Bethany Beyond the Jordan

The guide with our small group had a habit of pausing before key information and letting the silence work first. At the riverbank he said nothing for a full minute. The Jordan River is not what you picture. It is narrow, barely eight meters across, and the water is the color of weak tea — silty, slow-moving, bordered by dense stands of tamarisk and reeds that make the Israeli shore on the other side feel simultaneously close and unreachable. There are platforms extending over the water on the Jordanian side where pilgrims come to be baptized, and the day I was there a group of Ethiopian Christians in white robes was wading in, the women lifting their robes above the water line, an officiating priest reciting something I couldn’t hear from where I stood. The geopolitics of the place — UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2015, this particular bank administered by Jordan, the other shore administered by Israel — melt away when you watch that scene.

The site is called Al-Maghtas in Arabic, meaning “the baptism” or “the immersion.” Excavations since the 1990s have uncovered a remarkable concentration of Byzantine-era churches, baptismal pools, and monastic cells spread across the low landscape of rushes and chalky soil near the river. The largest of these — the Church of Saint John the Baptist — is represented now by its foundation walls, column bases arranged in rows across a wide rectangular footprint, the ghostly floor plan of a fifth-century pilgrim’s destination. Pilgrims have been coming here continuously since at least the fourth century, longer than almost any other active religious site I can name. Walking through the ruins you step on Byzantine mosaic fragments that no one has been able to reassemble.

Further inland from the river, the site includes the pools of Elijah — stepped stone basins where water was once channeled from the Jordan for baptismal purposes — and the remains of a series of churches built on top of each other, each generation of Christians constructing their chapel over the ruins of the previous one, the whole stack now visible in cross-section. What I remember most is the quiet. There is a bustle at the riverbank when pilgrim groups arrive, and then you walk fifty meters into the reeds and ruins and it is just you and the sound of birds and the faint smell of river water in hot air. I stayed longer than I planned.

When to go: Year-round, though winter and early spring are the most comfortable temperatures for walking the site. Arrive in the morning when the light is softer and the pilgrim crowds thinner. The site requires a taxi or car — it is not accessible by public transport from Amman or the Dead Sea resorts.