heritage status is thanks to its double-layered cityscape: the Ottomans in the 18th and 19th century built on top of the partly destroyed Crusader city, and it was only in the 1990s that large-scale excavations of the underground old Crusader city began, building on digs in the 1950s and ’60s. To date, the site is still not fully excavated.
A translated manuscript illustration on the hall wall explains the admissions policy for pilgrims needing the Hospitallers’ care under the Rule of Raymond du Puy, the first Master of the Order of St John, after its founder, Blessed Gerard: “Let him partake of the Holy Sacrament, first having confessed his sins to the priest, and afterwards let him be carried to bed.”
Akko’s spiritual significance for Christendom in the 13th century is shown by a map of Palestine by the English Benedictine monk, cartographer, and chronicler Matthew Paris (c.1200-59), where the coastal town is given greater visual prominence than Jerusalem, underlining the part Akko played as the port of arrival to the Holy Land for medieval pilgrims, who included St Francis of Assisi. Paris’s map is in Middle French, the official language of Akko’s port.
My marvelling at Paris’s camel and palm-tree recreations of places he had only seen in his imagination, is interrupted by our group’s guide, wanting us to gather at one of the best surviving crusader tombs, probably that of the last Archbishop of Nazareth, William de Sancto Johanne. An outline of the simply robed archbishop, who died in 1290, is carved into the pale stone’s central plane, framed by a Middle French inscription around all four edges. Behind the tomb we can peer into the darkness of the crypt of Eglise Saint Jean (St John’s), which predates the halls, walls, and fortifications built around it.
AKKO is the final destination on my church group’s ten-day pilgrimage. The city is not regularly featured on Holy Land itineraries, but can be requested in bespoke parish or diocesan trips arranged with Christian travel companies. We have chosen to visit this vibrant time-capsule to get a sense of where today’s pilgrims fit in the history of pilgrimage to the Holy Land.
Before mounting wide stone stairs to the aptly named Magnificent Hall, we pass the celebrated Latrine Hall, now a row of round holes cut into powdery grey stone, but once a two-storey arrangement of lime and rainwater sluices that would put today’s Glastonbury Festival to shame. Such mod cons were unknown to medieval European monasteries, and only Syria’s medieval castle, Krak des Chaveliers, another Hospitaller fortress, has something similar.
istock The Templar’s Tunnel, which gave secret escape from the compound out to Akko’s harbour
The Magnificent Hall is where the Romanesque blends into Gothic, and where the crusaders dined in two sittings with their guests and workers, under fleurs-de-lis carved into the corbels. A sign for Southern Street, a route between St John’s and the refectory, is a reminder that what now feels like a hidden underground world, was once a thriving townscape basking in sun and sea breeze.
With his eye on the day’s ticking clock, our guide sweeps us back up to the courtyard, where the remains of a prison used by the British during the Palestine Mandate once held his grandfather, who was charged with forging keys. Later, his grandfather’s handiwork helped rebuild Nazareth’s bazaar, after the 1948 Arab Israeli war.
After a brief blast of sunshine it is underground again into the Templar’s Tunnel, a vaulted passageway discovered in 1997, allowing the Templars a means of escape, with secret access between their fortress, in the west, and Akko’s port, in the east. Shrieking kids cannot get enough of its echoing 150-metre length, and charge past us down the vibrating metal walkway.
EMERGING from the tunnel’s dimness to within touching distance of the Mediterranean’s dazzle is a shock to the senses. But, after a few minutes’ reorientation, watching sailing boats and the Haifa-to-Akko ferry, we plunge into Akko’s narrow limestone streets, full of galleries and craft shops, to reach Al Jazzar Mosque. En route, our guide fills us in on the conquest of Akko by the Mameluks. After the Mameluk invasion, Akko lay in ruins for 400 years until the Ottoman invasion in the 16th century. It remained, largely, in Ottoman hands until the end of the Great War.
Our tour’s chop-chop pace means there’s no time to change before entering the grounds of the mosque, named after the Ottoman ruler known as “The Butcher” (“al Jazzar”). Fortunately, the gatekeeper keeps a supply of voluminous, elastic-waisted skirts for unprepared tourists. Approaching the green domed mosque, which Governor Ahmad Pasha al Jazzar ordered to be built in 1781 — and completed within the year — is like being in a sack race, as I keep tripping over the bunching hem.
Inside, the vast geometric patterned red carpet muffles my shuffling steps, as I take in the view of the Mediterranean through the window, gold mosaics highlighting the arches and columns, and a huge digital clock where glowing red numerals on a black background count down the time to daily prayers. Al Jazzar is the largest mosque in Israel outside Jerusalem, and I trip only a few more times before returning the skirt to the smiling gatekeeper.
MANY restaurants boast about being by the sea, but, for end-of-table diners at Abu Christi, they are virtually in the water, as our verger discovers when sea spray plumes through the window over lunch.
Having had tilapia, or St Peter’s fish, as it is known locally, at Tabgha’s Church of the Multiplication of the Loaves and Fishes the previous day, it is eye-opening to see it in a plus-sized version at Abu Christi. Slashed across the gills and body and deep fried, the bony fish is transformed into a succulent feast, equal to the mountain of golden chips by its side.
While we wait for baklava and coffee, our tour leader, Fr Warner, shares the Akko section from his 1986 version of The Holy Land: An archaeological guide from earliest times to 1700 by Jerome Murphy O’Connor, which talks of ticket booths and helpful leaflets. At the Crusader city, leaflets have been replaced by audio guides and back projection.
Israel’s best preserved Ottoman caravanserai (roadside inn), Khan-al Udman, is now sheathed in hoardings as it is transformed into a luxury hotel. But Murphy O’Connor’s observation that merchants and traders always outnumber pilgrims in Akko, does still feel true in the city’s relaxed, open atmosphere.
Next time in Akko, I would definitely ask to visit the Bahá’í Gardens, whose leaders were held in the town’s prison. I would also visit the renowned Ubu Buri restaurant, staffed by Jews and Palestinians. And arrival by Haifa ferry would be the ideal foretaste of how the Holy Land’s earliest pilgrims first glimpsed Akko.
Travel details
Susan travelled to Akko on a parish pilgrimage with McCabe Pilgrimages. Akko can be added to McCabe’s Ten-Day Holy Land Pilgrimage, currently priced from £2195 per person.
www.mccabe-travel.co.uk/pilgrimages/10-day-pilgrimage